The writing is on the wall for major job losses in our mismanaged country
WITHOUT being overly dramatic, I believe that the front-page articles in Business Report (January 8) were somewhat ominous. On the one hand we have local boy Elon Musk opening a massive electric car plant in Shanghai to feed the largest potential market on the planet.
Although there have been rumours about him being interested in building something here on the subcontinent, it is all smoke and mirrors at this juncture.
Before Musk considers building a huge plant here in South Africa to serve the African continent, I reckon that we would like to be able to demonstrate to one of the world’s leading innovators that we will be jacking up our roads on the continent, as well as having working plug-in points which actually have electricity 24/7/365.
We know that the South African economy is in a perilous state due in no small part to the gross mismanagement of the economy by central and local governments to the abysmal failure and maladministration and in many cases the outright pilfering of state-owned enterprises by the Zuma/ Gupta et al miscreants, many of whom we hope to see behind bars.
South Africa Inc, all its departments and divisions must engage the very best men/women/black/white or otherwise to transform our dying economy, before it is too late. It is therefore very refreshing to read that a new chief executive of Denel has been appointed because he is the very best man for the job. Period. If we don’t move beyond the strict edicts of “transformation” for the sake of transformation, we are doomed to perpetual mediocrity and failure and we will never rise to the levels of which we are capable.
Which moves me to the headline that a “Jobs bloodbath is looming, warns labour”.
This is a no brainer. We are a lazy, strike-prone, uneducated, labour union-controlled, work force which is over a generation away from entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The likes of Patrick Craven and the rest of the unionised labour movement see the writing clearly on the wall; we are going to shed jobs in their tens of thousands.
Witness the decline in the work forces in just about every sector in this country, manufacturing, mining and construction. Ironically, the one sector which is the most stable is the formal farming sector which is holding its own.
Finally, the article on the very sad state of the Zimbabwean command economy, inflicted by two generations of Zanu-PF kleptocratic misrule and the ruination of a once prosperous and productive country, should be taken in the context of the other articles cited.
The very policies advocated by the SA trade unions and indeed the government, with its minimum wage and land policies, are part and parcel of the series of missteps which will lead us further along the road to a South African version of the failed Zimbabwe.