Ramaphosa’s Stimulus Package

After the excitement of the great announcement by President Ramaphosa that he would introduce a stimulus package to restart the ailing South African economy, after it had finally fallen into a full-blown recession, a minor hiccup, apparently, in the mind of Ramaphosa, who persists in describing it as a technical recession. It appears that a ‘technical recession’ is a slight inconvenience as the country’s economy goes from one achievement to another, under the benevolent and expert management of the ANC.

Unfortunately, the more extensive explanation given by Ramaphosa to a very careful SABC interviewer of the exact extent and measures of the stimulus package was, to say the least, underwhelming. Observers have come to expect that of Ramaphosa, who is always light on facts and heavy on words, oily words spoken in an unctuous tone, to confuse those who don’t bother to note down the essence of what he says, and then verify the assumptions underlying them. Here is the content noted by this reporter after a half hour of listening to this man.

1. The biggest problem we have in the education system is the continued lack of toilets.
2. There are 57 non-performing municipalities.

That’s it. There was nothing more said that was worth writing down.

However, there was a lot more that came out of this tedious interview, reminiscent of so many SABC interviews of Cabinet Ministers and Presidents in the dark days of Apartheid.

The clearest message that came out of the interview was that Ramaphosa does not run the country, regardless of the Oath of Office he made on his accession to the office. The President declared that he is the President of the ANC, and that he does what the ANC tells him to do. He ignores the fact that he is the President of ALL the Blacks, ALL the Indians, ALL the Coloureds, and ALL the Whites, not just the mouthpiece of the select bunch of undemocratically elected ANC office bearers who rigged their route to this level of power, a group that, at best, represents less than one-fifth of all the voters. Ramaphosa’s commitment to that description of his job is no less treasonous that Zuma’s handing over of the powers, duties and obligations of his Office to the Gupta cabal.

Of course, Ramaphosa repeated the assertions made repeatedly by his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, that ‘we have made mistakes, but we now have a plan to correct them’. He seems to believe that the ‘mistakes’, many of them criminal acts or grossly negligent decisions, made by any ANC government are those of another entity, not of the current group of capos who hold themselves out to be as pure as the driven snow. Of course, the ANC has plans. It has always had a plethora of plans. It probably has a complete floor of Luthuli House dedicated to the storage of plans to be hauled out whenever a disaster looms, shown to the world as yet another example of ANC governmental brilliance, and then stashed away before anyone bothers to read them. It would be more than helpful, albeit incredible, if Ramaphosa were to state a problem in Government, dissect it carefully and then define the real causes of the problem, state solutions to the real problem, and then actually implement those solutions, with an audit afterwards to determine the correctness and effectiveness of the solution in resolving the real problem. Instead, new policies are rolled out, each one imposing new and, often, intolerable burdens on the long-suffering citizens. None of these policies is supported by scientific research, and all of them are the results of a Trump-like need for an expedient action to divert attention from this week’s other pressing problems.

Ramaphosa seemed to believe that his ‘infrastructure projects’ are immediately ready to go, and that they will bring about an immediate relief to the suffering of the 50% real-unemployed. Quite apart from the real-life fact that any economic turnaround takes from one to three years to start taking effect, Ramaphosa’s assertion that the projects will be supervised by central government and implemented on the ground by local government officials (remember that he also admitted that the ANC Government at all levels has a large preponderance of underqualified or mis-qualified people, including managers who have no management experience, CFOs who have no financial experience?) gives any experienced Government-watcher great cause for misgiving. Those are exactly the people who brought the country to its economic knees in the first place! Also ignored by him is the likely result of the intention to reallocate funds from other activities, so that there will be no effect on the fiscus! Does Ramaphosa not understand that a reallocation of expenditure does nothing to change the economic effect of the total of such expenditure, unless, of course, that reallocation is away from projects in which a significant proportion of the expenditure was intended to land up in Dubai, or in the ANC’s Swiss bank account? That seems to be unlikely in the face of the ANC’s need for funds in the run up to next year’s election, coupled with the retention in the Cabinet of proven fraudsters and strongly-suspected corrupt persons. Short story? There will be zero economic stimulus from those ‘planned’ projects in the short term, even if they do actually exist, in which case we would have expected Ramaphosa to put some meat on the bones of his grand announcement. Oh, we forgot! The building of school toilets might have some little effect on the economy as experienced by the overpriced builders (such as those who built Nkandla at 700% of real cost), but it will make no reportable difference to the GDP numbers.

Ramaphosa attempted to shift most of the blame for South Africa’s economic distress onto the shoulders of Donald Trump and his trade wars, and onto the oil price. A perceptive observer might point out that Japan and Germany, both devastated by the Second World War, became economic powerhouses in a shorter time than the ANC has been working at mismanaging the South African economy, bringing a once-powerful economy to its knees while its favoured few gained huge wealth and the less-favoured many descended into poverty, while driving away local and foreign skills and funds that could have made much more than the difference Ramaphosa now claims to be aiming for. They did that by pursuing realistic economic and political policies, and by promoting an excellent education for their children, all of which are foreign concepts to Ramaphosa and his ANC puppet-masters. Building school toilets, something that could easily have been done within the budget spent on Nkandla and within the time it took to build that monument to corruption, greed and Party stupidity, was never part of the plan for the Japanese and Germans. That was just one of the elements of those plans that were taken for granted.

The grand plan to encourage tourism by amending the lunatic visa policy that has kept tourists, investors and skilled workers from our shores, does seem to contain a grain of common sense. It should. That amendment has been recommended by the tourism industry since it was first mooted by Gigaba, the man who will now be in charge of correcting it, the man who has been demonstrated to have been in the pockets of the arch-manipulators of the South African Government, the Guptas, who have now been revealed to have manipulated the facts to gain illicit visas for their stooges. Does that mean that Gigaba has now decided to change sides, to come clean and declare to the South African public that he was only carrying out the orders of his master, Jacob Zuma, who, in turn, was only following the orders of the puppet-master ANC? One can hope.

No, Mr. Ramaphosa, your slimy words will not convince any thinking person, and certainly not the ANC-deprived Whites who, according to your Party, own and manage the greatest part of the economy in the face of everything you and your Party have said and done to drive them away, that you are now carrying out the new orders of a reformed puppet-master. No-one will believe you now, as they should not have believed you back in February, when you made promises of massive changes and improvements. No-one will conveniently forget the eight months of disillusionment since then, as they waited for senior officials and Cabinet Ministers who were party to the ANC malfeasance and who largely still hold the positions that enable them to corrupt their way to wealth, to promise their way to ANC re-election and to misdirect the activities of the Government towards the Zimbabwe-style future that the smart money sees as the future for South Africa.

Mr. Ramaphosa, if you wish to gain even the smallest degree of credibility, for you and for the ANC, now is the time to put hard facts on the table, to invite the best and brightest in the country to assist in solving the desperate problems you and your ilk have created, and then to follow that advice. There still remains a small element of goodwill in the country, in people who love the country above all else, and who will be willing to put in the time and effort to bring it back to what it should have been. If you don’t do that, the probability is that the IMF will. The choice is yours.