PETER BRUCE: The poor and entrepreneurs need a clean government

When I was editor of Business Day, around 2007, I briefly wrote a secret column. I’d become friendly with Branko Brkic, an intense, eccentric young man who had started a monthly print magazine called Maverick.

I think a media reporter, back when such positions existed, had called me to ask what I thought of the magazine. I replied to the effect that it was a solution looking for a problem. This amused Brkic and he suggested I might like to write a monthly column for him. While there were no rules preventing me from writing at the time, we agreed I would use a pseudonym.

Thus was born the brief life of a column called Citizen Kane. Freed from all constraint, I constructed it as the diary of a 40-something white graduate, married with children. His job was to be an aide of sorts to a rich black business figure, recently abundantly empowered and with political ambitions. He was my Michael Spicer to a black Harry Oppenheimer.

I had great fun. My character was irritable. I sent him to muddy weddings in deepest Transkei and glitzy dinner parties in Sandton where he was the only white. I made him lose arguments and eat things he didn’t recognise.

Just before my final column in around May 2008 I had set him on a big adventure. His boss had decided to go into politics and identified as a constituency those employed or unemployed black citizens who might be attracted to the idea and promise of a free-market economy.

When writing fiction, you can make anything happen, and my character and his boss were ready to plunge into politics with a vision to create, in SA, a Thailand or Vietnam. Smart youngsters would be identified early, nurtured and sent to the best universities in the world. A sovereign wealth fund, funded by mining royalties, would invest in the top global growth companies and pay its first dividends 21 years after its establishment. We would sit on the boards of at least one global carmaker and one big digital giant.

Poor people would be encouraged to trade on the streets of big cities instead of being swept into zones where no-one shops. Everyone was entitled to own the piece of land they lived on, whether urban or rural, official or traditional. The duo’s idea was to try to establish SA as an entrepreneurial beacon, a powerhouse of risk, hard work and reward in Africa.

I had based some of my character’s thinking on a fabulous column Leon Louw wrote for Business Day when he ran the Free Market Foundation (FMF), and I confess that I had hoped Herman Mashaba, who chaired the FMF when Louw was writing for me, might come to embody my guy’s guy when he branched out on his own in politics. Sadly, he hasn’t.

This all came back to me on Monday as I watched Julius Malema and the EFF try to coax the country into an economic shutdown. It didn’t work but it partly did. I was interested in the turnout because while Malema and some commentators have argued that this protest could not be judged by the EFF turnout, that is plainly wrong.

The EFF has always, always, relied on numbers to make its point. That it failed this time cannot be easily overlooked. One explanation might be that the audience Julius commanded 10 years ago no longer exists. Yes, the poor are forever with us, but the kids who marched in red in 2014 are parents now, with new pressures and new responsibilities. It may be that as the EFF gets older it is losing its appeal to the new young.

I have no idea, and I look forward to next year’s general election, which will clarify the true state of affairs in our politics. It seems an age since we last chose leaders. It is an age since we last had a real debate about our politics and our economy.

Is there still an audience for enterprise in this country?  Is there appetite in poor communities for trading, for barter, for risk and reward, to run their own affairs? Instead of boasting about the 27-million people the state pays to be on welfare, should we not be asking what rules or laws we would have to change or break to allow the poor into our economy in a tangible and sustainable way over which they themselves have control?

And why is this not even a discussion point in our politics? Do we just look on like idiots as the ranks of the poor grow? The ANC promises a monthly basic income grant so tiny it would not buy a tank of petrol for a small motorbike. The DA is telling folk scraping a living out of the dirt in Limpopo that where they govern ... Mashaba and Gayton McKenzie tell them immigrants are their problem. The EFF offers a mixture of racial and class war.

If you’re poor in SA you’re either ignored or patronised, each worse than the other. But the poor and entrepreneurs have a need for a clean government that bureaucrats, consultants and big business simply don’t. How, I wonder, might these two find each other. We’ll never know until someone tries.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.