How Easy ir is to Spend Taxpayers' Money

 

How easy it is to spend taxpayers' money! Suspend a 'worker' for 2 to 10 years on full pay, and then give them a golden handshake. Of course, governments, and particularly Ministers and Presidents, know that the supply of funds from taxpayers is inexhaustible. Until it stops! And even then, they continue to dream, funding their insanities with borrowed money - essentially spending the tax in advance - until reality hits, and then they blame everyone, establish commissions to find excuses for what went wrong, and explain to the voters that they have to wait for the reports, three to five years down the road, before they can fix the problem they created, in the full knowledge that they will create new problems to distract the voters when that time comes. And still they continue to dream!
Ramaphosa bewails the fact that South Africa has not overcome racism, 26 years after the ANC instituted its program of neo-racism, and demands that the Whites accept that BEE, Expropriation without Compensation and downgrading of government's capabilities by cadre deployment, be seen as both necessary and good. The real reasons for the woeful economic performance of the economy under Ramaphosa are BEE, which ensures that any White with skills and ambition goes elsewhere, to a country which values contribution without regard to skin color, Expropriation without Compensation, which ensures that no investor will put his or her money into a gamble, hoping that the government will not see the temptation to enrich its members or buy votes with it, and cadre deployment, which ensures that the civil service is both bloated and overpaid, without delivering any value to the people they 'serve'. Add to that, the fact that the President is a dedicated racist (remember that he propounded the theory at the time of negotiating the Constitution that the best way to get rid of the Whites is to subject them to increasing pressure, to heat the water until the frog jumps out?), as well as an incompetent manager, who learned the words but did not understand the theories and practice behind them, while he 'served' as Director of large corporations, who bought him as a reliable link to the ANC to get things done when and how they needed (remember Marikana?) It is glaringly obvious that Ramaphosa is neither an effective leader, never making decisions until he sees which way the NEC will jump, nor an effective manager, allowing his Ministers to run around like headless chickens while he boasts of 'performance agreements', which have no quantified targets, no rationale (remember the insane regulations about buying open-toe shoes, tee-shirts, discouraging the development of e-commerce, which has been an economy-saver in other countries but in South Africa is considered to be unfair to other retailers, and banning the sale of cigarettes because the 'infection is spread by sharing cigarettes', totally ignoring the other pandemics of AIDS - strongly promoted by the ANC under Mbeki, TB and half a dozen others).

Ramaphosa, and whoever replaces him when NDZ and Ace win the fight, should understand that the conflict in South Africa is the direct result of joblessness - easily over 50% and getting worse - and low investment. Poor people look for scapegoats, and the ANC is very good at pointing the finger at the Whites, who founded, funded and operate the vast majority of businesses that provide the few economically-active, i.e. non-government, jobs (because that is what you do when you gain experience by working your way up in the organization, and what you can’t fo when you have ‘earned’ your fortune by holding an overpaid job (gained by the color of your skin and having political connections, while hiring consultants to do the work you are paid for, while not gaining the experience and skills that come from working your way up the organization).

The ANC has ensured that this pool of skills leaves for better pastures, citing ideological reasons. Unfortunately, people cannot eat ideology, as the Communist bloc found to its horror. People need jobs, prospects for improvement that they can achieve by effort and training, and hope for the future. Ramaphosa cannot offer these.

 

Ramaphosa's Solution to Corruption

 

If Ramaphosa had a real desire to wipe out corruption, he would have introduced a body at government level to do the work. The Integrity Commission of the ANC, like all the other Commissions used by the ANC over the years, has no teeth, and no intention to produce anything more than a bland recommendation that ‘all is fine. No worries.’ If you doubt that, look at the record of the Seriti Commission, which set the benchmark for Commissions and Committees. What South Africa really needs is a body that a priori assess the honesty, integrity and suitability for the position to be held by the candidate before he or she is given the awesome power held by MPs, Ministers, the President, Directors General of Departments and their deputies, and other such positions. The Financial Services industry is required by law to assess these qualities in their candidates for high office. Why should a person who holds an office managing billions of Rands of public money be of a lower standard? If Parliament sees this form of check as essential for the Director of an investment brokerage, why are they not pressing for the same rules to apply? Why is Ramaphosa holding back on this, instead presenting as his ‘solution’ to the corruption pandemic that has swept the land since 1994 the ‘requiring’ of a toothless lapdog with no responsibility to the citizens or to Parliament to undertake the ‘vetting’ (without publication of the results) of the huge number of Party members who routinely indulge in ripping off the public purse?

