The world economies and the Employment of Labour

The current state of the world’s economies, from great to small, shows a change that appears to have been missed by the economic planners.  It appears that the change is likely to be permanent, and by not understanding the significance of it, the political leaders and, more particularly, the financial leaders of the economies are tending to use tools of economic management that are outdated and increasingly ineffective.

The economic history of the recession that started in 1989 is a clear indicator of what is now happening on a world scale.  The basic cause of that recession tends to be overlooked or, perhaps, misunderstood.  The collapse of Communism in Europe gave West Germany the opportunity to reunite, the fulfilment of an aspiration held as a prime objective of West Germany since the end of the Second World War.  That reunification brought with it an intensive investment effort, to bring the 15 000 000 East German people up to the economic standard of the wealthy West Germany population of 65 000 000.  The Government commenced pumping huge amounts of money into East Germany, taking the funds first from its own Budget, then imposing a tax levy on the West German people.  They responded with characteristic German discipline, and the investment proceeded.  Soon, the Government found that even that huge source of funding was insufficient to remedy the destruction of the once-thriving East German economy that had been wrought by Communist policies.  The German Government turned to the world financial markets, using the strength of the German economy to borrow huge amounts of money.  These funding efforts drained the world economy of free funds, depriving the capital markets of the ability to supply the credit needed by the world to support international trade and investment.  The world economies faltered, and, as in the recent situation of reduced lending by the world’s banks, the general economy went into a nosedive.  In West Germany, the results were dramatic.  Faced with reducing demand and a rising cost of supporting their borrowings, the industrialists cut costs in whatever way was possible, attempting to maintain their legendary quality while reducing prices in order to remain competitive and thereby to hold sales at a survivable level.  Inevitably, the factor of labour was a prime field for the cost-cutting efforts.  Within a matter of months, the number of unemployed started rising, going from about 2 000 000 to over 12 000 000.  Where a factory had previously employed two men per machine, they now automated their production processes, using one man to tend five machines.  Where the work could not be automated sufficiently to cut costs by the desired amount, those manufacturing processes were exported, to China, Vietnam and the other low-labour cost countries.  Although Germany lost hundreds of previously profitable companies, these actions saved the bulk of the German manufacturing base, now in a much stronger state than before the recession, and better able to face the changing world that had emerged from the ruins of Communism and the distortions that the Cold War had brought.  The picture of German industry changed dramatically with a few years, going from having large numbers of highly-skilled workmen, to few workers and many automated machines.

The financial crash of 2008, that followed the excessive lending of the banks in the pursuit of profits for the shareholders, the drive for ever-growing quarterly profit improvements with concomitant share price growth, and incredibly high bonuses for the bankers in control of the policies of their companies, resulted in a recession that bears remarkable similarities to the experience of Germany following 1989.

The (artificial) shortage of loan funds to businesses and consumers has resulted in a dramatic and massive loss of jobs and failure of otherwise capable businesses.  The efforts of the world’s central banks, by means of reducing interest rates, sometimes to 0%, and by increasing the supply of money in the economy, to drive funds to these markets have been largely unsuccessful.  The world’s economies remain stubbornly sluggish, and the number of unemployed remains high.  Where growth in employment has taken place, the numbers have been small, and the economic growth has not been commensurately reflected in a reduction of unemployment.  There is even a suspicion that at least some of the economic growth has, in fact, reduced the numbers employed in those sectors.  Even China, the recipient of many of the labour-intensive industrial activities exported from Germany and other Western countries after 1989, has developed a cost structure that now forces its previously high growth in GDP down towards the minimum level necessary to appease its citizens and hold an anti-Communist revolution at bay.  Yet the major economies of the world appear to be oblivious to the central fact of the modern industrial economy, a fact that is illustrated clearly by the brilliant economic performance of German, the only country, apparently, that has learned the lesson of the past. 

It is simple:  in the modern world economy, high-labour-cost low-labour-productivity economies must expect a declining level of employment or, at best, a stagnant rate of employment.  Economic growth in these countries will take place, when it happens, with only a minimal growth in the number of people employed.

