Every six months, Nedbank’s economists compile a list of significant new investment projects. Unlike surveys of sentiment or a confidence index, their Capital Expenditure Investment Listing is a hard tally of announced plans to build things (factories, solar farms, distribution centres, hospitals, etc.) and doubles as an indication of where fixed capital formation is headed. 

Fixed capital formation, in plain terms, is money spent on things that last: plants, machinery, buildings, infrastructure. When that number stalls, growth stalls because you can’t create new jobs, new output or new tax revenue from assets that don’t yet exist. 

The latest count from Nedbank should worry everyone. New projects listed in the first half of 2026 collapsed 81% from 2025, making it the weakest half-year figure in nine years. Private companies still put up the overwhelming majority of the investment money (roughly 78%), dwarfing the public sector contribution. However, the numbers make it clear: businesses with capital to deploy are choosing, overwhelmingly, not to. The private sector is literally sitting on billions to invest, and they don’t. They don’t because of immense policy uncertainty.  

Boards approve decade-long capital commitments when they can price the risk, and pricing the risk requires knowing who owns the asset, what the regulations are, who sets the tariff, who issues the permit, and whether those answers will still hold in five years. 

Many think of policy as something announced from a government podium. This, however, is wrong. It’s built, painstakingly, in the space between government and business, through sustained debate, communication, and engagement. These processes help ensure that business and government talk to each other clearly, consistently, and on issues which affect the economic trajectory of the country.  

Good public affairs communication is also an act of translation. South Africa’s dormant capital is saying something, and it needs to be communicated in clear language. The engineer’s concern about grid access or a CFO’s worry about tariff certainty must be turned into language a policymaker can act on. Similarly, the government’s genuine constraints should be explained back to business in terms that aren’t just other ways of saying “no”. Industry should also always show up with one coherent position instead of ten competing ones that cancel each other out in the government department’s inboxes. And the patient work of engaging through all existing channels (thought leadership, debate in the public square, comments, official submissions, consultations, meetings, etc) must be done so that concerns are on record and can’t later be waved away with a “but nobody told us”.  

South Africa doesn’t have a shortage of capital willing to invest. The latest Nedbank numbers show that. But South Africa certainly needs more private institutions that are willing to make that capital’s terms more explicit and convincing. If they do not, then our economy and collective futures suffer for it.  

– Loftus Marais
Chief Operating Officer