Our road diverges up ahead and Cyril must choose
Prepare, I’m afraid, for the mother of all fights while the coronavirus pandemic sweeps through our country and as it becomes clear that the battle to save our economy is edging towards some kind of climax, the outcome of which cannot be easily foretold.
There is so much political fog around the epidemic. Last week health minister Zweli Mkhize called aspects of the DA-controlled Western Cape’s fight against Covid-19 “sub-optimal”. A few days later two ANC-run provinces were smacked hard in the face by the virus. The snarky comments about the Western Cape from up north on my Twitter feed have dried up for now.
Mkhize’s complaint was that the Western Cape had prepared hospitals but had been poor at tracking and tracing Covid contacts. The subtext was that the ANC is closer to the black urban poor than the DA. Which may be true. But whatever the ANC has with the people that the DA doesn’t isn’t helping now as cases pour out of Gauteng and the Eastern Cape.
And, by and large, while the Cape has still had the highest number of cases, its hospitals are coping relatively well. By late last week hospitals in Gauteng were turning people away and in the Eastern Cape nurses were simply refusing to treat, sometimes even feed, Covid patients because they have no protective gear. We would do better if we learnt from each other, but the political spirit is missing.
As it is from our economic revival. Nearly 100 economists and academics signed a plea to parliament’s standing committee on finance last week asking it to reject, entirely, finance minister Tito Mboweni’s emergency budget late last month. Mboweni had warned that unless we get runaway debt under control it will eventually cost us our sovereignty. He proposed deep spending cuts but we are addicted to debt.
The expert economists, mostly of the Left Left, countered that the state should instead borrow more and spend its way out of debt, using measures that “would involve significant increased expenditure in the areas identified within the rescue package and could be financed through some combination of solidarity taxation, increased borrowing, mobilising domestic quasi-public funds and Reserve Bank action”.
It is an insidious and inaccurate attack, ostensibly to turn President Cyril Ramaphosa against Mboweni by suggesting his budget failed to fund the R500bn Covid relief programme Ramaphosa announced three months ago. In reality, the target is the Reserve Bank, which the Left wants to launch an endless programme of quantative easing — to print money to buy government debt. Don’t try this at home.
On hearing this news Mboweni tweeted “God help us”. It’s a tough situation but only growth, not more debt, gets us out of this and Ramaphosa’s best hope (forlorn given the virus and our record of corruption and poor policy) may lie in the infrastructure programme he has in his pocket but about which we know little. A huge building programme — roads, ports, cities, hospitals, rail lines — would work if the private sector could build and operate state projects at a profit before handing them back over to the state.
Until then the two sides of the economic policy view are on different planets. Ramaphosa will have to choose one and back it, even at the risk of cabinet unity.
Indeed, on Friday, National Treasury officials presented parliament with a flat refusal to countenance a cent more help to SAA other than the R16bn budgeted in February to close it down, just as public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan searches for a R26bn future for the airline.
We’re watching grown men and women choose between deliverance or destruction. The Left Left argues the whole world is doing QE and the centre Left argues that you can’t spend money you don’t have. I’m with them.
The fact is we spend more than we earn. We’ve been doing that forever. Try that in your own home and see what happens.
Ramaphosa’s best hope may lie in the infrastructure programme he has in his pocket
In newspapers, tradition matters. But for a decade now, the editor of the Sunday Times has not written a column on the leader page, the one where the editorials are. That’s not how I remember this paper from my youth. For the past five years it’s been my privilege to write the weekly column where the editor’s should be, and that has now come to an end. I’m absolutely delighted with my new home and the fact that the new editor restores tradition from today. I look forward to seeing you here every Sunday and, I hope, to a seriously exciting new permanent companion at the top of this new page of comment and analysis soon.