Our future: a fairy tale of the Grimm kind?

ONE might justifiably have hoped that the Covid-19 pandemic wouldn’t be all bad. That there would inadvertently be few good side-effects.

For example, it might galvanise President Cyril Ramaphosa’s languorous style of government. Currently, this seems predicated on the belief that he has ahead of him a 20-year presidency and that the ANC will be in power until – as his predecessor phrased it – Jesus returns.

Conceivably, Covid-19 might even encourage the ANC to dump some of the more grotesque skeletons stored in its attic. If #RhodesMustFall, why not Marx, Lenin and Stalin?

Unfortunately, nothing doing. Those outcomes were always in the realm of fairies, no more likely to materialise than Tinker Bell.

Nevertheless, the pandemic’s disastrous economic effects meant some hard realities. The fiscal cupboard was now undeniably bare and some vanity expenditure was no longer sustainable.

The national airline, SAA, would have to fold. It had a crushing debt overhang of R28bn and had been run and plundered into the ground. Add the pandemic-induced additional burden of a global turndown in tourism, SAA was surely dead? But no, while the ANC waits for Jesus, it is going to pull off a modern-day Lazarus – Minister Pravin Gordhan has decreed that SAA will rise from the dead and fly again. Such strength of political faith on the part of the governing tripartite alliance would be inspiring, were it not so scary.

Our future is in the hands of ideological true-believers, colloquially known as fanatics, who skrik vir niks.

As with any group that thinks of itself as the Chosen, it never feels it has to justify its privilege. The unionised workforce, already a minority within the working aristocracy, has emerged from the Covid-19 lockdown feeling mightily hard done by.

Hundreds of thousands of privatesector workers lost jobs and, if lucky enough to remain employed, forfeited leave and had salaries cut.

Public sector workers did virtually zero work during lockdown but remained fully paid, lost no benefits, and face no imminent threat of job cuts. Yet, far from being enervated by Covid-19, the unions appear invigorated. The public sector unions want more. They are wrangling for the 8% salary increases agreed upon in a threeyear pay deal that was struck in a different economic era.

The teacher union has been trying every trick in the malinger book to avoid going back to work. The health worker unions have been worse, actively sabotaging clinics and hospitals.

The ANC panders to union whims because, as a political party, it would struggle to achieve an electoral majority without Cosatu support. Ramaphosa – the alliance’s stand-in for JC until the Rapture occurs – is similarly completely dependent on union support to retain the leadership of the party and hence the country.

Fortunately, the ANC and Ramaphosa have in hand some clever dodges to avoid the economic pain brought by Covid-19. They’re seriously considering simply printing more money to solve our budgetary woes (it worked so well in Zimbabwe) and/or forcing asset managers to invest in state enterprises and government bonds (it worked so well for the apartheid regime).

If these strategies don’t work, respected constitutional expert Pierre de Vos punts another solution: doing away with inheritances or, at the very least, imposing swinging death duties. It’s this ability of whites to transfer “intergenerational wealth” that has over generations of colonial and apartheid rule made it possible for them to become wealthy. This must be stopped.

De Vos is vague on the detail, saying: “I am not a tax expert, so have avoided speaking about practicality.” He also concedes obstacles other than ordinary South Africans’ peskily inconvenient belief that they should be able to decide what happens to their possessions when they die.

Says De Vos: “For the state just to take your property is probably going to be difficult to justify in terms of our Constitution...”

It’s difficult to know what to make of De Vos’ startling proposal. He may just have had a rush of blood to the head, what with being able to buy booze again. Or he may be angling for that spot on the Constitutional Court that’s reserved for white men able to demonstrate true belief redistribution.

Either way, in a country where the unthinkable is so readily elevated into law, his is a suggestion that might well find traction. After all, if the expropriation of land without compensation is so readily justified, inheritance seizures may be a logical next step.