LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Technical compliance insufficient in age of narrative-driven politics

Kabelo Khumalo’s reporting on the Reserve Bank’s probe into Kastelo and DA MP Mark Burke highlights a glaring vulnerability in contemporary political strategy (“Kastelo case puts South Africa’s forex rules to the test”, August 22).

While public debate centres on the technical nuances of exchange controls versus crypto-arbitrage, the real story lies in a catastrophic failure of risk foresight.

Today the political arena functions like Chess960 (Fischer Random Chess) — the board setup is randomised from move one, established lines of defence vanish instantly, and players must navigate fluid board positions without a script and in real time.

Politics no longer moves according to classical opening theory, where leaders can rely on rigid, memorised playbooks to navigate early skirmishes.

Burke and the DA leadership evaluated their position through a purely legalistic lens: relying on Financial Sector Conduct Authority mandates, explicit client consents and tax-compliant structures. But in the fluid, brutal logic of modern political communications, technical compliance is secondary to narrative exposure.

Anyone assessing the board through a Chess960 mindset would have foreseen that a high-profile parliamentary finance watchdog cannot simultaneously hold a stake in a firm engaged in high-stakes litigation against the central bank without inviting a devastating flank attack.

The Reserve Bank affidavit did not need to prove statutory contraventions or regulatory noncompliance; it merely needed to exist to be weaponised.

The DA’s swift pivot — issuing defensive explanations on Tuesday only to withdraw Burke from the shadow finance portfolio by Wednesday — is classic crisis management. But modern strategic communications has outgrown reactive fire-fighting.

Today’s top strategists are no longer valued for managing the fallout of predictable blunders but for mastering crisis prevention — for securing what does not happen; value is measured not for putting out fires but for ensuring the match is never struck in the first place.

Until political parties and executive suites adopt this forward-looking posture they will continue to be checkmated by scenarios, real and false, that were entirely avoidable.

Ike Boss

The Boss Group

A 3% growth rate may exceed what government policy permits

President Cyril Ramaphosa says “growth of 3% cannot be the summit of our ambition” (“Can SA break 3% growth? Business and government raise the stakes”, August 24).

Given that World Bank data puts average growth rates for middle-income countries at 4% and above, one would hope so. We have argued that the objective has to be about 7%.

And while the president’s overall vision may be commendable, his policy intentions will make it unachievable. He told the Government-Business Partnership summit last week that “the composition of growth matters as much as its rate”, explaining that it needs to be labour intensive, stimulate industrial capacity and produce winners among the various groups or sectors that government decree seeks to empower.

The growth-with-adjectives proposition has made no small contribution to ensuring South Africa’s growth story has fallen behind its peers. Restrictive labour legislation ― most recently the national minimum wage ― has made labour-intensive activity a nonstarter. A failure to keep the infrastructural basics intact, crime, and inept industrial policy have overwhelmed productive enterprises. Empowerment policy has imposed steep effective taxes on doing business.

The fact of ruinous fines possibly being levied on firms for not meeting ministerially determined demographic quotas tells a revealing story about policy priorities. Growth is at best an afterthought.

A 3% growth rate may not be the limit of South Africa’s ambition, but it may well be the limit to what government policy allows. And even that may prove overly optimistic.

Terence Corrigan

Institute of Race Relations

Cape Town’s property boom still shadows apartheid-era legacies

Brian Kantor’s celebration of Cape Town’s property-driven growth story makes a compelling economic case but ignores important recent history (“SA has a growth story to emulate: Cape Town”, August 20).

Property in Cape Town cannot be understood without engaging with the legacy of the Group Areas Act, which rendered the coastal enclave of Clifton an exclusively white group area in 1957, with prime areas across Cape Town including the Atlantic Seaboard, Constantia, Newlands, Claremont and more.

This contributed to the accumulation of intergenerational assets and wealth in white families, which remains evident today.

The Group Areas Act, which deprived black people of their property rights, while facilitated by a national act of parliament, was implemented with speed and enthusiasm by the local authorities that are now part of the City of Cape Town municipality. The unfinished business of redressing this legacy of apartheid in “liberal” Cape Town is far from being addressed.

Kantor’s proposals for how Cape Town and other South African cities can benefit by growing their stock of taxable real estate cannot be divorced from the moral obligation we have to ensure that areas once reserved for whites do not remain enclaves of privilege while African and coloured suburbs and townships continue to be underserved.

Katharine McKenzie

Cape Town

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