It is no secret that the ANC itself, as well as its cadres, have been deeply involved in corrupt activities since the earliest days. Corruption is its very lifeblood, funding election campaigns and Party activities of every sort. To walk away from that sort of cash, and revert to a system in which the rights and needs of the citizens are the first priority of the government, as Mandela professed to believe, would require a fundamental reassessment of priorities and a realignment of the Party. Ramaphosa, a man noted for inaction, except at the urgent behest of co-directors such as those requesting him to seek stronger Police action at Marikana, is not the leader’ we need to correct the disastrous course the Ship of State is on. His passive acceptance of the dictates of Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and Beki Cele during the Covid-19 fiasco that has brought us so much closer to the rocks of disaster, while also putting huge sums in the pockets of the criminals amongst us, is a clear indication that he is ‘holding down a position’ while allowing (unelected) others to dictate policies, without even the rubber-stamping previously obtained from Parliament. Until we see at least five Cabinet Ministers in orange overalls, no intelligent investor will even put South Africa on his list of places to develop industry. That won’t happen, so expect more of the same.

President Ramaphosa and the Covid-19 Crisis

Not all that long ago, Cyril Ramaphosa was viewed as a reasonably competent manager, even if somewhat pedestrian in his decision-making and childish in his aspirations, as evidenced by his Wakanda new city plans, and his aspiration to teach every school pupil to code, where it is known that a high proportion of schoolchildren are not able to read with understanding and most children, not to mention teachers, are at a very low standard in mathematics.

Unfortunately, the continued experience gained by the public of Ramaphosa over the time he has been President have exposed many of his weaknesses. That has come into stark clarity during his mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis. As an experienced businessman, we would have expected Ramaphosa to understand that important decisions need to be made after careful consideration of expert advice. That has not happened. Just as Mbeki did during the early phases of the AIDS crisis, he seems to have locked in the advice of a group, perhaps only a few, ‘experts’, ignoring the views of others, particularly those of the public. This is clear in regard to the ban on cigarettes and liquor, where he has chosen not to permit the public access to the information or the reasoning process on which the decision was made.

The very name of the ‘Command Council’ gives a clue to the mindset: it is dictatorial, the action of a group of people who have no need to submit their deliberations to the scrutiny of an elected Parliament, no matter how feeble and emasculated that body may have become under ANC rule. This is certainly not the way one would expect an enlightened, confident and capable manager to act. The example of Angela Merkel provides an example of how he should have acted.

As an experienced manager and director of large companies, Ramaphosa should have the ability to understand when he can trust what he is being told, and what he should view as a sycophantic giving of information to please him. That is an important quality of any manager, and it is critically important in managing the response of a country to a pandemic, which has the potential to cost the lives of thousands of citizens, all of whom are entitled to rely on the capability of the elected President to make decisions that are well-considered and effective, in the light of facts.

Ramaphosa claimed at the outset of the lockdown that the purpose of it was to give the Health Service the opportunity to prepare for the crisis. That alone is a little naïve, given that the government knew, or should have known, early in January that the pandemic would be life-threatening. It should have started making the preparations at that time. It did not. The result of that failing has been that the hospital services, already at breaking point after 26 years of incompetent and corrupt cadre misrule, is now likely not to be able to handle the rush of patients. That level of incompetence seems to have prevailed until now. Two months ago, Ramaphosa visited the Eastern Cape ‘to check on the state of preparedness of the Province’. During that visit, he expressed his pleased satisfaction that the ‘Province was well-prepared’ for the encroaching crisis. That was patently incorrect, either as a result of his inability to investigate the matter correctly, or simply a political assurance, to avoid any political fallout. In either event, it amounts to criminal negligence on the part of a man whom that the public has a right to trust. The Province is not now prepared for the crisis, and was plainly never prepared. Ramphosa’s well-publicised endorsement of the performance of his Party in the Eastern Cape was wrong and misleading, and it came after 25 years of Press reports regarding the incompetence and corruption in that Province. Surely, that alone would have prompted any reasonable manager to interrogate the situation thoroughly. Ramaphosa failed to do so.

