The financial press greeted February’s budget with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. I can barely remember the last time anything concerning the Ramaphosa government garnered such approval in these and similar pages. Finally, it was widely said, we have a budget that registers the reality of SA’s condition. A decade late, the government has come to understand that growth has slowed and the fiscus cannot be used indefinitely to keep allies happy. The bubble of illusion in which the ANC has wrapped its core constituencies is finally being popped.
I struggle to share in this enthusiasm. It is true that in the coming time the ANC will increasingly be forced to distribute the pain that attends stagnation, but this is no way to do it. The budget should not be understood in isolation. It means what it does because of what else is going on around it. And the most painful thing happening in the world of governance right now is the government’s shocking and unforgiveable response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
I don’t think SA has absorbed the full extent of the government’s transgression. A basic contract between governors and governed has been broken. When the pandemic came SA’s population did everything expected of it and more. Obediently, it locked down, despite the fact that the relief offered in compensation was inadequate. It put up with a police force that enforced the lockdown with grotesque enthusiasm. It put up with a government that began treating its citizens like children.
SA’s population suffered all of this with grace. It did so for fear of disease, for fear of disorder, and from faith that those in authority would know what to do. That was the people’s side of the bargain. The government’s was to do all within its power to fight the pandemic.
By the third quarter of 2020, it was obvious the world over that the fate of national populations would be shaped overwhelmingly by access to a vaccine. As an upper-middle income country SA was among the lucky few that could afford to buy enough for everybody the moment it became available.
To say that SA’s government owed this to its population is to understate matters in spades. This would have to be one of the most consequential government procurements in post-apartheid history, a matter requiring the personal attention of the head of state. Astonishingly, it would appear that the government failed in this crucial task through sheer incompetence and absent-mindedness.
The government broke its contract with its people in a profound and fundamental way. If this were a country in which accountability was baked into governance, Ramaphosa would have been forced to institute an independent inquiry. It would have been televised before the nation. Ramaphosa himself would have had to testify to why on earth he left an era-defining matter to the deputy director-general of health. He would have had to explain what was occupying his attention instead.
This is the context in which the budget should be understood. The government should be apologising to the poor; it should be offering a gesture of compensation. To cut the value of social grants now, of all moments, is to kick its people in the face. To degrade vital social infrastructure without signalling that it is even aware of the consequences makes one wonder whether there are sentient beings at the wheel.
The budget reflects the same distractedness, the same lethargy, the same lack of conviction that characterised the failed procurement of a vaccine. It contains no strategy for growth, no acknowledgment that the poor are suffering, no sense that anyone in power is imagining the country’s trajectory over the next five or 10 years.
If the government were a person it might be diagnosed with clinical depression. The listlessness, the lack of purpose, the incapacity to be animated by thoughts of tomorrow. It is sleepwalking; it does not know where it is going.
• Steinberg is a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre.
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