We have to own up to ‘political risk’ — but we’re not alone

When Tony Trahar, the last of the Oppenheimer generation of Anglo American gentlemen, highlighted “political risk” as one to watch when investors considered the South African story in the early years of this century, it was just another stab at what is the long-held view that emerging-market countries are naturally disposed to uncertainty in their body politic. And in the years that followed — with the ANC’s deterioration as evidenced by the Zondo commission among others — his words have proved prescient. As a young black man believing in this country’s future I was affronted by Trahar’s words perhaps as much as former president Thabo Mbeki. But the results have shown that political risk and corruption were deserved monikers for our story, along with other emerging-market nations such as Brazil. But it’s now a symptom that’s no longer just an EM curse. It has spread across all geographies: there’s nothing in European or US politics that speaks of certainty and clean governance.

While the slowdown in the global economy caused by China’s cooling growth rates and a sovereign debt crisis in the West have set the cat among the pigeons in nations more disposed to commodities, it has also certainly filtered into the politics of the world’s leading capitals. The peak in Europe’s sovereign debt crisis may have passed, but it has caused a recurrence of the cancer of “nationalism” in the old continent. The EU, for all its economic virtues, was a necessary experiment to avoid repeating the countless wars between European nations over many centuries.

The bitter course of austerity that especially Southern European nations have had to follow has seen public services reduced. Immigration, which you’d think advantageous given Europe’s ageing people, has brought out the worst in their politics. Europe is greying, with the expectation that the median age will increase to more than 52 in about 30 years, not advantageous.

I sometimes view Britain’s decision to leave the EU in much the same manner that critics summed up Zimbabwe’s emotive and disastrous policy of land reform that an unpopular ruling class embarked upon in the early 2000s. It has similar hallmarks, raw emotion and a stick-it-to-the-elite grit to it, doesn’t it?

At the centre of the unhappiness of people outside of the commercial centres of that island nation is the belief that they are being robbed by the nobility in London and Brussels.

France’s yellow-vest protests over the reforms pushed by Emmanuel

Macron since the tail-end of last year come from the same place as

Brexit.

Across the Atlantic, the emergence of Donald Trump is as much about the end of the old economy as an entry into a new digital age that

I would say really took hold with the 2007 launch of the iPhone. Smart telephony has been the piercing point of the fourth industrial revolution. While Trump, whose “wealth” is based on that old and insecure economy, is quick to point to record high employment rates, labour force participation rates in the world’s biggest economy has been steadily declining since the turn of the century.

Under these rapidly shifting sands, it makes perfect sense why the US would target a trade war with China, the country that it blames for the end of its competitiveness in antiquated industries such as steel. But even in the world’s second-biggest economy, the days of double-digit growth rates are gone and not likely to be repeated for many a decade.

China’s Communist Party has long targeted a shift towards a more consumption-led economy rather than one driven by fixed investment spend. A shift that doesn’t come with the growth rates of yore that quite literally changed the face of the world since the state started its far-reaching market-economy reforms. For the one-party state, continued expansion is imperative in maintaining stability. The wobbles can’t be too comfortable for Beijing.

So political risk as highlighted by Trahar at the start of the century has certainly spread to all corners. South African investors that have bought into companies that have promised an escape, are finding fewer places to hide.

There have been some significant changes in the global economy and while we zero in on the greed of our politicians that have looked to benefit from the cracks in what’s still an old-school bureaucracy in which the National Party prospered, I fear that we don’t recognise just how much the neighbourhood is changing. Everyone is in uncertain and uncharted waters as this fourth industrial revolution poses too many questions and there’s no Chinese growth to piggyback onto as its economy matures.

The victors in this unsettled world will be countries that have a governing class that can see the wood for the trees. There aren’t many nations that blessed, but one can only hope I am proved wrong. Our May 8 polls don’t inspire much confidence that this governing class is alert to these shifts as they get stuck in a useless debate about the merits of a nationalised central bank.

There is nothing in EU or US politics that speaks of certainty