It has not been a great week for business and, obviously, the thing to do is to cast about for someone or something to blame, preferably a human so that the injured parties may relish their shame.
Perhaps, this will make us all feel a little better after the social grants payment circus.
Somehow, though, we know that blaming Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini will not be fully gratifying.
The Constitutional Court may have been unequivocal in its pronouncement about her competence and mandate, but we know that in a gangster state, a lieutenant does not pull off the kind of scam we think this lieutenant has done without cutting in the boss.
More likely, we might think, the lieutenant acted on instructions. What we don’t know is what the percentages are and who exactly the boss is.
What we must ask is, does it matter?
As with most scandals in SA, this one will also blow over. Grant recipients will have received their lifeline from the state and the business of being poor will continue as usual.
We’ll soon forget how close the nation has come to disaster, just the way we have forgotten about the arms deal and shall
soon forget about Eskom’s manufactured crisis,
and PetroSA’s bonuses and Hlaudi’s SABC and
Prasa’s locomotives and on and on.
We’ll forget. We’ll make do. Perhaps the ANC will sacrifice a few percentage points in the 2019 elections. No big deal. It is what we’ve come to expect.
Instead, let’s blame business. As Net1 UEPS CEO Serge Belamant enlightened us, Cash Paymaster Services did what it did because it was possible under the law.
Remgro’s Grindrod Bank made money from transacting with poor people, because transacting is what banks do.
Allan Gray put a lot of our money into Net1, because when an asset manager spots the opportunity for a low-risk, high-return investment, it would be remiss to pass it up.
The same thing happened when the US government bailed out its banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. That cost US taxpayers up to $700bn and it stung. It still stings. The world nearly ended and the banks – capitalists – were to blame. This is trotted out every time something goes bad.
But it is rarely acknowledged, and certainly not where populism is still played by a cynical pseudo-left, that the free market is only free if it is completely free. Any interference, such as a bailout, upsets the system. If the compromised banks had been left to perish, the better ones would have prevailed; if the market was truly free, the risk of systemic fallout would have been taken up by someone with the appetite and pockets for it.
Thus, moral hazard remains in the system, though the statists, even well-meaning third-way types, will blame its toxic presence on the free market.
This is what happened in the Constitutional Court. To the court’s distaste, and with awareness of the potential for judicial overreach, it had no choice but to order its own declaration of invalidity of 2014 of the previous CPS contract be suspended for a further year.
And soon we will forget and we will have forgiven Grindrod Bank and Allan Gray and let them get on with making money for their investors, even if they must make a deal with the Devil.
This thoroughly rotten affair could only have happened because public-private partnerships are de rigueur. This arrangement sullies a supposedly free market with a Stalinist obsession with control. It should have been perfectly obvious to anyone observing the deepening levels of corruption in SA that this is precisely what happens when we break down the wall between business and politics. How is it possible for South Africans to witness malfeasance on such a grand scale and not realise that whenever public entities and private interests get together, no good will come of it?
There is no point in blaming either political or corporate low-lives. The corruptor is as rotten as the corrupted. The best we can do about it is to separate the two. In this round, business has been the biggest loser. Politicians, like the cockroaches they are, will survive the fallout; the free market might not.
• Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write
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