It’s the poverty that’s a disgrace, Laura

ONE moment Andrew Canter, chief investment officer at Futuregrowth, Old Mutual’s fixed-investment boutique, was the toast of the town — or part of it — for announcing last week that the R150-billion funds he manages would no longer be buying the bonds of a range of state-owned companies because he was worried about their corporate governance.

Coming as it did in the middle of yet another spasm of the war inside and outside the ANC about President Jacob Zuma’s relationship with the Gupta family, about Eskom, nuclear power and downgrades if the finance minister were arrested, Canter’s stand took on the form of Big Business finally standing up for good governance in the face of a rapidly spreading political cancer.

But by Friday it was all over. Canter issued a grovelling apology. He had not expected the backlash, especially from Old Mutual, which must itself have come under huge pressure from people in government. Old Mutual manages the pensions of public servants, and state power served cold down a telephone is awesome. That is why people fight over it.

I feel mildly sorry for Canter who, I assume, will never be quite the same man following his humiliation. But I feel much more for our country. We are all in agony. Zuma, the Guptas, university students, school children, whites, blacks, men and women. The scale of our wretchedness may not be Syrian or South Sudanese in its intensity but it is real and existential.

We have moved so far from the promise of a bright, confident democracy that the Mandela era ushered in 22 years ago that I sometimes think we should start again. Then I think it can still be fixed. That, ultimately, the South African public can be trusted to move the country onto a path it is comfortable with. That happened in a way in the local government elections in August.

But what now? There’s a funny line in a John Cleese movie, Clockwise, when he turns to a woman and says: “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”

On an impulse, I decided 20 years ago to return to South Africa from a self-imposed exile, in the belief that the sheer authenticity and legitimacy of the ANC virtually guaranteed a stable and even conservative nation to which I could bring my (foreign) family and live productive lives.

I’ve never regretted it, though. What journalist or commentator wouldn’t want to cover this story? But I am still, naively perhaps, shocked at how quickly the hope of the early years has dissipated.

I am OK. I have a great job and my pension is intact. The house is paid for. But no citizen of this country, surely, can sleep easy watching the grinding poverty that almost half our fellow citizens live in, or the huge wealth enjoyed at the other end of the scale.

Some people call this problem inequality, but it isn’t. It isn’t the wealth that’s a disgrace, Laura, it’s the poverty. It is criminal.

If every South African had a stake in our economy worth defending, they’d all defend it. But they don’t and they won’t. And with the immense power that the ANC has been able to wield over the land for more than two decades, it has, through a toxic mix of feeble policy and human frailty, made it worse, not better, in way too many respects.

Probably because I write in the newspapers, people ask me what’s going to happen. I have nothing left to tell them. I ask the same question of people closer to the ground than I am, and they don’t know either. Surely, I ask, the ANC can gather itself and hold the centre?

The answer is, almost uniformly: “No, it can’t. It’s too late.” But then what? The ANC vote slips below 50% in the 2019 national election and we are run by a coalition government? Who would be in it? What would it do for the poor? For my family? It’s the uncertainty, Laura.

There’s a conversation inside the ANC about whether it would be better for the party’s internal election congress that will decide the Zuma succession to be held not in December next year but closer to the 2019 elections. More agony.

Can’t we just get this all over with and bring the national election forward to align with the ANC congress, rather than the other way around?

No citizen of this country, surely, can sleep easy watching the grinding poverty . . .