Having come in for some stiff criticism for her sweeping denunciation of business after a cabinet meeting earlier this month, minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni has predictably doubled down. She won’t retract a word. ’
It’s the ANC way. When you’re flying off a cliff, throw the road a finger. When you’re still at stage 6 a year after André de Ruyter resigns, find something to charge him with. When you’ve made no economic progress in five years, blame Jacob Zuma.
Writing on BusinessLIVE, and in interviews, Ntshavheni has insisted that the decade-old currency manipulation case that got that world’s attention for a brief moment has been responsible for the spectacular decline in the value of the rand. She even told a TV interviewer that the decline in the rand in December 2015 was because of currency manipulation — ignoring that it was triggered by Zuma firing Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister and replacing him with Des van Rooyen.
Goodness me... how embarrassing for President Cyril Ramaphosa to have her as the spokesperson for government after cabinet meetings. She is dreadful, even if she is merely trying to score points ahead of next year’s elections. Rogue currency traders were found 10 years ago to have manipulated trading for their own benefit. Yet after a cabinet meeting 10 days ago the minister chose to gift us this: “We have maintained over the period that the performance of the rand and sometimes the performance of the economy has been manipulated by the private sector, which has no interest in the development of this country‚ which continues to engineer and do machination to make sure the government collapses.”
Over what period then? But perhaps rather don’t bother asking. It was childish rubbish when she said it, and it looks even worse now that, instead of defending what she actually said, she has been making a completely different argument about how big the forex market is. Stuff we know already. If the regulator here can finger a few local miscreants that would be great, but they’ve been at it for eight years now and haven’t made much progress. How hard can it be?
Ntshavheni is just another cog in the wheel business here has to grind against to make money, pay taxes and create jobs. Most of Ramaphosa’s cabinet is. I was not in the least surprised to hear that our biggest steel producer, Arcelor Mittal (once Iscor), is shutting down its long products (the steel bars and beams you put in or under concrete) division, citing problems with Transnet and warning that 3,500 jobs will go.
Don’t believe it. The company has been at the centre of trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel’s Steel Masterplan and his fancy that “localisation” is the way to re-industrialise. He raised import barriers to protect the company and steel prices rose in the country as a result. As with most of Patel’s efforts at industrialisation, steel has been a disaster. He has just had to extend a total ban on scrap metal exports because his first ban didn’t work. Double down folks, double down. It’s the ANC way.
Patel and other ministers like Ntshaveni are a perpetual cost to the economy. You cannot know how much investment they drive away because investment not arriving doesn’t make a noise. Years ago the extra cost of doing business in Brazil, as opposed to other jurisdictions, was so high it had a name, the Custo Brasil . That cost had (at least until the recent re-election of the saintly Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) been beaten down by reforms.
We’re reforming here too, but way too slowly and in a way that sets the racial transformation of the economy against the imperative to grow it. You can only really have one of them as a priority, and the ANC and Ramaphosa are too scared to choose.
But choose they must, eventually. With unemployment growing as much as it has, after 30 years how can you possibly tell if black economic empowerment (BEE) has created one single new sustainable job? It may have created your job, but at what cost to lesser beings?
It’s the same with the “inclusive growth” so beloved of government. In the normal sense of the phrase, inclusive growth implies that both the poor and the middle classes benefit measurably from growth. In ANC Land, the poor are simply excluded. The “inclusion” here is racial and middle class.
Which is why it doesn’t work for the economy. We chase political targets instead of economic ones. There’s a magic mix of affirmative action (not BEE) and merit to follow. The Springbok rugby team got it right. Cricket gets it chronically wrong. The coming Khaya Majola Under-19 provincial schools competition requires seven members of a team to be black, with three African, and that at least two of the three top six in the batting order be African.
I totally get the need to promote black talent, but I’m just not going to watch a game that so crudely discriminates against potentially meritorious players because they are the wrong colour. We were supposed to be better than that. Surely we’re smart enough to include all the talent we have? And I hear too that a talented under-19 kid who happens to be Jewish has been called to a hearing for saying in answer to a question, soon after the Hamas attack on Israel in October, that he supported the young Israeli soldiers being sent into battle in Gaza. Why can’t he say that? Is this a free country or not?
No-one will care. It’s election time now, and there’s a panic at the helm. The polls are not good, and there are torpedoes in the water. Ramaphosa wants us to be more like the Chinese and not to bad-mouth the country. But Mr President, we’re not bad-mouthing the country. We love the country. We’re just bad-mouthing you.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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