Could you say something about that and whether you see any change now that it's two decades later?

I think the first thing is that, yes, the, it's correct that there was no coherent industrial policy s- and there was actually no single unified industrial policy at the time, which is not to say that there weren't industrial policies.

But those industrial policies over the late 1990s and the 2000s kind of supported a particular set of interests and a particular set of industries, and it supported in particular an expansion of very capital and electricity-intensive industries, while at the same time saying that, you know, we should liberalize trade for the rest of manufacturing.

So there were industrial policies of various kinds.

I mean, one can even say that some of the elements that are typically described as macroeconomic policy, like, uh, for instance, the liberalization of the financial sector and the liberalization of capital flows, was industrial policy of a particular kind because it supported the ambitions and the interests of, in this case, the financial sector.

So there were always industrial policies.

So the, I think the significance of the National Industrial Policy Action Plan was an attempt at a transparent and coherent statement of What some of the structural issues were with the South African economy, and how it needed to shift, and how the manufacturing sector in particular needed to shift towards relatively more labor-intensive sectors, towards greater value addition.

Could you comment just on that?