“This report is about how places that used to be nationally important can easily lose this status, and about how being ‘halfway to everywhere’ is no help at all if most influential people are leaving, fewer are passing through, and fewer still are coming to stay. The report is also, in a wider national context, about the ‘missing links’ in development strategy in South Africa, namely genuine trust between the public and private sectors,and a collaborative mind-set.
Its key finding is that there is also a failure at the grass-roots level to develop a common, unambiguous, and pragmatic agenda or language of development.As was demonstrated, this is the most obvious missing link in the Free State’s development prospects.”
