Ramaphoski takes a stand, Putin Russia first
NRamaphosa’s reforms are too late. The feeling that we are a country in decline feeds on itself
ow that President Cyril Ramaphoski has decided responsibility for the murder of women and children by Russian soldiers, as they invade Ukraine, actually lies with the West, he is like a man liberated. “I fear f*k*l,” he told Julius Malema on Thursday in what now passes for parliament.
The Russians have his back. “The war could have been avoided if Nato had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region,” said Ramaphonski, conveniently forgetting the Russian invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Hungary in 1956, Latvia in 1940 and Finland, 1939, to name just a few in the past century alone.
Terrified it would happen again after the break-up of the Soviet Union, new democratic governments in these countries applied to join Nato, which obliged. How could it not? Much as invasion apologists like to claim Nato promised Russia it would not expand eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall, no credible evidence is produced to confirm this. Not even the Russian leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, remembers Nato making such an undertaking.
It’s all in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s bloodthirsty mind and, clearly, in Ramaphushkin’s now as well. Good for him. A position at last. I hope he’s proud of it.
Sadly, what saves you in politics isn’t picking superpowers. It’s your own economy, and Ramaphosa’s is tanking big time. This was supposed to be the start of a decade of reform — the state has just auctioned radio spectrum to mobile operators and raised R14.4bn in the process, roughly the amount you would raise in a year if you increased VAT by one percentage point.
This is a real reform, but with prices being pushed up by the Nato-inspired invasion of Ukraine, will the promised declines in data costs survive the coming inflation? Another reform was the liberalisation of power generation. Private producers can now generate up to 100MW (from just 1MW a year ago) but, as yet, not a single application.
Pretty soon two ports and some freight rail operations will open to the private sector. Will anyone want them?
It’s fashionable now to blame paperwork, the bureaucracy, for preventing a stampede to enjoy these opportunities. I doubt it. The core problem with late and fainthearted reforms like Ramaphosa’s is that they deliberately keep the state in the game.
It is an uncrossable line. The state must be central to everything South Africans do to create wealth. But everyone knows that when you’re in business with the South African state you’re actually in business with the ANC, a quasi-criminal organisation. Good luck. Ask the people trying to turn Eskom around.
Better still, ask Mark Barnes if anyone has answered his offer to buy, for cash, the Post Office, keep the state on the board, along with the unions, and turn it into a modern and profitable machine for all the people. The answer would be no-one.
And, anyway, by the time any of Ramaphosa’s reforms have even a remote chance of success, the World Bank reckons our unemployment rate will have risen above 38%. That’s the low, formal, number. What turns that around?
Ann Bernstein wrote here last week that while Ramaphosa may introduce reforms (and get rid of rotten apples like the public protector or the chief of police), they just don’t shift the dial any more. They’re too late. The feeling that we are a country in decline feeds on itself. Appeals to “be positive” are archaic.
We all love our country, which is why the truth matters. In pure policy terms, Ramaphosa has been a massive disappointment. State-owned enterprises are in ruins, our defence force is a mere militia, the trains don’t run, hospitals burn and are never repaired, our premier summer resorts spill excrement into their seawater.
It is impossible any more to believe a single word any member of the cabinet says, including the president. These are simply not people who can make things happen. It is absolutely tragic.
We prattle on endlessly about “localisation” and reducing imports and building a new economy when it is precisely the old economy — mining and exporting the ores, farming and exporting the fruit — that saved us from our lamentable economic response to Covid and will save us, again, from the inflation and disruptions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the prices of our commodities boom once again.
We think we know better, but in fact we know f*k*l. I simply cannot think of what Bernstein calls “a plausible growth strategy” for SA into the 2030s that includes the ANC leading the government.