05 December 2025
Business Day
by Ayabonga Cawe
The early return from leave nearly 50 weeks ago by some mandarins of the trade department, following ominous news from ArcelorMittal South Africa (Amsa) in January, foretold what a difficult year 2025 would be. Yet nothing could have prepared us for the extent of state intervention in the steel sector, at home and abroad.
“The company will now transition the long business into care and maintenance,” read the January 6 statement. Eleven months later we have come to know that misery loves company.
In recent weeks ArcelorMittal’s French plant has faced the prospect of being “nationalised” by a motion in the French national assembly. By a vote of 127 to 41, the French Left (LFI, Socialists, Greens and communists in tow) led the charge in a vote that has complicated the policy debate on how to protect and preserve national steelmaking. The French argue that the real solution is a pan-European strengthening of trade measures to protect thousands of jobs from being displaced by imports.
In April British lawmakers, including Tory legislators, called for public ownership of Jingye-owned British Steel and subsequently passed the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Act to take notional control of the firm. This was reinforced a few weeks ago by a £35m contract from Network Rail to supply it with train tracks from British Steel’s Scunthorpe plant.
These developments are relevant to our discussions here at home. Views across the political spectrum have either called for a renationalisation of Amsa, a ramp-up of trade protection to stave off cheap imports, or a combination of both.
This has been further reinforced by trade regulator the International Trade Administration Commission’s (Itac’s) wide-ranging review of tariff, rebate and import control measures to enable competitiveness in the domestic sector. This in the face of chronic over-capacity worldwide.
The review, gazetted in March with preliminary findings published in August, has concluded its first phase, with a series of recommendations forwarded to the trade minister. However, more than 100 additional product requests have meant the minister may have to consider a further list of primary and downstream products in early 2026.
Notwithstanding criticisms that the proposed import control and tariff changes will “raise costs, create red tape and grant excessive powers” to the state, as one political party has suggested, this review is undoubtedly a sign of the times. It exposes the inability of a blind faith in free markets to contend with the cold fact of a crisis of overproduction.
What we learn from this episode is that it is a concert of measures that we must learn to wield and marshal in this changing environment, rather than a vacuous belief that markets will miraculously clear. The price mechanism is broken.
The recent engagements in the G20 trade working group between the EU trade commissioner and the South African trade minister signal that the European bloc has accepted this reality.
That is why it has called for a World Trade Organisation article 28 change in its tariff concessions, in effect walking away from its bounded duties on steel. As the French case is showing, national level European lawmakers are going even further.
The looming job losses, chronic over-capacity, narrowing product diversity, supply chain disruptions and ever-growing reliance on imports by downstream customers here in South Africa all indicate, as firms that have commented on the review have asserted, that this is an emergency situation.
There are implications for national security, as read from the draft national security strategy issued by government in July. The situation requires action rather than a praetorian guard of the faithful imploring us towards laissez faire when a black Christmas looms for workers from Dunkirk to Newcastle.
• Cawe is Chief Commissioner at ITAC. He writes in his personal capacity.