SA wealth is anxious to secure Zuma’s legacy

AJOHANNESBURG radio station is convinced that a “big change” in ANC policy is about to descend upon us. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just the way they have couched it . . . The ANC realises it is going down the wrong road, the money is running out . . .

After a week-long summit between the ANC, Cosatu and the SACP — many attendees being members of all three — a statement was issued which said, in part; “This resourcefulness of South Africans is a remarkable asset, but these strengths and traditions have become somewhat weakened by a message that ‘the state will deliver’.

“While public resources must play the major part, a different relationship between state and communities must be fostered. Our grassroots organisational structures must play a leading role in mobilising communities to appreciate that freedom comes with rights and responsibilities.”

I can see the exciting bits, obviously, but I can’t see the economic policy effect. Less welfare? Less delivery? How could there be?

The key for me is “while the public resources must play the major part”.

Why? Why not the exact opposite: “while private resources must not play the major part”? Now that would be a change.

Sadly, for all our resourcefulness, the ANC and its “partners” want dependent South Africans, not selfsufficient ones.

Until now, maybe. President Jacob Zuma may finally be vaguely aware that, since declaring in his 2011 state of the nation speech that: “As a developmental state that is located at the centre of a mixed economy, we see our role as being to lead and guide the economy,” things have fallen apart.

Unemployment has risen to record levels, public debt has hit a ceiling, the currency has declined sharply, commodity prices have collapsed, economic growth has sagged and we now produce less electricity than we did in 2006.

Now, there is absolutely no chance he would ever be given that message as bluntly as I have stated it. By nature a good-ol’-boy African nationalist, he is surrounded by communists and assorted ideologues (and some business figures) who lie to him. “We’re doing fine,” they say. “Look at all the construction in Sandton. That’s a vote of confidence in you and your legacy.”

He is swamped with warnings of the dangers of business. Companies merge to cut jobs. All businesses cheat on their taxes. They all collude. A minimum wage might even create jobs. Yes, really! All businesses are rich all the time. Just see how much they pay themselves.

There is a way to fix this slide and, yes, we probably have the money. But as long as Zuma surrounds himself with advisers hostile to the private sector in South Africa, he’ll never get to appreciate just how much it can do for him or the country.

But we should always be ready to talk. That means getting the coding right. There’s no point in convening an economic Codesa until there’s at least a chance of hearing what is being said by each side.

Here, for instance, is how it can go wrong. Two people are agreeing with each other on my Twitter feed that affirmative action is racist: “Yip,” tweets one, “if it discriminates against a person based on the colour of his skin, it is racist.”

No, it isn’t. Reversing racism isn’t racism in reverse. Sensible people know that. Our eternal race debate needs to end, and it’s easy. Racism as it manifests in South Africa is the cultural conviction of superiority handed down by one European generation after another for centuries. By the time people like me were born, we were almost hard-wired. You have to fight it. My kids will be better South Africans than I am.

It was Europeans who thought so little of Africans that they traded them as slaves, packing them like animals — lying, dying, in their own faeces — into little ships for months at a time. Twelve million souls. It was Europeans who colonised Africa. It was Europeans who legislated black inferiority with apartheid. What an absolutely nauseating history. All South Africans of European descent carry traces of this racism. Some cling to it. Others try to lose it. Black people here may be guilty of many other idiocies, just like white people. But they cannot be racist. They’ve never done to whites what whites did to them.

I only raise this in the hope that, should radio 702’s “big policy change” ever actually come to pass, we’ll all be able to be part of it without being sidetracked by more nonsense South African “debate”. The truth is, we’re all growing up. If Jacob Zuma could only be bothered to look and find the volume of vigorous private-sector capital waiting to show what it can do for his legacy and our country, he would be astonished.