This week, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies made a splash with an arresting full-page, paid-for advertisement in the business supplement of Iqbal Survé's Independent newspaper group. In the advert, titled "Are Companies Investing in South Africa?", Davies takes up his jousting lance, Don Quixote-style, and aims it at those who suggest South Africa's investment climate is - how shall we put it? - inhospitable right now."Many economists, business people and political commentators state as an empirical fact that investment in the South African economy is plummeting, and this is because of bad economic policy or a lack of co-ordination among the economic departments," he says.story_article_left1In an apparent reference to one cynic, Davies quotes Naspers chairman Koos Bekker's view that South Africa's "biggest need is to develop a coherent economic policy and to get everyone to sing [off] the same hymn sheet".In the advert, Bekker is offhandedly described as a "billionaire wine farmer". Which is sort of like referring to Warren Buffett as a wealthy bridge enthusiast from America's sleepy Midwest town of Omaha, who likes investing, reading newspapers and long walks around the Henry Doorly Zoo. Or describing President Jacob Zuma as a bureaucrat who likes to spend his weekends at his country home, relaxing in the fire pool with his family.Little matter that, due to keen foresight and a chunk of luck, Bekker now chairs the largest locally headquartered company listed on the JSE, Naspers, which is valued at R775-billion today.Anyway, this über-rich wine farmer, the advert self-righteously states, "is at least partly right" in that a consistent message is necessary for international investors.But, Davies says, "where many economic policy commentators really seem to lose the plot is their presumption, often without reference to data, that investment levels in South Africa have been, or are, declining massively".This just isn't so, he argues.Rather, the facts, he says, are that domestic investment dropped by only a "marginal" 0.4% last year, while the five-year trend is "unambiguously upwards".story_article_right2"That the popular press has sought to portray such a small decline in 2014 as a crisis suggests that other agendas are at play," he opines.Except, if you dig into those numbers, you'll see that the levels of investment by private companies fell by a rather more significant 3.4%. In fact, the only reason the overall drop was only 0.4% was that the government itself invested 10.3% more during the year.The drop in private sector investment in the economy, the Reserve Bank said, was because of the "lacklustre economic growth in 2014, structural bottlenecks and low business confidence levels".What secret agenda, do you think, caused Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago to dare point out these facts?Davies expanded on this theme in a piece he wrote for ANC Today, in which he pointed to an annual survey by AT Kearney which assesses the levels of foreign direct investment confidence in a country.On this ranking, South Africa did well to be ranked 11th in the world in 2012, before dropping four places to 15th in 2013, and then climbing again to 13th last year.Last year, AT Kearney cited a number of deals in South Africa - including investments from oil giant BP and Google - as "a positive sign for a country with volatile foreign direct investment (FDI)".But what Davies didn't say was that this year, South Africa dropped out of the list of the top 25 countries entirely, reflecting the fact that global investors are "more pessimistic" about the region.story_article_left3Now, it's true that this confidence index is not a definitive ranking based on empirical numbers. Rather, it is compiled from a survey of 300 executives from 28 countries, to see where global CEOs want to place their cash. But considering the top 10 countries have consistently grabbed more than half the investment flows the year after the study, it's pretty influential.Davies is also right that South Africans often seem able to ring bitter despair out of even the most shiny rays of good news. But in the efforts to compensate for this wearying negativity, it doesn't help to ignore the blinding realities of rock-bottom business confidence.Luckily for us, Davies says cheerfully that all the success stories "have not made us complacent". Instead, he says, we must continue improving the climate to create enough jobs to "half unemployment".So what do you imagine motivated Davies to take out this advert?A desire to support the struggling newspaper industry? Or was there a greater political reason why he had to resort to the "popular press" to make his point?If so, let's hope for Davies' sake that Zuma took time out of his busy schedule ignoring court orders on Sudanese despots to wade into the business pages.After all, the president could do with some good news right now, no matter how sugarcoated it is, rather than the energy-sapping negativity that tends to drift up from the wine farms these days...