Always doing more than required according to a neo-liberal policy agenda has become a pattern in the Government's economic practice. The government has gone instead for single-figure inflation. However, the IMF accepted that the deficit might exceed that figure for the first few years. The World Bank, also in a 1993 document, was even more accommodating. But nothing the government has done has been enough.
Foreign capital has far richer pastures in which to forage in other parts of the world.
South Africa's net, long-term capital inflow has been very small and sporadic and has occured only since late 1994. Moreover, very little of the capital that has come in has gone into long-term, direct investments that provide new productive capacities. Indeed, the primary function of capital inflows has increasingly been to pay for capital outflows, as the Financial Mail acknowledged. At first, in the early 1990s, when the expected flood of foreign capital turned into a drought, the 'experts' who predicted the bountiful harvest fertilised by foreign capital, attributed the problem to fears of socialism and nationalisation. So the ANC stopped talking about such things.