I spent way too much of my break scrolling on my phone, initially to keep up with what the maniac Trump is doing to the world, but was increasingly swamped and shaken by the division and race-baiting between South Africans that seemed to explode as the holiday ground on.
If it wasn’t Venezuela and folk calling for South Africa to rapidly rearm and restart its nuclear weapons programme in case Trump invaded here next, it was “How come black people own just 0.0003% or whatever of the JSE after 30 years while whites still own everything?"
You look up what numbers there might be, but even allowing that the biggest “bloc” of share ownership on the JSE has been foreign funds investing the pensions of Japanese teachers and Italian nurses, the next moment you’re down a new hole where the JSE is through the roof in 2025, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not the “real” economy.
It’s been an education, and, clearly, racial nationalism, white or black, is no way to solve problems here. Whites tried, and it failed, and now black nationalists are failing too. The old white apartheid economy flourished, to a great extent, on cheap black labour, which obviously no longer exists.
That doesn’t stop black nationalists now repeating the same conceits, but nationalism is a brain fog after all, and you have to wonder why no innovative politician has even tried to mark a path through the mire that people might think worth joining.
South Africa’s problems need to be solved by South Africans working together. That may sound trite, but the depth of ANC economic and social policy failure by now is so profound it has become complex all over again.
Eskom is our suicide pill. The recovery from load-shedding is admirable, but the ANC has never appreciated how joined up we all are to the price of electricity, and it has looked away as tariffs have risen to truly nauseating levels.
I see it best in industrial policy, which the ANC, from President Cyril Ramaphosa down, is determined to use to somehow build a sunlit upland-type vision of a new country.
So, for instance, as the last two furnaces still smelting ferrochrome here faced imminent closure in December (30 years ago we had more than 50 furnaces, and we were the biggest source of ferrochrome in the world — now we mostly dig up the ore and ship it to the Chinese, who smelt it), an innovative solution is found that will allow Eskom to cut its prices to the smelters by more than half.
To do that though, the government has to gazette regulations suspending key aspects of the Competition Act, ignoring the delicious irony that the Competition Act is designed to promote transformation and “inclusive growth”.
But if it must be suspended in times of crisis, then what good is it in the first place? Eskom itself was able to recover its generating capacity under its new management only because it was exempted from localisation regulations on procurement.
Eskom is our suicide pill. The recovery from load-shedding is admirable, but the ANC has never appreciated how joined up we all are to the price of electricity, and it has looked away as tariffs have risen to truly nauseating levels.
Affordable electricity
Where industrial users were paying nominal tariffs of about 20c/kWh in 2008, they pay more than 170c/kWh now. In the same time, Eskom’s staff grew nearly 20% while demand fell.
It is almost impossible to industrialise an economy without affordable electricity, and Eskom’s price increases in the years that followed Jacob Zuma’s ascent to power make competitive manufacturing or processing here almost inconceivable. And there’s not much to be done because Eskom somehow now has to repay the R230bn the government lent it.
There’s no cheap labour or black or white solution to this, and even if there was a sudden resurgence in manufacturing, you have to wonder whether Eskom could generate enough electricity to power it.
After two years of incredible effort, it managed to end last year with an average availability of its fleet of just over 64%. That’s good, but not great.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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