SA is going to get worse before it gets worse. Those parts that still work do so because they are habits or routines, things we do every day. We drive to work. Tankers fill our petrol stations. Lights come on, sometimes.
We send our kids to school, where the lucky ones are received by caring teachers and the unlucky by indifferent teachers who arrive late and leave early. If you’re poor and sick or old here, nothing can help you.
The SA of President Cyril Ramaphosa is a catastrophe. He and his government are to blame. “Traitors,” a former ANC spy and friend calls them. The SA Post Office is about to be liquidated. SAA, due to have been sold off years ago, still flies at a loss. At Transnet, whole locomotives are stolen by criminal syndicates. Ramaphosa has just discovered our transport logistics are a crisis of catastrophic proportions. He will appoint a crisis committee.
In Johannesburg, our biggest city, Ramaphosa’s party, the ANC, installed as mayor a man-child of such vast foolishness it defies description in any English I know. In Durban the ANC is presiding over the slow but inevitable destruction of the entire metropolitan economy.
Turns out Ramaphosa has no idea how to fix any of this. He lives in a dream world. “In a time of crisis, we need a single point of command and a single line of march,” he said pretentiously in Cape Town in February. “The crisis has progressively evolved to affect every part of society. We are, therefore, declaring a national state of disaster to respond to the electricity crisis and its effects.” Two months later, under legal challenge, it all turned out not to be a disaster at all and the state of disaster was terminated.
But Ramaphosa wasn’t done. “To deal more effectively and urgently with the challenges that confront us,” he continued, “I will appoint a minister of electricity in the presidency to assume full responsibility for overseeing all aspects of the electricity crisis response, including the work of the National Energy Crisis Committee.”
That minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, toured a few Eskom power plants, chatted to their engineers and returned with a new plan. Excited? Energy minister Gwede Mantashe also has a plan; public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has one too, and now there’s a third plan.
Ramokgopa’s plan is to fix Eskom’s coal-fired power stations, tie more coal mines to the plants, and get the state to pay for it all. The fact that his plan flies in the face of everything previously planned by the government is just typical. Where Ramaphosa rules the left hand doesn’t know what the other left hand is doing. Ask the Guptas.
Jabulani Sikhakhane, a great journalist and a former senior staffer at both the Treasury and the Reserve Bank, put it wonderfully here yesterday: “The worst a country in deep fiscal and economic crisis can do is not get its story right… After long delays finance minister Enoch Godongwana tabled a R254bn debt rescue plan for Eskom in February. Hardly two months later Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has put out another proposal that seems to go in a different direction.
“Ramokgopa’s statements to the media last week make nonsense of the country’s budget process, which requires that government departments prepare their budget proposals for evaluation through structures that have been created by cabinet… Ramokgopa’s statements already call into question the key numbers outlined in that (2023/2024) budget. That’s not how you run a country...”
Ramokgopa’s clearly a cowboy and if he is seriously going to oversee the work of the National Energy Crisis Committee, which already has a reasonable plan in hand, he will probably destroy it.
But not only has Ramaphosa lost control of the economy — all his planning and investment drives aside, the IMF has just forecast our growth at 0.1% this year — he has overplayed his hand internationally as well.
His decision to support the Russians despite their invasion of Ukraine is devoid of any dignity, for without Russian funding the ANC would collapse. Now our emissaries rush to the US because Vladimir Putin is due soon, and the Act under which most of our exports (including cars) get into the US duty-free, is up for renewal in 2025 and Republicans in Congress may remove our privileges because of our moral delinquency.
As she prepares to welcome Putin to a Brics summit in Durban, Ramaphosa’s hypocrisy-drenched foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, never misses an opportunity to remind critics how badly the Israelis treat Palestinians. We pulled our ambassador out of Tel Aviv in protest, but our man in Moscow stays, no matter how many Ukrainians die.
None of this happens in Ramaphosa’s dream state though. There he is in the vanguard of a new world order. The dollar is just another currency and China the dominant superpower. He will ignore news that a giant Chinese car plant at Gqeberha, launched by himself and Xi Jinping in 2016, promising thousands of jobs, has still not produced a vehicle.
Reality sucks, but if you add one unit each of the currencies of China, SA, Russia, Brazil and India, they would together be worth 43 US cents.
US diplomats here will be able to tell legislators taking calls in Washington from visiting South Africans that the ANC and the Ramaphosa government are a clear danger to their own country. Ramaphosa reappointed a police minister to his cabinet despite the fact that more people were murdered on Bheki Cele’s watch in SA in 2020/21 than in all the political violence between 1985 and 1995.
“SA is spiralling downwards,” activist and editor Mark Heywood wrote this week. “Today, everyone feels a little afraid.” He’s right. They do. I am.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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