The lesson to be learned is equally simple.  A high level of employment, in the absence of an increasing level of labour productivity, is a target that cannot be achieved without a means of holding the labour bill at the same level.  That means that the total cost of employment, including the wages, the cost of safety and welfare measures, the cost of administration related to employment in its widest sense, the cost of hiring and firing of people in response to changes in market conditions, must, in total, be reduced if the number of people to be employed is to increase.  An automated machine is an expensive investment in terms of capital, but, once it is installed, it does not require more than a minimal cost of maintenance.  It does not require annual wage negotiations with, often, above-inflation demands supported by strikes, it does not require a pension fund or a medical aid contribution, it does not require a lengthy negotiation or large compensation payment if it is put out of service for a month or a year.  It stands in its allocated position and produces on demand to its full capacity, without long tea breaks or annual leave, without strikes in support of other ‘machine unions’ making demands that cannot be met by employers who must earn a sufficient net profit to remain in business.  It is, in short, an ideal employee!

Governments may make statements about the ‘obligation’ of businesses to support Government policies, to provide employment for this class or that, to make investments that will create jobs, to provide in some way for people who have not earned that provision.  These demands may be effective in the short term.  Coercion does work, in the short term.  However, in the long run, the market will determine where businesses are established and where they will continue to operate.  It will determine where jobs are created, and where they are destroyed.  It will determine how much, in total, is paid for a particular job, and whether that job will be done by a human employee or by a machine.  A business is not a factory or a labour force.  It is a human who sees a potential, and who will go to wherever that potential can best be realised, and set up the organisation that will achieve that potential in the way that is most beneficial to the businessman.

The market is able to be manipulated in the short term, but it will prevail in the long term.  It is very large and very powerful.  Britain once spent huge amounts of its reserves to prop up its currency against a speculation that it would fall.  Britain, one of the major economies, failed to win that competition.  The market won. 

In the current world situation, only one industrial economy has consistently continued to maintain strength, facing the same conditions as all the other economies.  Germany learned the lessons of the 1989 recession, and came out of that trial stronger and more efficient.  The industries became hyper-efficient and the workers upskilled to become one of the best-educated and most highly productive workforces in the world.  The other economies of the world must now learn the same lesson.  They must choose to be labour-based or to go the route of technology.  They cannot afford to sit on the fence.  They cannot afford to believe that mediocre education is sufficient.  They cannot afford to be influenced by the Trade Union movements, whose motivations are based on higher wages and lower output by more members.  Those motivations are internally inconsistent.  You can have higher wages for fewer employees, or lower wages for more employees, given a consistent productivity.  You cannot have more expensive benefits paid by the employer without a sacrifice in terms of a lower wage paid to the employee.  In the end, a higher total cost of labour must be at least balanced by an equally higher production by the labour force and, if the labour force is to remain at the same level, the increase in production must exceed the increase that would be brought about by increased employment of machines.  The businessman is coldly rational, driven by the imperative to produce a profit each year sufficient to warrant the investment made in the business.  Ultimately, the world is not very far from totally automated factories, and the drive of the trades unions to increase the net benefits to their members is acting as a powerful driver towards that state.  If you doubt this, look at the work now being done to automate mining and agriculture, two of the seemingly most impregnable bastions of the large labour force.  These developments are disguised under the banner of safety, but, ultimately, it is the total cost of labour that is driving them.

If the Governments of the world wish to increase employment or, better still, to increase economic activity, or to postpone the time when almost no labour will be employed, they must act now, not to prevent businesses from driving towards a reduction of labour, but to make the employment of labour a more favourable option.  The carrot is the only way.  The stick, a favoured method of many Governments, will only serve to drive the businessmen to jurisdictions which are smart enough to learn the lessons that the Germans did two decades ago.  The world is a large place, and globalisation dictates that the market will prevail.