The prime requirement of a manager is that he manages. The antics of the members of the Cabinet, and more recently of the members of the ‘Command Council’, each going his or her own way, prove conclusively that Ramaphosa does not manage: he passes on the decisions made by the ANC NEC (a body that has no standing in the legislative or regulatory framework of the government under any law, but which is certainly the de facto government of the country). Ramaphosa’ s conduct in this regard is clearly in breach of his duties under the Constitution and his Oath of Office. His dereliction of his duties is clearly visible in the actions of Dlamini Zuma, in contradicting his statements on tobacco, and in the excesses of Cele and Mbalula. The fact that he would simply ignore the breaches of the law by the taxi industry in loading to 100% of capacity and crossing Provincial boundaries is clear evidence of that, as is his caving into the demands of the taxi bosses in forking out a subsidy of R!,2 billion, at a time when practically every industry is under existential threat as a result of his bungling of the Covid-19 crisis, without any form of support by the government.

Another vital capability of any manager is the ability to plan. Clearly Ramaphosa does not plan. The ‘Command Council’ has lurched from one self-made crisis to another, making ad hoc decisions and reversing them, and never bringing the public into its confidence. The rationale behind many of the incomprehensible decisions, if, in fact, there is a rationale, is conceived in dark rooms and edicts are issued.

Virtually every aspect of Ramphosa’s performance, or lack of it, since the coronavirus struck, casts doubt on his ability to be the President. The only comparison that is positive is that he has probably been better than Zuma would have been.

Surely South Africa deserves better.

Advice to the President of South Africa

South Africa is in a crisis. It has been in a crisis for two decades, with most of the indicators of a healthy economy falling, with the country losing its status as the most advanced and the largest economy on the continent, with a flight of experienced and effective management heading off to more congenial pastures, with the State Owned Entities heading ever more deeply into financial and operational collapse. The government has ignored this, as well it might. The ANC-led government has been responsible for the mismanagement of the economy since it has been in power, using its position to derive corrupt profits and simple corrupt diversion of funds from the State. It has constantly asserted that it plans to stop corruption, a statement in every State of the Nation Address by the President since 2010, but no action has been taken to put meaning to those fine words. The people, the businesspeople and the international investment community have taken note of the empty promises, and are no longer willing to give any credence to such empty words. They want action, and they want it NOW. The same disbelief applies to all of the multitudinous plans announced by the Presidents – all of them- and the government they represent. And the same demand for action NOW is present in the thinking of those businesspeople and investors when they consider what they can do to pull the country out of its multi-faceted crises, and, indeed, whether they wish to.

A small piece of advice has been offered in a book published early this year – “Multiverse” – which analyses the cause of the many problems discernible in the worked through the medium of quasi-science fiction. The book has been read by many leaders of business and politics around the world, and the advice might well be taken to heart by the President of South Africa.

“It is well known that your country has many plans, but that no-one ever does anything to implement them. Part of the reason for that is that the people who should be responsible for implementing them did not really commit themselves to drawing them up, and so have no real reason to do the hard work of implementing them, and the other part of the reason is that those plans were pie in the sky. They represent a wish list, but no fairy godmother has arrived with a magic wand to make them real. You need to call in the best experts in the country, no matter their political affiliation, to make a realistic evaluation of the state of the country, and then to formulate plans that will bring it to where it should be. There must be no reliance on the past as an excuse not to achieve the future. That past has happened, and you can’t manage it now. You have to accept what is and go on from there. There must equally be no reliance on reasons that you certainly know to be little more than political posturing, and equally no commitment to a set of policies and ideologies that no longer have a place in a real-world country. Nothing can be written in stone, and nothing can be off the table. You need to evaluate each element of your plan and take it to a logical conclusion, using only assumptions that can be shown to be valid now.”

