A trend in American television that has been long observed — that there is a great deal of overproduced fluff — seems to be especially prevalent on the streaming services. We’ve got a few of these services at home and while there’s enough good stuff to be found to justify the subscription, there’s a fair amount of junk too.
Unbelievable dialogue, eye-rollingly unreal characters and tiresome projections of smug Californian virtue wear a viewer down. But the studios are good at their job, and much of the nonsense looks really good on the surface.
On Thursday we won’t need a Netflix subscription to see an overproduced show with little substance. The opening of parliament long hence deviated from being a celebration of our democracy into a perverse and nauseating expression of power.
They shut down Cape Town for no good reason, disrupting schools and businesses. Then, after a fashion parade and when everyone has taken their seats, the president stands up to make a speech about the state of the nation.
Be under no illusion, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech will be a party-political broadcast with the imminent election front of mind. He may even use the speech to announce the date.
It is relevant that in 2023 American academics studied more than 30,000 people and established a clear link between cognitive function and stress. Stressed people are not more stupid than unstressed people, but their state of anxiety makes it harder for them to access their full intelligence.
That is an interesting observation for South Africans generally, but I think the ANC is under huge pressure. The bad news keeps rolling in. Eskom is collapsing into its long-foretold death spiral — the lights are on because demand is down — the ports and railways are strangling exporters and heaping pressure on prices, the economy is flatlining, the fiscus is in a vice of our own creation and the metros where the ANC governs or co-governs are filth-strewn, potholed and broke.
Ramaphosa’s first state of the nation address (Sona) was five years ago. His record speaks for itself, and as a result he will not want to focus on it. There is too much pressure, too much stress in the ANC for anything new, creative or helpful. His speech will be long on received difficulties regarding a post-Covid world, about the shakiness of the global economy and the challenges of international supply chains and geopolitical ructions.
He will carefully frame the issues of Eskom and Transnet as having been inherited from some out-of-focus, nebulous and historical fever dream during which he will expect us to forget he was deputy president.
And then there will be the distractions. The country’s case at the International Court of Justice will feature, and there will be much cheering from the ANC benches. He will frame our actions there as SA leading the fight for global justice. He will probably mention the rugby and Bafana Bafana.
He will talk about the Energy Action Plan and the logistics road maps. He will say that collaboration with the private sector is going well. He will talk about anything and everything except the reality that exists beyond the wall of armour that surrounds the Cape Town city hall. Aside from an election date, it’s hard to imagine what the president can say that might create hope.
The far more important and consequential speech will follow two weeks later, when finance minister Enoch Godongwana presents his national budget. Unlike his boss, who can do nothing to undo the attrition of the past five years, Godongwana’s challenge evolves almost daily as the country’s finances come under snowballing pressure.
News at the end of last week that the JSE had warned the Tshwane and Ekurhuleni metros that they had a month to file their financials or the bourse would suspend their debt-raising instruments from the bond market is one of several flashing red lights on the minister’s dashboard.
Free-falling governance in Ekurhuleni especially, where an ANC/EFF coalition took power from the DA in 2021, has not yet reflected in the audits, but last week the office of the auditor-general had to defend itself from attacks from Ekurhuleni finance MMC Nkululeko Dunga of the EFF, who blamed the auditor-general for the late submission.
The truth will out in due course — and it will be ugly — but as local metros increasingly rely on the Development Bank of Southern Africa (overseen by the National Treasury) to fund their debt, the capacity of the institution — which also leans on international capital markets — to do so almost single-handedly will come under scrutiny. With R7.1bn of municipal debt maturing in the coming three years it will probably be OK, but the question is, at what cost?
These stories of declining governance standards in the country will not only affect the cost of municipal debt. Godongwana will have to take into account the rand cost of the country’s geopolitical positioning, specifically that we keep spitting in the faces of those who fund our debt and give us preferential access to markets and concessional finance for our energy shambles.
He will need to consider our potential exposure to the loss of US African Growth & Opportunity Act largesse, to sanctions as we continue to make friends with the likes of Gazprom and to our vulnerability to the anger of those who used to root for us.
None of these things is a disaster in itself, but the minister also has to layer in other details such as the decline of exports in motor and mining and the crash diet our trade surplus took in December. To present a credible budget, the minister will have to tiptoe carefully about the president’s messages of success and progress this week and tell us the truth about the prospects for improvements in energy and logistics that are plannable and measurable.
What the minister cannot know is what other shocks lie on the horizon, how a less certain election will affect markets and how our almost unique capacity to punch ourselves repeatedly in the face on the global stage will affect the cost of debt.
To keep everyone happy, unlike last February he’s going to need to carve out some real, discernible space for things to go wrong, and it matters not a dime what Ramaphosa says on Thursday.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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