Business Day

23 Apr 2026

The word “reform”, often emblazoned in the reports and columns of this publication, can mean many things to different groups of people on a closer reading. As history shows, actual reform is often brought about by events, circumstances and developments that sit squarely outside the genteel thoughts of reformers and policymakers. It often emerges as the only possibility, rather than a carefully selected option among plausible others.

I was reminded of this as the 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ended a few weeks ago. A quote from Vladimir Lenin lamenting the lethargy of the 4th Duma, the Russian wartime parliament that sat in 1912-17, came to mind. He suggested that the Duma, like the ministry in Yaoundé, it seems, “listlessly made appeals for reforms while admitting the impracticability of anything even approximating reform”.

Contrary to the optimism that the convening on African soil would herald advances in agricul- ture and the reform of the multilateral system, and achieve consensus on multilateral rules in “new” areas such as e-commerce, it rather exposed the multilateral fault lines of the trading system in an environment of war. It also affirmed that might is dominant, rather than any con- sensus held by a rational centre.

American economics professor Percy Bidwell, asserted during the Great Depression a prin- ciple of almost axiomatic value in economics: “Even those [changes] which at a given moment appear almost inflexible are eventually responsive to changes in economic conditions”.

In Yaoundé the changes in political and economic conditions outside the Cameroonian city framed the limits of what would be possible. Safe to say that the interests of Big Tech, the protectionism of large agriculture-subsidising nations among the developed, the revenue needs of those with economies rapidly shifting towards services and the despondency of the least developed collided in spectacular fashion to produce nothing. The outcome was a tech- nocratic kick for touch on key issues and the waste of a crucial political moment, a missed moment for a signal of reason in the throes of noisy chaos.

Much like global advances in the flow of money and goods from the 1980s onwards made a new wave of global interconnectedness and its supporting institutions a foregone conclusion, so too does a war-like world now confront us.

For South Africa, which has from the 1600s been reliant on international exchange, from slaves through to customers for our minerals and farm goods, interconnectedness has been a fact from which we cannot easily escape. We’re a small, open-market economy, reliant on the predictability of rules rather than buccaneering impulses of a new context where rules are dispensable. When those rules fail or favour those bigger or more powerful, we are vulnerable. So reform of the multilateral system, whether for the trade in goods or even for the market for credit, is a visceral rather than theoretical matter for us. From Yaoundé we came back with little assurance that things will be better or anything more orderly than the ominous signs foretell.

“One of the compensations of disasters,” said Bidwell, “is that they jolt us out of our ruts of thought and action and hasten many an incipient reform.” Yet it seems the belligerent mood of the moment and the disaster confronting the multilateral system failed to unlock any advance from our rut of inertia and nor did it yield any incipient or latent reform.

The world seems to be very different from 1995 and the “end of history” and its epochal con- tests. Welcome back to history; it seems we should be saying a history that by all indications will be transactional and bilateral. And not blood-less.

What, and for whom, shall we build from the ruins? This is a question it seems we may have to answer very soon.

Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administra- tion Commission.