Zuma is a failure but we’ll survive him

WATCHING President Jacob Zuma answering questions in Parliament is good fun. He is really quite good at it. Sure, his English is poor, but it probably isn’t even his third language. And, yes, he chuckles even at serious questions, clears his throat constantly and pushes back his glasses. All of which are extremely irritating.

At one stage yesterday he complained that “the country is not going down. It is not going backwards since me. SA is being governed responsibly.”

Obviously, given what we see around us daily, we can all have fun with that. But pause a moment.

However absolute we might want to be in our judgment of Zuma, his dreadful cronies and the friends he has running state-owned companies and the absolutely pathetic excuse for economic policies that he parades as “developmental” and designed to rescue the masses from poverty, it is important to calm down now and then and catch your breath.

This is still a good country to live in. In business, you can still make a pile of money if you’re clever and determined. You can still send your kids to some of the best schools in the world and get the best medical care. You can still rely on the central bank to ensure your savings are not devastated by inflation, and on the courts to be fair and independent.

Leave aside our new best friends such as Russia and China, both corrupt, totalitarian and cruel to their own people — even what we might think of as mature democracies, or at least interesting ones, are much worse places to live in than here in SA. Imagine the terror of being Mexican? Or Greek? Imagine being an Argentinian, where to report the actual rate of inflation is to invite arrest?

A lot, perhaps most of what is still good in SA happens because our private sector is strong, competitive, intelligent and robust. But it’s not all that.

Even the African National Congress, divided, fractious, arro- gant, frightened and a general mess, deserves some of the credit. It has always been an ideological disaster. It was absolutely useless in exile and its performance in the government has been true to form. But it has a good heart and it hasn’t lost it. Founded by doctors and lawyers 100 years ago, it is still a fundamentally middle-class organisation. Liberal even.

Zuma somehow embodies that. He did yesterday. He will embody it perfectly when, as I have no doubt he will, he leaves office in 2019.

Of course, attempts will be made to fix the succession and to embed cronies and hide some loot. But it will not be the worst I’ve seen. And the good thing is, we can only do better after he goes.

As president of an industrial democracy, Jacob Zuma has been a failure. But it is his failure. As a country, we have not failed and we will survive him and get better.

IPROMISED last week to feature extracts from Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel’s New Growth Path document. Mine is dated 2011. I want to help people understand the gap between Zumanomics and reality. This is me giving back.

Patel was on Radio 702 the other day, telling John Robbie about his plans for “unlocking opportunities” for jobs growth in the private sector.

This was in the middle of a swirl of mining and other industrial retrenchments. He ended with a boast that the public sector had really done “quite well” growing jobs in the past few years.

Translated into Real World Language, that would read that the government had employed so many people that its wage bill had doubled under Zuma and its ability to finance emergencies (like not enough electricity) was now zero.

Of course, ministers such as Patel and trade and industry’s Rob Davies think Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene is just mean. A neoliberal! Davies, attending the recent launch of the Brics Bank, was heard to mutter: “I believe we will not be guided by mindless austerity which is causing enormous difficulties in some parts of the developed world.”

Austerity may well be mindless, but not as mindless as this passage from the New Growth Path (2011 remember): “Initial projections by the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) suggest that mining can add 140,000 additional jobs by 2020, and 200,000 by 2030, not counting downstream and sidestream effects.”

Gosh, did someone forget the economic cycle?

Here is the IDC’s chief economist at the time, Lumkile Mondi, speaking to radio host Tim Modise just the other day: “We had a beautiful story that SA could have been telling today — about how we exploited an opportunity (the commodity supercycle). We were too slow to invest in infrastructure … so that opportunity was lost.

“We planned creating jobs and building the infrastructure but we failed dismally…. You have a provincial infrastructure investment committee, led by (Zuma) (which) has a plan to invest R1.2-trillion. So far it’s been run by politicians and we know politicians can’t run businesses or investment programmes. This fixation of the government that they can resolve all of these other problems is what is letting us down.”

Needless to say, he no longer works in the public sector.

TO SAY I’m disappointed Pat Lambie isn’t going to get a Test start before the Rugby World Cup would be an understatement. I don’t want to start the Third World War here but he’s a better flyhalf than Handre Pollard and if you disagree with me I don’t care. You’re probably a closet or card-carrying Bulls supporter. Like the Springbok coach is.

Lambie, when he does get on to the field for his routine 10 minutes of Test play, usually starts behind his own try-line. The fact is he defends better, kicks better (from anywhere), plays better behind a losing pack and thinks better than Pollard. Inside his own half, he is twice the flyhalf. Pollard, I’ll grant you, can spot a gap when he’s close to a try-line. But Lambie doesn’t always need a gap. Watch his try, again, on YouTube against the Australians at Newlands last year.

And for temperament, watch his injury-time 55m place kick to beat the All Blacks at Ellis Park last year. Minute for minute on the field in the past two seasons (so far) he has outplayed Pollard in every department.

At some stage this October, Pat Lambie is going to get the Springboks into the 2015 Rugby World Cup final at Twickenham.

The fact ANC opponents need to acknowledge is that, at its heart, the ruling party is a fundamentally middleclass, liberal institution