If you want capitalism to last, think again

IF you listen, Julius Malema’s exhortations to the poor to occupy land make a lot of sense. Strip away the rhetoric about slaughtering whites. Our politics has always sounded bloodcurdling. National Party politicians in apartheid days were just as bad about communists (they meant black people, in the main). Trade union leaders are just as bad about destroying big business even though it is big business that supplies the jobs their members have.

Land is the single most pressing social threat we face. Access to land here is the essence of social justice. Solve land and you take our pressure cooker off the heat. It all seems so difficult but inside Malema’s populism lies at least the possibility of a serious answer to our survival as a prosperous and significant democracy in the world.

Everyone knows South African capitalism is Victorian. It makes only a few people rich. But capitalism is the only answer to poverty and inequality because, by its very nature, capitalism creates wealth. It is how we are able to reform our capitalism that matters. How do we make creating wealth popular rather than despised, as it is now?

How do you sell that to the 26% unemployed — the 37% unemployed if you include citizens who no longer bother to look for work, the 50% unemployed if you’re under 25?

You sell it by making the economy more inclusive. You sell it by giving every citizen a stake in the future, in the real economy. And you do that by ensuring that every citizen has a piece of it. And to do that you have to give people who now have nothing an asset to develop or sell. And the one thing we have in abundance is unoccupied land.

We are more than capable of doing it. First, we need a cadastral map of the country, an aerial survey of every corner of the land. Once unused land is identified, every poor South African alive should be allocated 1 000m² of it as close to an existing town or city as possible. It is a huge ask, but think about what is possible then.

No one has to build a house, but a 20-year programme, run by professional people who know what they are doing, of infrastructure to these areas — roads, water, sewerage, electricity, schools, hospitals and transport services — would grow this economy into another dimension. It would make the Marshall Plan — the US programme that rebuilt Europe after World War 2 — look like chicken feed.

And for those yet to be born you make another plan. You deposit, in a bank account in their name, R20 000 on the day they’re born. Our financial services industry and its asset managers then take that money and invest it, here and abroad, for at least a 10% return until the child can access it when they are 21.

About 1.1 million people are born here every year. By the time the first children access their accounts we would have accumulated a savings base of more than R20-trillion. We would never have to entertain a ratings agency ever again. The state would claim its investment back from their estates when they die. That’s what capitalism can do here. But you need clean, efficient government and brave politicians to make it happen.

Instead we have an ANC more interested in merely changing the colour of our existing (and diminishing) wealth from white to black. The DA has no view on the future of wealth creation here whatsoever. Only Malema has a radical new view of the economy, and his vision is destructive socialism. How can that be? How can Mmusi Maimane allow it?

President Jacob Zuma will be gone one day soon and with him will go the juiciest political target in our history. And then what does the DA do?

The next election, in 2019, will, as it should, be fought on the future of economic policy, on how we create wealth and how we distribute it. The ANC is in too much of a mess to offer any new thinking on how we do that. The EFF has already decided. The DA is in the process now of rethinking policy across a wide range of issues. It alone has the space to reimagine the future of the country. It needs courage and it needs to get a move on.

Access to land here is the very essence of social justice. Solve land and you take our pressure cooker off the heat