There is a biblical text that makes a causal link between ignorance and decay, decline that ultimately results in the destruction of a nation.

It says "...my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge..."

Although the text was directed at ancient Israel, it has some resonance for South Africa today.

In parliament last week President Jacob Zuma said he didn't know about impending job losses in the mining sector. This is illustrative.

Ignorance. That is what sums up the government's approach to policy-making and implementation.

But this ignorance should not be understood in the crude sense - of not knowing and of desiring to know but not having access to knowledge.

The ignorance that inspires and informs the running of our government is self-inflicted. It is ignorance that comes about from a conscious decision to reject sound knowledge and advice.

Zuma, in his update on the progress his government has made in implementing the commitments given in his state of the nation address early this year, again reiterated that SA's economic woes have more to do with the external global environment and little to do with the domestic policy environment.

In other words, the primary constraint to SA's economic growth is that the economies of our major trade partners in Europe have slowed dramatically, and now China's demand for commodities is on the decline.

This is glossing over reality at best. Zuma is basically saying that the government has done everything right. It's not their fault.

Let's consider a number of internal challenges facing SA's economy today.

Our power challenges, owing to Eskom's lack of capacity to deliver on growing demand for electricity, are not the making of the international community.

It was the ANC government under President Thabo Mbeki that rejected sound advice.

A decade before the country's first load-shedding crisis Mbeki's government ignored warnings from experts who predicted that, come 2008, Eskom would struggle to generate power because of ailing infrastructure and the need for more power stations.

If the government had heeded the calls, the construction of new power stations would have begun by the turn of the millennium and might have been completed in time to avert the 2008 crisis. Fewer jobs would have been lost because more companies could have expanded and many more started, spurring job creation.

Load shedding is therefore a consequence of the government's self-inflicted ignorance.

It is no secret that the mining sector has not been operating at its optimum. This is a consequence of the structure of an industry designed under apartheid to exploit workers, deriving from them maximum labour for the least wages, while maximising mining company profits.

SA mining has remained labour-intensive and lack of skills has meant that the sector has remained largely extractive and has not created a network of value-adding industries.

Experts have pointed out that mining is finite.

Over the past two decades gold mining - the core of our mining economy - has become more and more expensive as mines are having to go deeper underground to find viable mineral content.

Fixing this was not going to be as easy as allowing unions to demand higher wages in the hope that mining companies would control their insatiable desire for higher profits.

Establishing new regulations compelling mining companies to invest in their workers and surrounding communities, at their own expense and with no enforcement, was never going to work.

In the context of industries such as mining and manufacturing losing the capacity to absorb SA's huge number of unskilled and semi-skilled labour, economic transformation should have focused and should be focusing on mass re-skilling initiatives.

The billions that were set aside to support BEE schemes that only made a few politically connected blacks rich and that has made tenderpreneurship a viable career choice, should have been directed at reindustrislisation through skills development in areas such as artisanship, engineering and other vocational skills.

Impending job losses in the mining and manufacturing sector can be attributed to the government's self-inflicted ignorance.

In 21 years the government has failed to break up the oligopolistic nature of SA's business sector. From retail to banking to construction and telecommunications, there is a clubbing together of major players that keeps smaller players out.

The vibrancy of the small business sector and entrepreneurship is choked by red tape, difficulty to compete with bigger players, and the bias of funding and projects directed mainly at more established businesses.

The government's economic revitalisation programmes should cease to take the top-down approach. They must be directed at promoting self-reliance among ordinary people and a sense that they have the answers to their own problems.

Given that SA is a developing economy, there is no end to the problems the country faces. For every problem there is an entrepreneurial opportunity. But instead of driving this self-reliant entrepreneurial mindset, our government prefers to extend social grants.

The nation will continue to sink into socioeconomic regression as long as Zuma and company choose to remain ignorant.

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