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Charles Taylor – the Message that should be learned

The conviction of Charles Taylor for crimes against humanity, and the imposition of a fifty year prison sentence by the International Criminal Court is a welcome development.  It has now been made clear that some top politicians at least may be held responsible for their actions.  In the case of Taylor, those actions were particularly reprehensible, but the principle is a good one.  Too many dictators have been able to buy themselves a comfortable retirement in a friendly country, using the funds they have stolen and defrauded from their citizens.  One of the many outstanding examples was Idi Amin, who retired to Saudi Arabia after years of brutality, in many cases even bestiality, as ruler of Uganda.  The results of his reign of incompetence and terror are still to be seen in that country, which he took from a position of hope to a state of destitution.

A worrying development in this regard is that the view is now being propagated that the International Criminal Court is an instrument used by the ‘West” against Africa.  There is some credibility in this view, in that the processes that bring the top criminals to the Court are controlled by those nations with a veto in the United Nations Security Council.  It appears highly unlikely that George W Bush and Tony Blair would be convicted of crimes against humanity, as the spokespersons of this view demand, but it would certainly be a beneficial development if the possibility of such a charge were to be possible.  It would certainly act as an inducement to honesty and decency in government if the top people knew that they will be held responsible, by a body with real teeth, for their actions, while they are in power, and after their retirement from that position.

The example now needs to be converted into law.  Every one of the leaders in Africa and the rest of the world claims that they are acting ‘for the people’, that their actions, in the best interests of their citizens, are being misinterpreted by ‘the Western Press’ to discredit their noble works.  Witness Robert Mugabe, the man who singlehandedly brought Zimbabwe, a previously prosperous country, to its knees, using Nazi tactics, brutality, theft and corruption to sustain his rule while the Zimbabwe nation suffered.  Witness Hendrick Verwoerd, the ‘architect of Apartheid, who initiated a rule of laws that ensured that South Africa created a vast population of deprived people, a population that even now, eighteen years after that system was brought to an end, continues to suffer and to grow.  The Truth and Reconciliation process that was intended to bring the nation together failed to achieve that objective.  It left the vast majority of the population, Black as well as White, dissatisfied, uncomfortable that serious crimes against all the people of the nation remained unpunished.  A man who bombs a church, a man who throws a prisoner from a helicopter to his death, has no place in a civilized society.

If the politicians are so sure that their actions are good and pure, that they enjoy the support of the people, let them put their money where their mouths are.  Let them pass a law committing themselves to the judgement of an impartial International Criminal Court, at the instance of an International Commission for the Dispensation of Justice.  In this way, the politicians will be held responsible for what they do to their people.  The people will have the hope that their rights under their Constitutions will be upheld, that the rulers will not be able to use the money they stole from the people to buy protection from the people.  Let us at last remove the hypocrisy that the ‘rulers’ of the nation are elevated above the laws that govern the common herd.  Let there be equality under law.  If the ‘rulers’ fail to do this, let the populace understand at last that the politicians are protecting themselves against the consequences that their acts would otherwise bring.

Correcting the Errors of the Past

Imagine a large corporation, employing thousands of people.  The corporation is headed by a Managing Director, who is assisted by several Divisional Managers, and so on, down the organisation structure.  There are millions of Shareholders, who attend a Shareholders General Meeting regularly, listen to the report of the Managing Director on the state of the company, then go off to discuss what they have heard with the media.

The individual Shareholders have a minimal input into the operation of the corporation, and are subjected to the heavy propaganda put out by the Public Relations organisation of the corporation, which has many years of experience in manipulating the opinion of the Shareholders and the public, and a long history of being the ‘only game in town’ in respect of its product range.

