My hotel is full of Australians. What’s going on? I thought we were trying to scare them away so they didn’t buy Anglo?

It’s amazing how things change so quickly. With six new air routes into SA just launching there is a surge in tourist arrivals and a different vibe in the air.

Similar happened when President Cyril Ramaphosa and a proverbial busload of government of national unity (GNU) members met investors in New York last week, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Add in the launch of a second phase of the partnership between business and the government and the media has tried to fall over itself to grab the thesaurus to describe what’s going on.

In some sense this is all slightly odd. Nothing new was offered in London or New York. There were no particularly new announcements or news. Instead it was old-fashioned flesh pressing and looking into the whites of a politician’s eyes. The back slapping among GNU-ers at events might have been cheesy but it was also genuine and left an impression.

SA has taken far too long to learn this lesson that simply pounding the pavements works.

Quite why similar roadshows haven’t been done in the past administration to any great degree is a good question. Excluding a tight series of slightly staged events around the state visit to London two years ago, something on the scale of what happened hasn’t been seen for more than a decade.

Part of the problem perhaps was that two ministers from the past administration chose to present SA as a charity case. I have sat in those cringeworthy meetings with investors where they would lay out a case more akin to guilt tripping investors to stop giving SA a hard time “because of apartheid” (this sounds so mad as to be a joke but alas it is not). Thankfully neither is in government any more.

Instead, the past week was characterised by a simpler recognition that SA had a story to tell but was being told to a cohort of investors with experience of other countries and where simple truths and slowly building trust was better than anything too grand — simple grown-up conversations.

Indeed, it perhaps shows a maturity that has come from the ANC itself let alone others, that the GNU has unleashed — cut the internal navel-gazing pretences and get on with it. Ministers Parks Tau and Barbara Creecy perhaps most exemplify this as new people in new portfolios where serious changes are desperately needed.

There has also been a maturing in the business response to the sentiment uptick — caution and clearly road-mapped optimism. It seems the media went a little too hard on all the bromance and was forced to row it back a bit. We may well therefore be passing a credibility point now which we failed five years ago — tempered and credible expectation management.

This comes at a crucial time as corporates have not opened the taps (nor banks) but key 2025 strategy board meetings and planning sessions (off-site jamborees!) are widely happening in the next six weeks and will include decisions on the GNU sustainability. Here decisions on opening the investment taps next year will be made.

The signs look promising domestically with more than 100 basis points of rate cuts possible, a fire cracker up the backside from two-pot cash whether to deleverage or spend, a clearer path on energy security and logistics volumes coming slowly off the floor, as well as more readily available credit.

Still the lack of coalition agreement yet, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill and National Health Insurance (NHI), large electricity tariff increases (of questionable justification) and volatility (to put it mildly) offshore all weigh to some degree. To open the taps now also requires some active decision making for corporates that has not been necessary for some time when risks were higher.

The amount of new investment will decide if next year’s growth is just below or above 2%, or if it can indeed break higher. The latter seems unlikely given sentiment can only help you get so far with a broken logistics system and other underlying constraints.

More could also be done to risk mitigate some of the negatives — especially on NHI where there is a risk of the private sector being played by the ANC if a more robust stance is not taken. Any compromise that is real will, however, almost certainly require amendment to the act.

The line that seems to be taken by some in government of “oh we can just pretend parts of the act don’t say what they say they do” such as on the status of medical aids — say by pushing their removal out to “never” is a fudge too far to be credible I fear. Ultimately the Treasury may well have to remain the grown up in the room on this one.

Difficult conversations are also required to get unions on board with logistics reform. While its true that unions are at a broad brush stroke getting weaker and more marginalised this is not universally true in every case — particularly in logistics.

Regardless of the unions, there is change coming that must be sympathetic to workers. This should not be hard — a reformed system where the private sector is moving more volumes means higher trained logistics workers being more productive (moving more volume each) which means higher pay or better conditions (or both).

This isn’t magic — though the previous minister in charge of Transnet could never grapple with this, which caused no end of problems early on in the Durban concessioning for instance. The notional risks from unions can be mitigated with credible and easy to make but easy to keep frameworks and agreements.

Some proper expectation management is needed also on the G20. It’s a jamboree that can lead to a boom in visitors and put some key global issues SA has on the global agenda — it is not, however, about SA. Much performative nonsense goes on around such events — the core parts are leadership and showcasing SA.

The medium-term budget policy statement this month is also likely to be “all fine” on the macro-fiscal front and show broad conservatism, but continue to paper over many of the cracks on the micro-fiscal side with cabinet lacking an agreement yet on priorities and so unable to redirect spending in anything more than the smallest ways. Nuance will be the flavour.

All this is a reminder that indeed stuff remains complicated, especially in logistics. So, the decisions boards and excos have to take on 2025 may only really pay off in two to three years.

There is not necessarily anything new that can be said to convince people. The plans are already on the table. It’s now just a matter of how much trust investors have in the GNU, and whether they take the leap.

• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.