It is worth noting that the new finance minister, Malusi Gigaba, is not proposing to change the ANC’s economic policy, no matter how compelling the evidence that its continuation would be catastrophic for our country. And chief among Gigaba’s continuation policies is, well, the certainty of policy uncertainty.
Policy uncertainty has long been the pitiful excuse trotted out by those selfishly reluctant foreign investors and their running dogs, the sovereign ratings agencies, which have given cause for the good ship SA and crew to be rendered junk under tattered sail, about to be becalmed, or hit a storm, whichever is worse.
That, anyway, is how one should read the North West University School of Business and Governance’s policy uncertainty index, which now rates conditions at 51, which is greater than the index’s arbitrary calamity score of 50, and up from 38.8 in the fourth quarter of 2016.
But South Africans don’t panic. We are too thick for that, or perhaps we’ve become so inured to incompetence and corruption creep that we fail to notice tsunamis until the deckchairs are swept into the briny. Who knows?
What matters is that fringe indices, such as the one hatched in Potch, are dismissible if you bear in mind they are based on media reports in a time of blogging.
Except in this case. The venerable Prof Raymond Parsons, he of many councils of commerce and sundry collectives, appears to oversee the index. It means we had better pay attention when he says the measure confirms that SA is facing a period of uncertainty and the replacement of Pravin Gordhan as finance minister has enhanced that.
It is difficult to disagree and it may be merely relatively helpful either way. To gain a degree of certainty – and for the sake of politeness — it is best to carefully weigh what the perpetrators of uncertainty have had to say and then to believe its antipodal.
Take Gigaba’s utterances, for instance. He has been true to ANC form when he assured us he would not be swayed by his lefty advisers and that the policy of inclusive growth (copied from retired politician Gordhan’s notes), is still his very own and that of the party. Then, in the same breath, he assures us also that nationalisation is not ANC policy. In this way, we know the ANC’s policy uncertainty is the one thing of which we may be absolutely certain.
The trouble with this is that investors are no wiser, the global hunt for yield notwithstanding. So, what is the ANC’s policy?
Official documents and papers and speeches don’t help. When they are not rhetoric or gibberish, they are contradictory; it is a mystery. We may never know the whole truth, but it should be possible to work out whether the economy is being nationalised or not.
Consider land reform, an ANC policy pillar. The stated policy is to redistribute land, but instead, the state acquires land and then keeps it.
Restitution policy, in which land is meant to be returned to people dispossessed under apartheid, grants certain land rights to beneficiaries but not rights in the sense of property ownership, as contemplated in Section 25 of the Constitution.
This is nationalisation policy by subterfuge. The same goes for the state’s continued ownership of SA’s monopolistic state-owned enterprises, which arguably constitute the most important chunk of the economy. Each day that passes without the state putting these entities out to tender, it renews its nationalisation policy.
Now we know: Gigaba’s utterances are obliquities at best but mendacious in effect. When he tells ratings agency Moody’s that SA’s fiscal policy won’t change, the minister will be fibbing, of that much investors may be certain.
But now new mysteries appear. Does Gigaba know he’ll be found out? Does he care? What’ll happen if the yield-starved Americans believe him, only to discover their investments have been siphoned off to Dubai now that Saxonwold has become part of the zoo?
Clearly, policy uncertainty is not our problem. It is a silly euphemism for disapprobation. Our investment problem is the absolute certainty that the ANC’s policies are rotten.
•Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write.
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