Over the years, the corporation, which was never really efficient or effective in its operations, but which had ridden on the wave of its PR, became less efficient and less profitable (or more expensive, depending on how you look at it!).   The Shareholders became restive, demanding that their interests be better protected, and the customers started looking to other suppliers.  The Managing Director and the Divisional Managers denied any wrongdoing, repeating over and over that the problems had been caused by the previous management, which had been ousted nearly twenty years earlier.  They instituted new rules, preventing the workers in the company from talking to the Press, and the PR Department went into high gear, calling on the names of heroes from the company’s past, and providing a clear identification between them and the current management.  Still, the incompetence and the corruption of the present management grew, becoming more visible as Divisional Managers were found by the Press to have stolen from the company, or to have managed their whole divisions so badly that they were in danger of collapsing and brining the entire edifice down with them.  Eventually, the Shareholders General Meeting took place again, and, this time, the Shareholders felt that their interests had been so badly mismanaged that they rolled up en masse to vote in a new Managing Director and Board of Directors.  These people took their offices seriously, realising that they had no right to the positions other than the rights given them by the Shareholders, and they set to work, replacing the dishonest, the ineffective and the corrupt members of the company.  It required many years of dedicated work to undo the errors of the past, to institute a training program that enabled the new workers to become effective employees, to build the capital of the company back to the point where it was no longer the ‘basket case’ of its industry, to re-establish the trust of the lenders and the joint venture partners in the honesty and integrity of the company and its top management.

Does this story ring any bells?

The African National Congress was established with honourable intentions.  It made a number of mistakes in its progress to maturity, including allying itself with the Communists, which told a seductive story with the purpose of gaining control of a potentially valuable piece of real estate.  It came to power, not in a bloody revolution, as it now increasingly claims, but in a controlled handover by a White majority that no longer had a fear of domination by the Russian Communists, a government that had committed acts of terror against its own citizens on a scale that made the tyranny of Hitler seem almost insignificant.  It took power in an atmosphere of confidence, the people believing that the opportunity had now come to correct the many errors made in the past.

It did not take long for the new Government to realise that it had been handed a cornucopia of personal wealth.  The top people set to work with a will, to appropriate to themselves as much of the wealth of the country as they could.  This attitude spread rapidly down the ranks, as numerous cadres were rewarded for their membership of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and Cosatu by the means of cadre deployment.  The institutions that had enabled the National Party, representing a very small proportion of the citizens of the nation, to build a strong economy even in the face of world disapproval, were dismantled or allowed to fall into disrepair under the management of incompetent and dishonest people.  The economy started to crumble, first in less obvious, longer-term ways, such as the health care system, where once-proud hospitals were stripped of their capabilities to become ghosts of what they had once been and the training of nurses was almost abandoned, the educational system, where an untried and untested new system was introduced with disastrous results and where the experienced teachers were retrenched to bring in new cadres who had little understanding of education or management of an educational system, the Atomic Energy Corporation, a world-class nuclear research establishment, where the scientists were dismissed to go to Iran, North Korea and other potential danger areas) and the assets were stripped and sold at give-away prices in order to realise the commissions to cadres, Eskom, where the failure to understand the necessity of maintenance and continued investment brought about a near-collapse of the economy which is now in the process of correction with massive price hikes that are resulting in the country losing its previous standing as a favoured industrial investment location, in Spoornet, where the sale of thousands of wagons as scrap steel (again to realise a commission to a cadre) brought about a massive decline in the capability of the mining, forestry and other industries to be competitive on an international scale, in the Police Service, where crooked Commissioners were appointed in order to protect the top politicians from investigation and the Crime Intelligence Service was turned onto the political enemies of the elite, in the labour system, where the demands of Cosatu have been allowed to run rampant, bringing practically all sectors of the productive economy into a state of uncompetitiveness and forcing unemployment to levels that exist only in declining Third World economies, in the Department of Public Works, where the disease of corruption has become endemic while the capability to perform the necessary works has dropped to an all-time low, in the South African Revenue Services, where the morality now appears to permit a system of demand, enforce and collect, even where the demand has no basis in law, in the Department of Defence, where the military capability of the country had declined to the point where it is only marginally capable of undertaking a peace-keeping role in a foreign country, to the Courts, where the case load has grown, in some cases, to over two years while under-qualified and under-managed Judges sometimes fail to deliver their judgements for many months, to the universities where law graduates are unable to write, even to read, effectively.  The list goes on and on.  Even within the Party, allegations abound of purges of ‘elements opposed to the Leadership’, and joint Press conferences of the top leadership are held to give the impression that the Party enjoys internal unity!  The same allegations are made of the South African Communist Party, where branches are disbanded without clear and credible reasons being given.