I have told you this because I believe that there should be absolute clarity on our stance. Your government in the past has imposed laws and regulations on your people and the companies on the basis that they have the power to do so, without most people having the ability to avoid becoming subject to such unfair laws. I know that the Ministers have blamed the dire economic situation in the country on numerous factors, such as global warming, the China-American trade war, White Monopoly Capital, and other similar reasons. The real truth is simple. Investors avoid the country because they choose not to donate a half of their shareholding to people nominated by the ruling Party. They would rather go to another country where they can rely on the electrical utility not doubling the cost of energy every three years while they allow the lights to go out, simply because the political appointees are robbing the State-Owned Entities blind while they employ twice as many people as are needed. simply to keep the unions sweet. The businesspeople go to other countries and planets because they can, and because they have not received a fair deal here. If you want to create the millions of jobs that you need, you must offer the investors the sort of deal that they will get elsewhere, from any honest government. You, as voters, must insist that the people you elect, comply with the norms and standards that you would want for yourselves. You must punish the Members of Parliament who fail to hold the Executive to account, when it is clear to any thinking, fair person that what they are doing is not right. You must make them believe that they represent you [the voters] in every decision that they make. You have suffered long enough at the hands of evil, greedy men and women. You will have one opportunity, at the next election, to set the path for your country. If you make the right decisions, you will enjoy the full support of the Integra Corporation and many other similar companies throughout seventeen universes. Your country will boom as it never has before. If you make the wrong decisions. you will condemn South Africa to the group of failed States, the countries that are willing to accept the excuses that their politicians offer them, rather than demanding that they perform their duties to the high standard required by their salaries.”

In a discussion of the reasons for the state of the nation, an analysis of the President was made:

“We don’t think that he [the President] is an inherently bad man but sometimes the job is more than he can cope with. His response to such a situation is first to spend a lot of time hesitating and then, when we push him for action, to turn to the people he knows, the people in his Party, who are more than willing to give him the advice that best suits their desires, or simply to defer the matter, to delay making a decision or to pass the responsibility for it to a group of so-called ‘experts’, who are, more often than not, people who have sold him on their supposed capabilities and who are, almost by definition, people he has come to know as a result of their Party connections. Of course, they earn big fees for doing the work, and their interests are best served by inflating the problem far more than is really required. They produce a report at the end of weeks or months, with seven hundred pages of waffle and recommendations that are in line with Party thinking, when what he really needed was a one-page summary of the facts, and another page setting out three or four possible ways to go, each with a ‘why’ and a ‘why not’.”

The book contains many items of wisdom and insight, and should be made required reading by every politician and businessperson, possibly every High School student.

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.

Some advice for Ramaphosa

Cyril Ramaphosa, an undeclared contender for the position of President of the ANC and so, ultimately of South Africa (if the ANC can hold onto its voter base in the face of its abjectly poor management of the economy) made the first really strong (almost) statement of his political career last night, declaring to an assembly of presumably dyed-in-the-wool Black ANC supporters that the policy of radical economic transformation is ‘non-negotiable’.

This was not the brightest thing to do at this critical time in the country’s economic history. The new Minister of Finance is in New York, attempting to convince the world’s investors, already very leery of the economic policies of the ANC, which have placed the country on a continued economic slide towards the present junk status, will not change, that it will continue on its path of ‘fiscal conservatism’. The fact that this path, together with several other elements of the ANC policy, are the cause of the current junk status, appears to have escaped his attention, and the inflammatory electioneering speech of Ramaphosa will certainly go a long way to convincing the investing public that the ANC will continue to be blind to the failings of its policies.

