Mediocrity rules as we keep faith with failed remedies
While Limpopo schools smoulder and parliament descends into disorder, our future is being compromised by the stubborn adherence to socialist policies,
WHEN historians write the current chapter of South Africa’s story, they will be spoilt for choice for a title. Explaining how the once great hope of Africa slid from being the largest, investmentgrade economy on the continent to third place in a handful of years, and shed 1.3 million jobs since 2009 (according to the latest, gloomy figures on unemployment from Stats SA), will require a few pages.
But you can sum it up in three words: “The new mediocre.”
In April last year, at the International Monetary Fund spring conference, the fund’s MD, Christine Lagarde, coined this phrase to describe the danger of protracted low growth taking hold in the world. She warned, to deaf ears among local policymakers at any rate, that new thinking was needed to prevent this becoming “the new reality”.
Instead, South Africa has chosen to double down on a depressing diet of more of the same — more BEE, more state interference, more ideology and more unemployment. Ironically, it could be to Lagarde’s dread organisation (dread for those many local enemies of international capitalism) that we will have to turn if a credit downgrade chokes off our ability to fund the government’s grandiose spending plans and commitments.
Another economic title which might fit current and potential future economic trends here is derived from The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman’s 2003 bestseller on the economic illiteracy of George W Bush’s presidency. But of course the largest economy, and biggest middle-class consumer class, in the world can borrow in its own currency and run up vast deficits and even the worst of governments there does not choke off the engine of capitalism.
But to segue from economics to the constitution, 20 years ago this month South Africa offered the world an object lesson in building a bridge from the ravages of past conflict to a future based on inclusivity, civil liberty and social justice.
Not that you would know it in the smouldering ruins of schools in Limpopo or in the hollowed-out institutions — from the National Prosecuting Authority to the seat of authority in parliament — which mock the designs and intentions of this country’s constitutional architects. “Missed Expectations” might describe this chapter.
But further afield, in London, once the heart and headquarters of the colonialism usefully depicted as the harbinger of local misery, a much more hopeful snapshot of nonracialism in action played itself out last month.
Sadiq Khan — a Muslim who had to bring his own Koran to Buckingham Palace when he was first sworn in as a privy councillor in 2009 — won a landslide victory as mayor of London.
In terms of inclusive nonracialism, there’s a lot to celebrate in how the Labour son of a Pakistani bus driver received, against the Tory son of a billionaire, such a clear and strong personal mandate.
But perhaps the most telling comment of all relates to the Koran he left behind at the palace “for the next man”, as he put it.
One of the political drivers of the fortunes of the high-performing British economy is David Cameron’s business secretary (or minister of trade and industry) Sajid Javid, another son of another Pakistani bus driver. Except that he is a true blue Tory.
Hardly in the mould of Conservative Enoch Powell, who five decades ago prophesied that with mass immigration of dark foreigners, the UK would soon resemble “The River Tiber foaming with much blood”.
Pithily, reflecting on this modern Muslim duo sitting high in British politics today, on opposite sides of the aisle, Khan noted: “Typical. You wait for ages for a Pakistani bus driver’s son to come along, then two come at once.”
Of course there is still a clutch of whites in the inner circle of governance in South Africa, but they appear to require SACP membership to be admitted through the front door. The claim of “representivity” is being cancelled out by an ideology as alien to minorities here as it is ruinous of economic progress everywhere.
Just how bad full-throated socialism is in the world — and not the milder versions of social democracy advanced by, say Bernie Sanders in the US — is witnessed today in the “great unravelling” in “Socialist Bolivarian” Venezuela. It cannot produce enough sugar for its Coca-Cola or enough malt for its beer; the once big hope in the world of the left is shrivelled down to a collapsed state and a two-day week for its army of civil servants.
We certainly haven’t reached that point here. But, to borrow a title from a musical of 1961, if we put into practice our home-grown version of “Stop the world — I want to get off”, who knows what will be written on the last page of our current chapter?
We had a glimpse of this gothichorror alternative of chasing away success last week, when the president’s son declared war, again, on one of the few indigenous billionaires left in South Africa.
Presumably Duduzane Zuma and his sister Duduzile are held close to the economic interests of their father’s best friends in business — the Guptas — because of their economic smarts, not their lineage. But another sibling, Edward, didn’t appear too clever when he charged Johann Rupert with corruption in March, or last week declared the Stellenbosch tycoon to have the judiciary under his thumb, or some such.
But if Zuma jnr is ignorant of who pays the bills — and the taxes, which fund everything from most of Nkandla to the luxury vehicles used by the presidential spouses — let’s hope the father has a better idea.
Perhaps neither has read the February 2016 New World Wealth Report. It revealed that almost 1 000 millionaires left this country in 2015 and the dollar millionaires here declined from 46 800 in 2014 to 38 500 at the end of last year.
Or, maybe the Guptas believe that means more for them to acquire at fire-sale prices.
But perhaps local politicians should rather listen to the voice from London of the Pakistani bus driver’s son. Khan, before his election, said: “I welcome the fact that there are 400 000 millionaires in London.”
Maybe, indeed, the Zuma family should broadcast that message in Stellenbosch; honey, instead of vinegar, for local wealth creators, might lead to a genuinely goodnews ending to South Africa’s current travails.
Typical. You wait for ages for a Pakistani bus driver’s son to come along, then two come at once