It is safe to say that South Africa, under the ruling Tri-Partite Alliance, is heading down the same road of corruption, mismanagement and incompetence that led to the ruin of so many other African countries.  The only question is whether the ‘Shareholders’ of the country, the voters, will see past the smoke and mirrors that the ruling Party is putting up, and decide to elect a new group of people to run  the country in the businesslike way it deserves.  In the same way as the Managing Director who fails to manage his company must resign, so should the President, in the same way as the Directors fail to perform their duties to protect the interests of the Shareholders resign, so too should the Ministers resign.

If the ANC is to have any honour in the future, the Party must now accept that it has failed to perform its duties over the past eighteen years.  It must accept that lame excuses are no substitute for performance.  It must accept that it has moved away from being the Party of hope to being the Party of division, between the races, and between the classes.

Finally, it must accept that it does not have the qualities that are needed to manage a sophisticated modern economy in a dynamic, non-racial world.

The ANC and Unemployment

The ANC Policy Congress made great play of its concern about the very high rate of unemployment, particularly among the youth.  Of course, we all know that this was motivated mainly by a need to grab the votes of the unemployed, who will believe that all the fine words are true.  When did a politician lie!

The facts speak clearly to the contrary.

A colleague, in discussing a job development project with the MEC for Economic Development and the Premier of the Eastern Cape Province, pointed out that the Eastern Cape suffered a very high rate of unemployment, and that the numbers of unemployed would increase considerably when the mines started cutting back due to a declining economy.  The response from the MEC warrants recording in the annals of ANC achievements.  “But the rate of unemployment is not so high!  It is only 69%!”  One could be forgiven for wondering at the attitude of the Party as expressed by a senior political official.  “Only 69%!”

The same colleague wrote a proposal to the Premier of another Province, proposing that a similar project be conducted in that Province, with the objective of creating 350 000 sustainable jobs within three years.  He was contacted within a week by the Personal Adviser to the Premier, who asked for a meeting to discuss the project.  The man’s words equally merit recording.  “This is a very interesting project, but we need to discuss the commission.”  “Commission?” queried my colleague, surprised.  “Yes, we normally ask 15% equal to R1 800 000 at that time), but you don’t need to be concerned.  That amount includes the Premier and the MEC for Economic Development!”  Needless to say, my colleague did not agree to that proposal.

When my colleague wrote to the Premier of the Eastern Cape a couple of years ago to propose that the project, which was succeeding to a level well beyond what the Government has achieved in the years since then, the Premier responded after nearly two months that she would respond fully in the near future.  Needless to say, there has been no further response since then, even though my colleague has written several further letters requesting a response.  Perhaps the problem lies not with the project, but with the failure of my colleague to offer an acceptable ‘commission’!

Now the ANC has decided that any form of corruption will be punished by the Party!  Now the ANC expresses its concern for youth unemployment!

The Association for Nepotism and Corruption rules!

Democracy ANC Style and Cadre Deployment

The Policy Conference of the Association for Nepotism and Corruption has clearly stated the view of the Party on what democracy means to it.  One of the decisions of the Conference was that any Member of the Party who takes the Party to Court to uphold his or her rights under the Party’s Constitution will be subject to immediate expulsion from the Party!

This decision is a very clear statement of the meaning of democracy to the Party.  Any person who dares to go counter to the decisions of the leaders is a pariah, and not suitable to be a Party Member!  Those with any knowledge of history will see clear parallels, to the Nazi Party in Germany, which rose to power on the basis of terror and thuggery (do you notice the similarity?), and to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, which sought to maintain that power by the use of strong censorship of the Press, by a network of spies and informers, by lying about the state of the nation, and by a rigid control of what people thought and did.