Junk did not happen overnight. It was the result of a long series of bad decisions, one building on the other, since the ANC came to power on the back of a voter base which is either economically illiterate or blindly trusting in the qualities and moral integrity of one man. The country has been sliding down this increasingly-steep slippery slope for the last twenty-three years, and a continuation of the political lunacy is guaranteed to bring about a continuation of the economic train smash, until, finally, the Government will be forced to accede to the harsh demands of the IMF when it begs for rescue. There are only two ways to avoid this fate: either a less-corrupt leader will take control of the ANC and change the country’s economic direction, or another Party will do the same. The only question is whether the change will come before the IMF takes control, or after.

What Ramaphosa fails to recognize is that the country simply does not have sufficient well-experienced and qualified Black managers to rescue the country. Of all people, Ramaphosa should know that a skilled manager is not born: he or she is the result of a good educational foundation, with the addition of years of on-the-job training and a wide exposure to the advice of people who have seen it all before. South Africa could have been approaching that stage now, if only the ANC had not decided that a certificate that the bearer has been educated is less important than the content of that education. The educational system has demonstrated convincingly that it is not capable of producing the managers of the future that the country needs, and no number of examples of exceptional Black graduates will change that. There are exceptional Blacks, as there are exceptional Whites, Indians, Coloureds and Chinese, but that is not proof that the system produced them – they are exceptions. The country cannot grow on exceptions. It needs an educational system that consistently produces school and university graduates who are amongst the best in the world. South Africans are capable of that, as is shown by the Model C schools that Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma so disparages, but the general system does not harness that talent. That was proven convincingly this week, when the Law Society warned the University of the Witwatersrand that it will lose approval for its Ll B school unless it tightens its law educational standards. That comes only a few years after the Law Society reported that a significant proportion of new law graduates were incapable of using language efficiently. It is a frightening state of affairs when a formerly prestigious law school, which, over the decades, has consistently represented the pinnacle of university education in South Africa, and the graduates of which have, until the past two decades, been held in high regard by most of the world’s academia as well as big business, has to be warned that its education is sub-standard. Unfortunately, in the international Management Consultancy of which the author is part, a recent degree from a South African university is treated as an indicator of below-par capabilities. Once again, the ANC has shown its belief that tens of thousands of certificate bearers is of greater value to the country than a smaller number of graduates of excellent quality.

The quality of management of the State Owned Entities, such as Eskom, SAA, Sanral, Denel, SASSA and SABC, as well as of most ANC-controlled State Departments is an unmistakable testimony to the extremely poor standard of the Black management available in the country. The South African Police Services seems incapable of producing a Commissioner who is able to hold the top job for more than a year! Apart from the rampant corruption (another manifestation of poor management), it is clear that the policy of pushing an ANC cadre into the top job years before he has the skills, the integrity and the personal qualities to perform adequately is a virtual guarantee of failure, and no amount of Hlaudi-speak will be enough to convince the world that the financial woes of the organization are a figment of the Opposition’s fevered imagination. SABC requires another R3 billion, although the former CEO, now out of the job for only a few months claims it had a cash surplus of R800 million, and SAA requires another R4 billion only a month after the last R5 billion was injected to save it from bankruptcy – who has ever heard of a State-owned airline failing to publish its annual accounts for fifteen months after the statutorily-required date, in order to save it from insolvency! The incompetence and corruption (another manifestation of managerial incompetence) of Eskom has resulted in a massive slide in the industrial and mining output of the country, causing it to miss out on two world booms. The reliable, affordable supply of electricity is universally recognized as a promoter of economic activity, and Eskom has been singularly negative in its role in that regard, while the ANC and its leaders have benefitted enormously from the endemic corruption on the corporation.

The management talent is available in South Africa, amongst the thousands of sidelined White managers who would love to be in a position to help their Black counterparts, and tens of thousands of South Africans abroad would be delighted to return to add their skills and efforts to the drive. Believe it or not, Mr. Ramaphosa, Whites want the country to succeed as much as Blacks do! They all understand that the future of the country lies in the hands of all its citizens, and the amount of goodwill on the ground, amongst all races, is considerably greater than the ANC wants to believe. The average citizen wants the Rainbow Nation of Nelson Mandela to succeed, and he or she will do whatever it takes to make that happen, if only the Government will step aside and allow them to do that.

