African Capital Markets Development Workshop

Opening Remarks

By Paul Harris,
Chairman, Rand Merchant Bank

We take seriously our role as a good corporate citizen, not only in South Africa but in Africa too.

What can we do to build the soft infrastructure of Africa?

Hard infrastructure (roads, buildings, telecommunications) is the easy part. Soft infrastructure is hard - creating an enduring legal and regulatory framework that is free from political interference, in which investors can have confidence, and in which contracts can be enforced.

Africa is getting its act together in a big way. But the African renaissance which Thabo Mbeki and other African leaders talk about can't happen without a good, soft infrastructure for Africa.

At RMB, we believe that our job as leaders is not to make decisions, but to facilitate good decision-making.

Allow me as a white person to have a dream. My first dream would be about accountability. I dream about:

• An accountability struggle rather than a power struggle.
• Accepting incrementalism rather than a Big Bang (we sometimes set too high standards and want to go for the panacea when small improvements can also achieve the same purposes).
• Learning from our successes rather than reinventing the wheel (lots of things work in Africa; let's exchange our success stories in Africa instead of always wanting to come up with the big, unique solution).
• Accepting that the market is a better allocator of resources than politicians.

My final dream is that we have action lists instead of wish lists.

Someone once said that we have too many conferences, that the last item of the last conference becomes the first item on the agenda of the next conference, and we always hope that it will be in Mauritius.

Let's go away with an action list. That's how we will start to achieve things.

Think big, start small, and start now.