Tell us what the plan is, Mr President
Fault lines are starting to show as the battle to save lives and livelihoods endangered by Covid-19 intensifies. Like any crisis, the pandemic has offered SA’s governing party elite an opportunity to dream up cure-all solutions for the socioeconomic ills it has failed to solve over the past quarter of a century.
A fortnight ago finance minister Tito Mboweni spoke of efforts to refashion SA’s economy and promised it would look different once the coronavirus has been defeated. Yet in the news briefing, the only example of note about the features of the new economy was the nationality of staff employed by restaurants.
When Mboweni returned from exile, he said, restaurant workers were predominantly South African, and now are predominantly foreign nationals. The implication was that post Covid-19, this demographic make-up would be reversed.
Mboweni neglected to complain about the thousands of foreign nationals who are working in SA households. He could also have gone on to talk about spaza shops in the townships and rural villages having been taken over by foreign nationals, and that post Covid-19, South Africans should take back these shops, which serve as convenience stores for many African communities.
After the series of credit rating downgrades, Mboweni also feels emboldened to use the Covid-19 crisis window to finally implement long-stalled structural reforms. And he is not alone in not wanting to waste this crisis to resolve longstanding ills.
The more than 80,000 small-business owners who have filled out government bailout forms will remember that one of the many requirements for qualifying for the R500m worth of debt rescheduling the firm must and“growth be 100% facilities during Covid-19 is that SA-owned”.
Minority rights groups Solidarity and AfriForum have just lost a high court case against tourism minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane in which they challenged the requirement that BEE be used as a criterion for businesses applying for the department’s R200m assistance package. The groups have said they will take their appeal to the Constitutional Court.
But BEE lobbyists have also lodged a grievance: they complain that they are being marginalised and given crumbs from the state’s multibillionrand procurement largesse for medical and food supplies.
To be clear, these aren’t new issues nor are they insignificant. They are important public policy problems that require resolution. It is true that BEE has failed to achieve its stated objectives. It has benefited a few politically connected ANC officials who have sometimes been paid lucrative sign-on fees to lead consortia. Few of the many trusts representing poor communities, the disabled and women’s groups have really benefited from these schemes.
Similarly, some large companies have cynically used African companies as fronts. All of these culprits are still walking the streets instead of being in jail or facing stiff fines, despite the existence of laws that criminalise such conduct.
It is curious that when former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba launched a campaign against undocumented foreign nationals who are trying to eke out a living in the city, it was ANC politicians who accused him of xenophobia. It is common cause that the country’s borders are porous. What has not been taken into account during the battle against coronavirus is the plight of foreign nationals who are in SA for various other reasons, including fleeing repressive governments and poverty in their countries.
The mixed signals haven’t stopped. ANC politicians have been working overtime this week to defend the decision to fly in 217 Cuban doctors to assist in fighting the pandemic, when the country still has unemployed medical personnel, including doctors and nurses.
Worse, up until the outbreak of Covid-19, President Cyril Ramaphosa was on a global drive to attract $100bn worth of foreign direct investment to SA by 2023. The question that arises is: are multinationals excluded from the government’s financial aid merely because they are foreign-owned, even though they are legally registered in SA and are paying corporate and other taxes here? What will be their fate if they happen to employ less than 70% South Africans during the initial stages of their investments, but continue being compliant with other laws?
The use of the economic support measures as a social engineering’tool Ramaphosa s investment is not only drive disturbing, it also seems to run against the spirit of and the global solidarity that is required to defeat the virus, which respects no race, border or creed.
Notwithstanding Covid-19, it is hard to believe that the ANC’s newfound urgency, including the populist nationalism, has nothing to do with the local government elections due in 2021. Given how some of his ministers have messed up communications of the Covid19 message, Ramaphosa needs to step in. He needs to take the nation into his confidence and paint a picture of what this new economy looks like in practice, beyond its founding values of fairness, empowerment, justice and equality.
In future, the officials who have come up with the lockdown regulations should be the ones communicating and explaining them to South Africans.
IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE THE NEWFOUND URGENCY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS IN 2021
Dludlu, a former Sowetan editor, is executive for strategy and public affairs at the Small Business Institute.