The real problem of the ANC and its hangers-on is that they believe that the size of the economic pie is fixed, and that the only way that the Blacks can get more is to ensure that the Whites get less. That may be true in the world of the ANC, as is demonstrated by the fact that the economic pie has been shrinking consistently since they have been in power. Numerous non-ANC initiatives to grow it have failed because the ANC policies have ensured that the preconditions for growth – good education, good experienced management, good control of corruption – have been removed, rather than being expanded. An attempt in the 1990s to bring about 350 000 sustainable jobs failed because the Premier of KwaZulu Natal demanded from the German sponsor of the project a bribe of 15% of the cost of the project, promising that payment would ensure the co-operation of the Premier and the MEC for Economic Development! The economic pie is, in fact, not fixed, as is demonstrated by the fact that several economies, around the world as well as around Africa, have been growing at a pace greater than 5% p.a., even in times of world economic slowdown (with the South African GDP growth rate now projected at under 1% in 2017/8, and likely to be less). Even a smaller share of a bigger pie will translate into a better standard of living for tens of millions of South Africans, Black and White, with a brighter future for the Blacks making their way up the educational and experience ladder. Black Empowerment will happen inevitably in a growing economy, but cannot in a declining economy. No amount of entrepreneurial training in school will substitute for the quality education that is required to allow the schoolchildren to become citizens of the world.

Mr. Ramaphosa, as an intelligent politician, it is necessary for you to recognize the facts of the situation. A continuation of the mantra of Radical Economic Transformation cannot achieve anything of value for your Black voter base. A continuation of putting down the Whites who managed the growth of South Africa from a small colony at the end of Africa to a country that was important to the world, in the face of abjectly poor political management over many decades, will only deprive the country of a significant base of skills, knowledge and entrepreneurial capability, to the cost of all.

Mr. Ramaphosa, you are the Deputy President of all South Africans, Black, White, Coloured, Indian, Chinese, not only of the ANC portion of the country. The continuation of the present Zuma-ANC lunacy will serve only to drive away an increasing number of the people who supported the delivery of a democracy in this country on the basis of the moral character of a great man, Nelson Mandela, as well as the capital that is so essential to economic growth.

Now you have the opportunity to stand up, to speak truth to your political boss and to your nation, and prove to them that you have what it takes to be the next President.

The World’s Investors are all Over-Reacting

After the ANC January 8 electioneering and repetitive explanation speech, President Jacob Zuma, went to pains to explain how the thousands of investment bodies that have committed funds to South Africa over the years have over-reacted to his multiple sacking and replacement of the Minister of Finance, leading to them bringing about the crash of South African securities and of the Rand.  He could not understand how his capricious and dictatorial behaviour, still without a credible explanation, could possibly have a bearing on the view by those bodies of the stability of South Africa, explaining multiple times that the Minister of Finance is supported by a trained and experienced staff, implying that the appointment of a total newcomer to the portfolio, a man who has demonstrated his unpopularity by being forced out of office as Mayor of a failing municipality and having his home burnt down by an angry mob, had no bearing on the decisions that will be made by that person in his new office.  His surprise at the world reaction to his actions was a little spoiled by two announcements made during the interim.  The first was the announcement that the Cabinet had approved the proposal to investigate the intention to waste a huge amount – R1.5 billion and rising – on the unaffordable construction of a fleet of nuclear power stations.  This was to be expected from the Zuma-compliant bunch of lackeys in the Cabinet.  After all, they will be the biggest beneficiaries of the finder’s fee that is rumoured to have been negotiated with the Russians, as has, no doubt, been done in numerous other large foreign contracts, starting with the Arms Deal in 1997, which reportedly attracted commissions of about $386 000 000, and will perhaps form the basis of a good end-of-term pay-out for this failed and discredited President (unless, of course, he uses it to support a coup d’état to make the end of term some distant event, as is ever more frequently being rumoured to be Zuma’s intention when his ten years maximum term expires).  This is Africa, after all, and we use African solutions for African problems.

