It’s close now, the end of lockdown. Cosatu has called for an end to prohibition. A forum of directors-general wants the economy opened. Chambers of commerce too. If you hurry, you might get in your own call for a return to sanity before President Cyril Ramaphosa moves us all to level 1.5, or no level at all, in the next few days or hours.
Then claim credit for it on social media! Or not. The state of disaster Ramaphosa proclaimed back in March comes to an official end on Saturday, and with health minister Zweli Mkhize positively bursting with enthusiasm for how good the Covid-19 numbers are looking, it's a slam-dunk that Ramaphosa — who never moves without that kind of public political encouragement — will dramatically ease restrictions on travel, drinking and smoking and pretty well all forms of business.
We’ll be told to social distance and wear masks in public, but it isn’t clear that you even need an extension of the state of disaster to do that. One wonders what that would do for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, our toxic co-operative governance & traditional affairs minister, who, by dint of the constitutional role of her ministry, is in charge of running a state of disaster.
She’s had such fun at the Coronavirus Ball, waving her wand like a fairy queen to make whatever she doesn’t like simply disappear. Never mind the cost. Our princess has never worried about mere money. But what if there’s no more state of disaster? One moment she’d be dancing with handsome Prince Cyril and the next — poof! — she’d be a pumpkin again, babbling earnestly about the district model as a solution to failing rural municipalities (it isn’t).
It couldn’t happen to a nicer woman, which, knowing our luck, means it probably won’t. But let’s not forget we’re still living in a free country and you’re allowed to insult politicians. It seems almost unfair. People in places like Hungary and Poland have had to endure their lockdowns in silence as their political leaders remove real freedoms, distort their democracies and still get to eat at the €750bn EU Covid rescue restaurant.
We have been as loud, rude and complaining as is humanly possible, yet between them Hungary and Poland will get EU funding of some €350bn (that’s a cool R7-trillion, almost twice our national debt or 100 times more than we have just borrowed from the IMF) over the next seven years to help them recover from the virus, in return for no more than a polite lecture on the rule of law. It pays to belong to the right clubs.
Here we are not so smart. One of the reasons everyone expects the end of this first state of disaster to herald major relaxations of restrictions is that we took an emergency and turned it into a real disaster. Poor leadership and an indifference to (or genuine ignorance of) just how hard it will be for our economy to recover, or even if it will recover, means Ramaphosa and his cabinet, and all the terribly important officials, emerge from their lockdown bunker next week to an economic wasteland.
Officially, the unions will rejoice and organised business will bow and scrape before the ANC, as it did before the Nats back in the day. But the damage has been titanic. Confidence is shot, companies and lives blown apart. Worst, trust has gone. Corruption is the new normal.
Ramaphosa may have a vision for a new economy. He’ll talk endlessly of “inclusive growth” in coming months but neither he nor the unions nor business have even a remotely common vision of what inclusivity is. To most it is just economic growth, the rising tide that lifts all boats.
It isn’t, but good luck with it. And yes, there will be growth but from what depth? Unlike the UK, officially in its worst recession ever, we do not release our second-quarter GDP number until the first week of September, but it will be savage. Economists predict a fall of more than 40%, an annual slide of almost 10%.
How far can we fall? Foreign investors have already pulled R600bn from our markets since Jacob Zuma tried to make Des van Rooyen finance minister in 2015. Once trust is lost ... Meanwhile, the government now spends roughly R50bn more every month than it collects in taxes. The Treasury borrows more than R2bn every day. That IMF loan will be gone by September.
Which really explains why we are about to end this lockdown. Like apartheid and sanctions, corruption and mismanagement have bankrupted us. The money is gone. And left standing as the music stops is a finance minister, Tito Mboweni, fickle and irritable at the best of times, at the end of his tether.
While Ramaphosa has allowed ministers to kneel on the necks of Treasury’s income flows these past few months, it’s been up to just two people — Mboweni and Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago — to hold off the markets and prop up the rand. Except it can’t be done any more. You could only get short odds, I reckon, on Mboweni not resigning next week if Ramaphosa doesn’t lift the alcohol and tobacco bans by Monday.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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