The development is not surprising.  The ANC is struggling to keep hold of power, as a rising numbers of people, particular the Black Middle Class, come to enjoy a place in the sun, to enjoy the standard of living that comes with better education and the development of real skills that make them valued employees.  These people are starting to realize that the policies of the ANC are not well suited to the management of a modern economy, that the ANC is still living in the dream of Communism, a dream that has become thoroughly discredited during the past three decades.  One cannot blame them for their belief.  Many of the leading lights in the ANC gained their insights and beliefs under an education in Communist Russia, East Germany or Cuba, where the objective of the sponsoring governments was not so much to educate them as to brainwash them!  Pravin Gordhan, the Minister of Finance, is an avowed Stalinist, a belief system that is clearly evident in the fiscal policies of the ANC, which are aimed at State control of anything of interest.  Under the ANC, the numbers employed by the State are ballooning, creating a massive problem in the future for any competent Government, and one which the highly incompetent ANC will certainly not be able to master.  And do not forget – one of the mantras of the ANC is ‘all power!’

The Secretary General of the ANC, in a radio interview during the Conference, defended the principle of ‘Cadre Deployment’, stating that it is not unusual in ‘Western systems’.  In a somewhat surprising ‘endorsement’ of the political system in the United Sates, he pointed out that when a new Party comes to power, all the senior officials are replaced by Party nominees, ensuring that the views of the Party would be upheld in Government.  What he failed to say was that the new officials are generally highly-experienced and competent people, unlike the ANC cadres, who generally have no qualifications other than Party membership, and that the replacement of officials is only in the top posts, unlike under the ANC, where, it seems, the prime qualifications for employment in any meaningful position in Government relate to Party membership.  There can be no doubt that the ANC is enforcing the rules of the Association for Nepotism and Corruption! 

An overriding impression that one gains by speaking to Black people is that the ANC is dividing into two groups – one group consists of the super-wealthy who have gained that status by exploiting the policies of the Association for Nepotism and Corruption, together with the super-poor, that group of people who, through ignorance, largely propagated by the amazingly ineffective education system, continue to vote for the ANC, regardless of the inability or unwillingness of the Government to bring them into the Middle Class.  The countervailing group consists of those who, by their own efforts, have been able to move themselves upward into a comfortable economic position, and recognize that they will be able to continue that upward progress under any system of Government that is not what the ANC is trying to move toward.  These are the people who are against the ANC and what it now stands for.  When one analyses this situation, it is clear that the ANC does not wish to rule over an educated nation!

The opening of the Congress marked a clear anti-white stance by the ANC, with the failure to sing the second half of the National Anthem – Die Stem, the former national anthem of South Africa.  The closing of the Congress, with the President’s speech delayed by nearly an hour in what is becoming a clear pattern of disrespect for the Party Members and the Press, as well as a statement of the ANC’s inability to do anything on time, was marked by a generally unenthusiastic applause, giving the lie to Zuma’s upbeat summary of the proceedings, a summary that played down the defeat of his strongly-advocated proposal for a ‘Second Transition’.  The audience present, in unison with the media audience, was clearly less than impressed by the showcasing of the ANC, a repetition of the remarkably transparent joint Press Conference attended by a smirking Zuma and several uncomfortable members of the top brass of the ANC during the Malema drama, during which Zuma attempted to give credence to his claims that therre was no leadership struggle within the ANC.  The body language of several of those present demonstrated how untrue that claim is.

For those looking for signs that the Association for Nepotism and Corruption is starting to unravel, there can be no doubt that the coincidence of the ANC Policy Conference with the complete inability of the Department of Education to comply with a Court Order to distribute the school textbooks in Limpopo Province was a complete exposure of the incompetence of the Government under the ANC.  The juxtaposition of the proud boasts of the performance of the ANC with the startlingly clear evidence of its incompetence could not have sent a clearer message to any thinking person.

