I have a fabulously boring suggestion for the DA and other Government of National Unity participants to put forward in discussions with the ANC about the economic direction of South Africa: balanced growth.

How many times have you heard the words "balanced growth"? Many, I'm sure. Sadly, it is often one of those phrases that have a mere air-filling quality. It sounds good. I mean, "balanced" is better than "unbalanced" right? But in a true economic sense, can we please inject it with some sort of meaningful meaning?

It's not that difficult. You can do it in a single word, and that word is "Argentina". More on this later.

The key, I suspect, to understanding how to improve lives is to ask what constitutes economic growth. GDP is a country's total throughput over a given period. But more than that, it is constituted or calculated from four things: personal consumption expenditure, business investment, government expenditure and net exports.

At the moment, SA's economic growth is barely 1% per year, which is way below the population growth rate. To put it another way, we are going backwards, which is why unemployment is increasing. As I have been saying for a decade now, it's worth recording how uncharacteristic this is globally. The world is growing steadily...