Zuma’s perplexity at the workings of the world financial system was enhanced by Ramaphosa’s explanation to the ill-informed voters that the crash of the Rand is a worldwide phenomenon, that we are all in a market that is subject to a downturn, and our suffering is shared with all other developing markets.  What he failed to mention is that the rest of Africa, with the exception of the leading light for the ANC, Zimbabwe, has grown at a rate a multiple of our own declining GDP growth, that we have repeatedly failed to benefit from opportunities that have been grasped by other developing, and particularly African, economies, and that, in addition to the President’s foot in mouth disease, the ANC Government has developed a remarkable ability to shoot itself in the foot with everything it does. 

The ultimatum to which President Obama was forced, to comply with the US demands by the end of 2015 was missed by the Departments of Agriculture and Trade and Industry, and the triumphant statement by the Minister of Trade and Industry, Rob Davies, that we had clinched a ten-day overdue deal with the United States to allow us to enjoy the benefits of the AGOA Act was promptly negated by a further statement by President Obama (a Black President, in case racists start complaining that the United States is acting in a racist way towards South Africa) notified the world that the facility of AGOA will be available to South Africa only if US goods are actually on South African store shelves by March 15, 2016.  Obama has almost certainly lost patience with the prevarication and delays so frequently displayed by the South African Government!  That is not surprising – many South Africans feel the same way.

Ramaphosa’s explanation that the ANC Government has nothing to do with the crash of the Rand was complemented by a TV interview with Mr Kingsley Makhubele, an executive of Brand SA, that the justice system works in South Africa, which is, supposedly, good news for tourists and investors, who should flock to the country in droves, appreciating the good and honest governance of the country.  He gave as an example the case of Oscar Pistorius, completely overlooking the fact that a Judge of the High Court failed to understand the application of a basic principle of law, that a person who intentionally acts in a particular way should be considered responsible for the foreseeable consequences of that act, and so sentenced him to five years for culpable homicide instead of fifteen years for murder.  That is a principle that first-year Law students were required to know (.e. in the past – one cannot be sure of the situation now, given the abjectly poor standard of education in the universities).  He also failed to mention the case of Annie Diwani, who was shot and killed in Cape Town by a contract murderer for the paltry sum of R10 000 – presently less than $600!).  Her husband, accused of masterminding the crime, was brought to trial in Cape Town after years of legal wrangling in the British Courts about his extradition, at a cost running into millions of dollars (his return was in a chartered aircraft, and he was placed in a mental institution for about two months at State expense before coming to trial), and acquitted when the Court found insufficient evidence to convict him of the charge of murder, notwithstanding that the two men found guilty of the actual deed made statements implicating him!  One would be forgiven for wondering who was paid off to present such an amazingly poor case in the glare of the world interest focussed on the case!  He failed to mention the case of the German tourist who was stabbed on the Durban beachfront some years ago.  His wife appealed to the crowd to call an ambulance, to be told by a Black man “Let the White pig die!”  (Durban is the site of the 2022 Olympics.)  The moral of the story is twofold: first, do not take at face value what any President, Deputy President, Minister, politician or State employee tells you about South Africa; and second, if you plan on coming to South Africa on honeymoon, vacation or investment negotiation, hire several (foreign) bodyguards to ensure your safety.

In conclusion, immediately after Jacob Zuma spouted his pathetic plea for improved understanding of the South African situation, the currency tanked again, dropping to R17.99 to the dollar – when the ANC came to power 21 years ago, it stood at R4.30 to the dollar!

Given these lessons in practical economics, tourists and investors would be well-advised to cross South Africa off their list of destinations, at least until the voters understand that the only recovery possibility for the country lies in sweeping the ANC incompetents and kleptocrats from power.  They will join the ranks of thousands of others who believed that the Rainbow Nation of Nelson Mandela still exists, until they learned the hard way.