GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of the Western Cape Parliament
03 September 2026
*Note to editors: This speech was delivered during a debate on 3 September at Provincial Parliament
For 70 years, the rhythm of life in Tulbagh has been the rhythm of the fruit season.
That factory was never just a workplace, it was the town’s economy, its history, its inheritance passed from parent to child.
It was also one of the largest fruit canning operations in South Africa.
If any facility should have been within reach of this government’s flagship economic strategy, it was this one.
Yet the Growth for Jobs Strategy failed to save it.
Wesgro, this government’s own trade and investment agency, tasked with driving growth in exactly this sector, failed to save it too.
And the reason should trouble every member of this House, because it exposes something deeper than one factory closing.
G4J is built around “horizontal enablement”, energy, water, skills, logistics, ease of doing business.
None of that failed at Tulbagh. The plant had power, water, a trained workforce built over generations. What it lost was market access.
This government set itself a target: triple exports by 2035, build a R1-trillion economy.
But it built no instrument capable of holding a single value chain together when the owner decided to walk away.
And there are real questions this House deserves answers to.
This factory changed hands through Premier Foods’ acquisition, a merger before the Competition Commission.
In the roughly five months between announcement and Tribunal approval, while public-interest conditions were being negotiated, Wesgro was out marketing South Africa’s fruit-canning capacity to international investors.
Did this government make representations to the Competition Commission to ensure that the merger would not end exactly where we are?
If this government’s strategies stop at attracting the next investor and go silent the moment an existing industry is at risk, they were never strategies for growth and jobs.
They were strategies for announcements.
Tulbagh’s workers deserve to know: where was this government when it mattered?
I thank you.
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