Mashaba: what our metro needs
HERMAN Mashaba may seem sugarcoated to Eusebius McKaiser, but someone who has been this successful must command respect from any businessman who understands the terms “leadership”, “efficiency”, “ethics” and “fearlessness” (“Blue like Herman Mashaba”, Opinion and Analysis, January 18).
Eusebius, you wax lyrical about how inexperienced Mashaba is in political matters, but in reality, what is governance but business on a large scale? How much worse can a person who obviously has a sound knowledge of good business principles perform in managing a metro?
If I look at the recent achievements of the ANC government, I don’t have much to work with but personal enrichment, cadre deployment, government bailouts and misdirection of taxpayers capital. What I find incredible is the disregard of so many fundamentals, which lead to such examples as the Spanish locomotives disaster; SAA board chairperson’s Airbus scheme; Eskom, destructive business confidence utterances; SAPS demoralisation; prosecutorial and judicial fiascos and so on.
BEE is in essence a good principle for redistributing business, except when perverted by unscrupulous firms, who through manipulating the BEE rating system are able to artificially inflate tender prices, forcing the consumer to pick up the extra cost of services or goods.
The only way the economy is going to be able to support the 54 million citizens is to shift our endeavours away from a commodity-based to a value-added manufacturing-type economy.
Free education for all is laudable provided we have jobs available once our students qualify. Being downgraded to junk status by the world’s financial institutions is not what our country and thus our metros need.
Therefore, any person with the amount of business acumen Herman Mashaba obviously has, can only benefit all the citizens.
Socio-economic policies are an essential part of transformation and shrinking the inequality divide. This is only possible provided we don’t have the junk-status albatross around our necks.
Without reasonable GDP growth and a correspondingly low inflation rate, the country cannot achieve the aspirations of its people.
What’s governance but business on a large scale?
Linden, Joburg