Busi Mabuza, chairperson of both the South Africa BRICS Business Council and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), told the Mzansi Way Makers show what South African exporters need to do differently after the BRICS summit in New Delhi: sell finished goods into the bloc’s big economies, not raw commodities.
Mabuza said South Africa sent its biggest business delegation to a BRICS summit since she joined the council in 2019. She called it a game changer for an emerging economy like South Africa’s, because the bloc’s large economies matter most when they can take “value added goods” in their import baskets, not just raw inputs, adding that South Africa’s exports into BRICS still consist primarily of raw commodities.
What India’s prime minister asked the council to deliver
At the summit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi set the business council concrete targets rather than a general mandate. “Please bring to us the 10 most important trade barriers that you would like to have addressed by the heads of state. Please bring to us a hundred startups that can benefit from intra bricks trade,” Mabuza quoted him as saying, adding that he also asked the council to find a thousand partnerships to promote trade within the bloc.
Mabuza gave one example already under way: an Indian company has bought a small packaging business near Pretoria and the land next to it, planning to expand the plant to export across Africa, funded by an investor from the United Arab Emirates. She called it BRICS trade “in action”.
Funding for small business, and fixing the basics
Asked what single change would do the most for the economy, Mabuza did not point to a grand policy: “where I would start if I had a magic wand is giving easy and ready access to funding for small and medium enterprises,” she said, “because that is where the impact is going to be closest to where it’s needed the most,” arguing that a small business employing a handful of people creates jobs faster than a large one scaling up.
She named tourism as the other obvious opportunity sitting idle: “our country has beauty that compares to the best in the world,” and the sector’s reliance on people rather than capital makes it suited to youth employment, work that continues “because we also have the advantage of uh beautiful weather all year round.” She linked the sector’s underperformance directly to unresolved crime, a theme that overlaps with our reporting on how the Madlanga Commission’s revelations are already hitting small business confidence.
Energy, finance and the risk gap for growing firms
On the power utility, Mabuza struck a cautiously optimistic note, saying she was “pleased that an entity such as” Eskom “has turned the corner and is now able to offer preferential rates to the big consumers of energy,” since manufacturing cannot scale without a dependable electricity supply. That is her own assessment of Eskom’s turnaround, not an independently verified figure.
On financing growing businesses, she argued the gap sits between banks and development finance institutions: “development finance entities do have a healthier risk appetite than banks,” she said, pointing to businesses that a bank turns away on risk grounds before they ever reach that stage, and arguing that closer partnership between banks and development finance institutions could unlock funding for them. Our guide to government funding for small businesses covers the development finance institutions already open to that kind of application.
What shaped her as an executive
Mabuza credited two women with shaping her career: Almarie Maul, a former chief executive of Engen whose preparation and clarity in meetings she said she tried to emulate, and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who brought her in as a young volunteer researcher while serving as Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry. “I wouldn’t have come through CEO without the benevolence and support of people who had walked the path ahead of me,” she said, and she warned younger professionals against moving jobs too early, saying “young people have a much shorter attention span” and risk “pivoting away from getting the depth that they require too soon” before they gain the expertise that early mentorship gave her.
Her own discipline starts before dawn. “My body clock, 4:00,” she said of her wake time, time she uses to meditate, reflect and read before the day’s demands start competing for her attention, a habit she traces to her parents, both teachers, who instilled an early-rising ethic in her as a child.
On corruption, Mabuza was blunt that oversight bodies cannot do the job alone: “we of course can’t then sit back,” she said, arguing that oversight bodies alone are not enough. “We need to call corruption out wherever we see it.” She linked it to a lesson from a primary school teacher, who treated a pupil walking past litter without picking it up as a small failure of the same kind of intolerance the country now needs toward corruption.
