About half of large businesses in SA are satisfied with the pace of the ongoing government-led structural reforms, with about two-thirds expecting increasing positive results to continue impacting their businesses positively.
This is according to an interactive reform tracker established by Business Leadership SA (BLSA).
The online interactive tool was launched last year to provide real-time updates on progress in state structural reforms, including those outlined in Operation Vulindlela.
Krutham, formerly Intellidex, is a SA-based global think tank and consulting firm that has introduced a survey of BLSA members to monitor progress using the tracker.
“We asked many questions, but two I thought would be helpful to highlight,” Krutham executive chair Stuart Theobald said.
“The first is: ‘What has the impact of reforms over the past 12 months been for your ability to do business?’
“It is encouraging to see that 43% report ‘somewhat positive’ and 4% ‘highly positive’.
“A quarter say the impact has been balanced, and, of course, some are experiencing some negative consequences of reforms.”
Theobald was speaking at last week’s quarterly update of the BLSA Reform Tracker.
“The forward-looking view, is also encouraging. So we asked: ‘What do you expect the impact of reforms to be on your ability to do business over the next 12 months?’
“And here, you can see 45% saying it will be somewhat positive and 18% saying it will be highly positive.”
Having climbed 2.3% between September and December 2025, the overall score has risen 23.7% from its starting point in March 2024.
Economic reforms carry the largest weight, representing 70% of the reforms tracked.
“We saw particular progress in the last quarter in freight logistics and reforms around spatial inequality.
“Momentum has slowed … but the rate of change momentum does actually slow down purely as a mathematical consequence of how many reforms are meeting completion.”
Of the 245 reforms tracked since the beginning, 34 were completed in the last quarter.
“Some reforms have moved in the wrong direction ... and there’s a reversal of that progress. We are highlighting electricity reforms as the most significant of those, particularly around the [Eskom] unbundling strategy,” it said.
Theobald said 192 of the reforms were still in progress, as the tracker showed the rate of change of different scores quarter by quarter. In the latest quarter, the most reform progress was made in the economic category, with some progress in the governance and criminal justice categories.
BLSA CEO Busi Mavuso said the reform tracker was a critical tool to measure delivery on commitments that the government has made to improve the network industries, service delivery, and criminal justice interventions.
“It is difficult for the business community to thrive in an environment where progress is measured by speeches rather than outcomes. Every second month, we meet with the president to monitor the progress.”
She said it is encouraging that 21 months of tracking show reform is gaining momentum.
While the decision that Eskom will not unbundle its transmission assets into the Transmission System Operator is regarded as a reversal, SA’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force greylist last year is acknowledged as a completed reform.
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