Free from theft, we get to make good choices at last

In life you have to make choices. The All Blacks lost against the Springboks because they made poor choices. Victory was on for about three minutes as they camped on the South African try-line, determined to win by pushing over for a try rather than do anything so namby-pamby as kick a drop goal. On a more mundane level, we all make choices all the time. Most of us. One creature that never has to make choices is the ANC. It always manages to combine everything it wants into one choice. Come the next election, I guarantee you it will dream up a new list of Five Priorities, whatever they are.

It never makes any progress on these because it cannot prioritise one ill over another. It’s too hard. Do you make education a priority over health? How callous would you have to be to deliberately underfund the health of your citizens? But a priority is the thing at the top of your list, not a list at the top of your priorities.

Or how about the three ills almost every politician of the Left lumps together as if they were the same thing: they’re all going urgently to tackle poverty, inequality and unemployment.

But how, they can never tell you. That’s because the cause of each is different and the solutions different, too. Poverty is caused by the absence of money or assets. Inequality results from the presence of money. Poverty is the priority to fix. Unemployment is often caused by employers being deterred from hiring people. Make it easier to hire and fire, and unemployment would fall.

Fixing unemployment would obviously make a dent in poverty, but then politics makes an appearance, because to lighten the load on employers, or to make it worthwhile to be an employer, requires, to an extent, disempowering the trade unions, and we can’t have that. Can’t they be bought off with a big fat property portfolio, as the Spanish socialists did after Gen Franco died?

Nonetheless, it was fascinating to watch President Cyril Ramaphosa outline his stimulus package on Friday. He was making choices, mostly very good ones. His finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, is going to make some even harder ones as he finds R50bn in the government’s empty piggy bank to spend on “reprioritised” projects and targets.

That R50bn is imminent. In all, Ramaphosa wants a R400bn infrastructure fund, a blend of (private) equity, bonds and debt, run out of his office.

He is also going to run a sword through Malusi Gigaba’s and Naledi Pandor’s preposterous visa regime (she designed it, he implemented it). They set back our highest-margin export — tourism, in which people bring their hard currency to you — by a decade. It’s also labour intensive.

There is so much potential here. The rand rallied on Ramaphosa’s announcement, especially as it appears to be fiscally neutral. He says business is excited by the prospect. When Ramaphosa says that, you at least know he actually knows some business people. His predecessor would have consulted Ajay Gupta and then announced a list of new projects drawn up in Saxonwold.

The fact is, hidden from the gaze of the public and the media, huge and good things are being done in SA.

Sanral is making a fantastic advance on the new Wild Coast N2 toll road through Pondoland. At every village or hamlet they are consulting and drawing in new people to work with them and to deal with every inconvenience a national road might pose to a (new) roadside community. It is superb and inclusive progress, and work on the massive bridges along the route has begun. I was seriously impressed with what I heard, not only from Sanral but from a respected independent voice from the area as well.

In my old home of Mthatha, engineers have driven an entirely new sewer through the length of the exploding town. Now they are involved in an ambitious scheme to take — via a new water treatment plant, pumps and gravity — bulk water from the Mthatha dam to the nearby villages of Libode, Ngqeleni and Mqanduli and settlements on the way. I say “nearby”, but Mqanduli is 30km from Mthatha. It’s a big deal and the skills required to do it right are still with us.

When you spend for public benefit rather than theft, all you have to do is make good choices. Building a huge dam, as the Zuma administration wanted to do on the Mzimvubu River, makes no sense. Engineers say a series of smaller dams in the region might, on the other hand, be extremely useful.

This time let’s do it right, one big and hard thing at a time.