Since when has SA been Zimbabwe’s bitch? How is it humanly possible that SA, the continent’s third-largest and most sophisticated economy, can be so beholden to an economic basket case?
It’s not just that Zimbabwe’s first lady, Grace Mugabe, can waltz into SA, whip our citizens at will and then be explicitly granted the right to do so. It’s not just that her sons can get away with causing a South African woman to lose her baby and get away with it.
It’s an entire mind-set of the government. South African government officials are so in the thrall of the Mugabe regime that they routinely genuflect and buckle in the face of almost any outrage.
They do so without the slightest acknowledgement that the regime has destroyed the lives of millions of Zimbabweans. The average Zimbabwean is no richer now than he or she was at independence in 1980.
In 37 years, the country has achieved precisely nothing. The unemployment rate is now about 95%, according to the IMF; the hospitals have no medicine; the country’s entire productive citizenry has fled.
Just how bad this is in an African context is illustrated by one simple statistic: the average African is roughly three times as rich as he or she was in 1980, despite an explosion in population size.
Almost no country on the continent not involved in a civil war has performed as badly as Zimbabwe, particularly one with such smart people, such great resources, a fledgling manufacturing sector and excellent agricultural and mining sectors. Next door Mozambique, which was a devastated disaster zone that had just emerged from a civil war at the time of Zimbabwean independence, is now a larger economy.
If the indignity inflicted on SA by its neighbour’s politicians were a matter of letting its brutish leaders get away with beating South Africans physically, it would be one thing. But it’s not.
Last week, it was announced (and I’m not making this up) that Transnet had "won" a bid to recapitalise National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) with $400m.
What extraordinary phraseology. This "victory" for Transnet is just another indication of wool once again being pulled over the eyes of the suckers down south.
National Railways of Zimbabwe is functionally bankrupt. It reportedly hasn’t paid its employees for over a year. What Transnet could and should have said was that it would buy NRZ for a rand
NRZ is functionally bankrupt. It reportedly hasn’t paid its employees for over a year. What Transnet could and should have said was that it would buy NRZ for a rand, the normal transaction price for a company that is worthless.
In fact, NRZ is much less than worthless. It has a debt of $348m, which has been put into a special purpose vehicle. That does not mean the government is going to pay back the loan. The special purpose vehicle is there to prevent creditors, whoever these lucky souls might be, from getting access to the new cash injection that Transnet, in its infinite wisdom, is pumping into the railway.
SA might benefit from increased copper exports from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that flow through Zimbabwe. But what the announcement did not say is that Transnet will get equity, management control or any real security. One hopes it will, but one holds one’s breath a bit.
What’s incredible is how the South African suckers just never seem to learn. Years ago, Eskom sold power to Zimbabwe, until the Zimbabweans stopped paying. Forced by local load shedding to devote all its resources to local paying clients, Eskom stopped supplying. Then in May, it turned out that SA was once again supplying Zimbabwe with electricity and had been for a while. The only reason we knew about it was that it leaked out in the Zimbabwean news media that SA was threatening to stop supplying, because, you guessed it, the Zimbabweans had stopped paying — again.
Eskom, now producing more electricity than local consumers want to buy because it’s so massively more expensive, is trying desperately to offload its electricity on SA’s neighbours. The Zimbabweans, ever attuned to the potential sucker to their south, were happy to take some off our hands – and then forget to pay.
It’s a truism that all foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy. The South African government wants desperately to pretend that nothing serious happened when Mugabe trashed the country’s rule of law and smashed its economy to win populist election support.
To do so would be to acknowledge something the ANC government does not want to acknowledge: that transformation is risky and comes at a price. It cannot be implemented with a sledgehammer and that means there must be general agreement, at least in broad terms.
The Zanu-PF government, now in a desperate situation, realises this and is happy to feed the pretence that it should be treated as an equal by a country 20 times its size because that suits the South African government’s view of itself as a respectful and dutiful neighbour.
The losers are, as always, ordinary South Africans who stupidly and naively think their government is there to protect them against foreign bullies.
Turns out, not so much.
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