A loaded gun of economic failure
• In a country held to ransom, the hostages were millions of citizens who depend on a pittance
WE CAN TAKE A PAGE OUT OF ZIMBABWEAN PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE’S ECONOMIC HANDBOOK AND START PRINTING MONEY TO PAY OFF THE DEBT
Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini and Net1 CEO Serge Belamant had the mother of all winning hands and they knew that we would fold. We gave them what they wanted: the feudal extortion of the masses.
We didn’t have a real choice, but to allow their plundering of the underclass. The alternative would have been Armageddon: violence, chaos, blood in the streets.
We weren’t going to send 17million people back to apartheid’s world of stillborn children and barren kitchens; we are not yet that cruel.
So, we will pay CPS and its associated leeches a fortune. And we will give these swines more than our taxes. We will hand over our democratic institutions and the social contract: they have already transformed the Constitutional Court into an echo chamber.
They have employed the governance strategy of US president Andrew Jackson, that destroyer of the Native American Cherokee. In 1832, following a Supreme Court ruling compelling federal marshals to implement its decision, Jackson said: “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
They’ve taken to heart Joseph Stalin’s diktat: “The pope! How many divisions has he got?”
They’re not Stalin or Jackson, nowhere even close, but they’ve used the same logic. They will loot because they have, as the Prussian sociologist Max Weber pointed out, a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. As they fill their offshore bank accounts, all the country can do is shout into the wind.
In January of this crazy year, I stopped off at Britstown in the Northern Cape to take photographs of yet another decayed train station, trying to chronicle our faded rail infrastructure. I was approached by two men, curious about my 1200cc motorcycle and this apparition from SA’s ghetto of wealth. I shared cigarettes and listened to stories. Boetie spoke wistfully of his golden life, two years in the distant past, as a part-time gardener in Somerset West. Since then, all he has had are social grants and empty hours.
Boetie is one of what the Inkatha Freedom Party’s Liezel van der Merwe called the 17million failed economic policies.
GDP growth has flatlined: when the economy doesn’t expand, there isn’t job creation, it simply won’t happen. The population, on the other hand, continues to grow, throwing an ever increasing number of young job seekers into a mythical labour market. So human potential idles on street corners.
And because of anaemic GDP growth, SA’s politics have entered a ruthless period of factions, individuals and groupings squabbling over a static and finite pot of money.
In SA, the ethos of “get rich or die trying” is rapidly turning into a moral good.
Unlike GDP, inflation continues its remorseless march. When grandmothers say that things were cheaper in the old days, they were right. The weak rand increases the cost of living, but the randlords smile when the currency tumbles — both the old and the new, such as Number Two, he of Marikana.
They sell SA’s diminishing reserves of minerals in dollars, getting more bang for their buck. The randlords, in case you’ve been asleep for the past 140 years, aren’t the sharing type.
At best, the Treasury increases social grants only marginally. Bet your rock-bottom rand that the purchasing power of those grants is decreasing.
The country’s debt is climbing and unless there is a radical reversal of fortunes, SA might join Greece and Spain.
There are only a few ways to reduce the debt. We can grow the economy and thus be able to afford debt repayments. Since growth isn’t happening, scratch that plan.
We can take a page out of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s economic handbook and start printing money to pay off debt: 6% annual inflation will then be remembered as the days of milk and honey.
If SA defaults on its debts, global financial institutions and foreign governments will punish the government. I might not be expert in geopolitics, but I suspect that seriously annoying countries with nuclear arsenals will not end happily for us.
Or government spending can be reduced so that those debt repayments can be made, entering the realm of austerity.
Cutting government spending means fewer opportunities for the poor. Schools, roads, clinics and social services will all suffer under austerity. Expenditure will be slashed for the things required to get people off social grants. The only thing worse than not being on a social grant is being on one.
If Strontium Tina gets her way, we’ll buy R1-trillion plus worth of Russian nuclear power stations and watch our debt shoot past the International Space Station.
I don’t mind paying taxes for early childhood education and sewerage systems. I do object to paying for President Vladimir Putin’s next invasion of a sovereign country. And the invasion after that. And the one after that.
So, in the words of that other user of legitimate violence for immoral ends Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? I wish I knew how to fix SA’s broken economy, how to change those 17-million failed policies. A Nobel prize in economics would look great on my dining room table. There are, however, some simple things that would get the country on the right track.
More can be spent on research and development, which would help to figure out how to create new technologies and industries.
Cutting the red tape that is strangling small and medium enterprises, which are potential sources of real growth, couldn’t hurt. Stamping the life out of corruption and government fraud is a jolly good idea.
But instead of seeking an economy that works for Boetie and his millions of compatriots, instead of doing the simple stuff well, Dlamini and Belamant have taken a different path. They’ve taken the ANC’s greatest achievement, looking after the poorest citizens, and turned it into an ATM.
Heaven help us.