The Association for Nepotism and Corruption

The ANC is an organisation that was founded with noble objectives.  The Communist backing of the ANC brought about a shift in the policies to achieve those objectives, and produced in most Whites in South Africa a well-founded fear that any accession to power by the ANC and those it claimed to represent would inevitably result in South Africa falling into the pit of poverty and oppression that, for many years, was the fate of African nations that gained their freedom from ‘colonialism’.  If the objectives had been separated from the Communist threat, they would certainly have enjoyed a very much greater support from the Whites throughout the country, a situation that, paradoxically, led to a prolongation and intensification of the system of Apartheid that worked so strongly to the disadvantage of all South Africans, Black and White.  The increasing influence of the South African Communist Party and its close ally, COSATU, in the political life of South Africa shows, once again, that the desire for power is so strong in most politicians that they are prepared to sell their souls, and the souls of the citizens, to gain and hold onto that power.

This factor has become chillingly enhanced by the sliding into the previously noble organisation of the African National Congress of the ‘New ANC’ – the Association for Nepotism and Corruption.  Looking back, one should have expected that ‘payback time’ would come.  As one prominent ANC leader said in 1994, “I didn’t go into exile so that I could be poor!”  Indeed, the Whites expected that there would be some element of payback, but few expected that those who would have to pay the cost of this payback would be the poor, the unconnected, the average Black citizen.  Many Whites believed that there would be no possibility of a decent life under a Black Government, and showed their belief by moving to another country.  There, they would have to restart their lives, and they did so with the customary gusto that is expected of White South Africans.  As an Australian said in the 1980’s, it was easy to see who of the arriving passengers were South Africans – their feet were a blur of movement!  It is sad that the talents, skills and energy of these many tens of thousands of people were lost to a country that sorely need them, but their decision to seek a future in a country other than their homeland has been largely vindicated by the events since that time of hope.

The thriving economy that was South Africa has been brought to its knees by the actions of the few hundreds of political leaders who have seen that the credibility of the ANC gave them a licence to exploit the system.  Hardly a day goes by without a demonstration by the voters who put the ANC into power, demanding that they be given the rights that they were promised at the dawn of democracy.  Any thinking person knew, in the months leading up to the Black majority Government, that the promises that were being made, and the scenarios that were being believed by the Black voters, were not in any way realistic.  Many Whites simply believed them to be the hyperbole that makes politicians one of the despised classes of humans.  However, few understood that the Black voters, deprived of the experience of democracy throughout their existence, would not see these promises for the vote-grabbing lies that they were.  Unfortunately, that is still the case.  And, as the country slides deeper into the morass of incompetence that is the result of the Nepotism that so strongly characterises the New ANC, the demands grow, the poverty increases and the hope of a brighter day dims.  As this process gains pace, those at the top of the New ANC are becoming aware that the pie is getting smaller, and the time to grab a slice of that pie is becoming shorter.  They compensate by spending ever-larger sums of public money so that their share, the percentage that they skim off the top of the contracts that are handed out, is becoming larger by the year.  Whereas the most noticeable piece of Corruption during the time of Thabo Mbeki was the Arms Deal (a very amateurish piece of fiddling with the public coffers so that selected members of the New ANC could steal an estimated $120 million), it is now commonplace to see expenditures of R29 billion on freeway construction so that the members of the New ANC could steal an estimated R54 billion – the total amount of the Arms Deal! – over the next 20 years, R300 billion on refurbishing the transport sector that the New ANC sold out to China as scrap metal (for a paltry commission on the sale), R200 million to re-establish a nuclear capability (one that South Africa had in excellence prior to the ANC), and many more.  A question that is now usual when Government announces a major item of expenditure is “Who is getting the cut?”  The proposed ‘Second Transition’ is being recognised for what it really is – an admission that the ‘First Transition’ did not achieve what the electorate wanted when they voted to put the old ANC into power, and a shifting of the grounds for comparison of what has been achieved with what was expected.

Is it not time for the People of South Africa to see what the New ANC is doing?  Is it not yet the time for a groundswell of public opinion to make itself heard so that even Jacob Zuma and his cronies in the New ANC come to understand that the wealth of the country is not theirs to appropriate to themselves?  Is it not time for the People to say to the Association for Nepotism and Corruption that they want honest and competent Government?