What a country. Our national cricket team, just back from another unsuccessful short-form World Cup cricket tournament (lost this time for failing to appreciate the difference run rates make when scoring is close) has a new advertising campaign: “It’s not just cricket: it’s boundaries broken” as three sincere players stare from the poster.
Cricket SA (CSA) says in a note above the tweeted advert that “Our victories are not measured by the scoreboard but by how many we were able to bring along with us”.
This is supposed to be feel-good stuff, but all it does is remind us how poorly CSA has run the game and how far behind they’ve been left by the rugby world champions. Can you imagine any Springbok marketing declaring that results don’t matter?
It’s a reflection of the country’s politics, or at least the president’s. Cyril Ramaphosa declared to a post-election audience earlier this week: “An immediate priority in every municipality where we govern is to ensure that all residents have reliable and affordable electricity, water and sanitation.”
Hahahahaha. It is bit like the promise he made in Soweto at the beginning of the local government election campaign just over a month ago that their complaints about electricity would be attended to that very week. He would be calling Eskom himself to make it so.
Needless to say, nothing happened and nothing improved. And just as the cricketers would have done better with “Look, we’re a young team and we’re trying to get better together”, so Ramaphosa should have told his audience the truth: “We cannot make you any promises.”
Later on Thursday new finance minister Enoch Godongwana will be making some promises of his own when he delivers his delayed medium-term budget policy statement. We will write them down and judge him later. One thing we know about Godongwana is that he is not impressed by cries from the Left for the country to spend its way out of its crisis with money it doesn’t have.
What we have to find out is whether he has a credible plan to solve a remarkably easy arithmetical (not even mathematical) problem. What is required for our rate of economic growth to outstrip the rate at which we pay interest on our R4-trillion (that’s R4,000,000,000,000.00) debt. Because once we have that, we’re growing in real terms again and there’ll be money to spend on being a kinder society.
Back in 2007, Thabo Mbeki and Trevor Manuel gave us a budget surplus. Then Jacob Zuma, surfing the tidal wave the ANC’s union allies created for him, went and spent it all. The union allies have long since left Earth’s orbit and are demanding that Godongwana simply helicopter money wherever it is required.
That’s not going to happen, which, given the seemingly infinite dream state of the presidency, may not be a bad thing. But it doesn’t mean much either. There is simply too much bad policy already in place and Godongwana, if he doesn’t know it already, is about find out that in SA the finance minister doesn’t run economic policy. He or she merely finances policy, however rotten it might be.
And there is a lot of rotten policy about. People don’t learn. In Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe tried to indigenise the economy. It didn’t work. Under apartheid in SA many jobs were reserved for whites, the result now being insufficient skills to keep the country running.
In Botswana the state has decided to keep foreigners (including, I presume, South Africans) out of the following industries: bread and confectionery, ice making, meat processing, peanut butter, purification and bottling of water, traditional sour milk, sorghum, brick, burglar bars, gates and windows, candles, fencing materials excluding gum poles, floor polish, packaging, protective clothing, roof trusses, school furniture, school uniforms, screen printing and embroidery, signage (including electronic), traditional crafts and traditional leather products.
Thus does Botswana follow SA down the perilous route of “localisation” in the hopeless pursuit of “job creation”. Ramaphosa’s African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is getting off to a rocky start down south. Up north, and west, I doubt they care much. But without Africans opening their economies to each other (Gaborone’s move seems aimed primarily at Zimbabweans, but it will complicate any foreign manufacturing investment there) the AfCFTA is stillborn.
And with that, so is localisation here at home. On our own we don’t have an internal market big enough to support much in the way of increasing local manufacturing. We are banking on the AfCFTA becoming our backyard. It all sounds great until other people’s labour and goods start crowding your home market. Africa is dead keen to export to SA, but not so keen on having us eat their markets.
Still, the British are finding out to their cost that you can’t disconnect yourself from the world for free. It is a monumental error of judgment to assume the world is fundamentally changed by Covid, certainly as far as trade is concerned. Wait and see. The inflation-driving supply blockages of today will iron themselves out. The inflation-relieving benefits of open trade will reassert themselves.
And we will most probably still be in dreamland when it happens.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.