Mboweni between a rock and a hard place
Finance minister Tito Mboweni is not going to deliver. This is because he does not have the power and mandate to undertake the deep structural reforms required. These are:
1. Scrap cadre deployment and place the public service on a professional and nonracial footing.
2. Scrap quotas.
3. Reform AA.
4. Reform B-BBEE.
5. Reduce the public sector salary scales.
6. Retrench public sector workers who are not adding value; reduce the bloated bureaucracy.
7. Reform the labour laws to make it easier to hire and fire workers.
8. Scrap the socialist mining charter.
9. Arrest and prosecute the looting public servants and politicians.
10. Reduce public sector expenditure to keep the national debt from exploding.
11. Reduce the budget deficit to very near to zero.
12. Replace the culture of entitlement and rent-seeking with a culture of work and innovation.
13. Instead of rewarding failure, punish failure. Instead of punishing success, reward success.
14. Shift from protecting the individual which leads to anarchy (seen in parliament, in the bullies in our classrooms and in our criminal justice system as criminals exploit their rights at the expense of society).
15. Raise the matric pass rate from 30% to 40%. This will be beneficial in the long term.
16. Scrap NHI.
17. Scrap EWC.
18. Do not threaten whites with “White Monopoly Capital” and “Stellenbosch Mafia” talk. To threaten one capitalist is like threatening all of them.
I don’t think Tito will implement a single reform.
He will play around with fiscal matters like expenditure, taxes and loans, and criticise the SOEs, but that will be the end of it.
Expect Moody’s to downgrade us and more companies leaving.
Expect a dark future.