Last Gasp by Bryan Britton - HTML preview

CHAPTER 20

 The jury is out. The judgement is awaited. The tension is palpable. The journalists wait, pens poised, to see whether African Kleptocracy or Western Democracy will prevail. The importance of the judgement is that it will determine the future of South Africa and its citizens.

Over-dramatisation? I think not. But while we wait what do the pundits say as the country teeters precariously on the edge of a fiscal cliff that may set it back twenty years…………..or worse.

ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THE BOMB EXPLODES

By Moletsi Mbeki

I can predict when SA’s  Tunisia Day will arrive. Tunisia Day is when the masses rise against the powers that be, as happened recently in Tunisia. The year will be 2020, give or take a couple of years. The year 2020 is when China estimates that its current mineralsintensive industrialisation phase will be concluded. For SA, this  will mean the African National Congress (ANC) government will  have to cut back on social grants, which  it uses to placate the black poor and to get their votes. China’s current industrialisation phase has forced up the prices of SA’s minerals, which has enabled the government to finance social welfare programmes. 

The ANC is currently making SA a welfare state and tends to forget that there is only a minority that pay all the taxes. They are often quick to say that if people (read whites) are not happy they should leave. The more people that leave, the more their tax base shrinks. Yes, they will fill the positions with BEE candidates (read blacks), but if they are not capable of doing the job then the company will eventually fold as well as their new tax base. When there is no more money available for handouts they will then have a problem because they are breeding a culture of handouts instead of creating jobs so people can gain an idea of the value of money. If you keep getting things for free then you lose the sense of its value. The current trend of saying if the west won’t help then China will is going to bite them. China will want payment – ie land for their people and will result in an influx of Chinese (there is no such thing as a free lunch!) The ANC inherited a flawed, complex society it barely understood; its tinkerings with it are turning it into an explosive cocktail. The ANC leaders are like a group of children playing with a hand grenade. One day one of them will figure out how to pull out the pin and everyone will be killed. …and 20 years on they still blame apartheid but have not done much to rectify things – changing names etc only costs money that could have been spent elsewhere. A famous African liberation movement, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, after tinkering for 30 years, pulled the grenade pin by cancelling an election in 1991 that was won by the opposition Islamic Salvation Front. In the civil war that ensued, 200,000 people were killed.  

 The ‘new’ leaders are forgetting the struggle heroes and the reasons for it – their agenda is now power and money and it suits them for the masses to be ignorant – same as Mugabe did in Zim. If you do not agree with the leaders then the followers intimidate you……..  

……..We all accept that a socialist model, along the lines of the Soviet Union , is not workable for SA today. The creation of a state-owned economy is not a formula that is an option for SA or for many parts of the world. Therefore, if we want to develop SA instead of shuffling pre-existing wealth, we have to create new entrepreneurs, and we need to support existing entrepreneurs to diversify into new economic sectors. 

Make people work for their hand-outs even if it means they must sweep the streets or clean a park – just do something instead of getting all for nothing. Guaranteed there will then be less queuing for hand-outs because they would then be working and in most instances they do not want to work – they want everything for nothing.

And in my opinion the ANC created this culture before the first election in 1994 when they promised the masses housing, electricity etc. – they just neglected to tell them that they would have to pay for them. That is why the masses constantly do not want to pay for water, electricity, rates on their properties – they think the government must pay this – after all they were told by the ANC that they will be given these things – they just do not want to understand that the money to pay for this comes from somewhere and if you don’t pay you will eventually not have these services. 

 And then when the tax base has left they can grow their mielies in front of their shack and stretch out their open palms to the UN for food hand-outs and live a day to day existence that seems to be what they want – sit on their arse and do nothing. 

Time for an Economic Codesa

By Clem Sunter

One of my recent articles for this website was entitled: The perfect storm: why waste it? It went through all the red flags fluttering in the breeze concerning the global economy and South Africa. Now, all of our own making, the breeze is turning into a hurricane with an epicentre not far off our shores.

So rather than write yet another negative article about the current situation, I want to stress the idea that I have been advocating in public for the last few years. We need an Economic Codesa to set our economy on a new path just like the political ones did in creating a new democracy in the early 1990s.

We achieved political freedom without economic freedom and that is a very dangerous mixture, particularly at a time of low economic growth.

We never completed the job and we still have economic apartheid dividing the haves from the have-nots. In addition, we have a national unemployment rate of around 25% which is equal to the record figure in America at the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

No presidential council of business advisers meeting privately behind closed doors with government ministers is going to resolve the basic problem we have of widespread exclusion from the formal economy suffered by township and rural entrepreneurs.

We need to start creating an inclusive economy right now that encourages widespread participation in the wealth creation process.

I do not mean by this an old-fashioned socialist economy driven from the centre, but I do mean a centrally conceived and agreed platform which allows the entrepreneurial spirit to flourish. I guess the best way to express my wish is that the objective of an Economic Codesa must be to construct a level playing field instead of the highly slanted one we have at the moment.

I also totally agree with Julius Malema when he talked in the UK at my old university about employee share ownership programmes so that workers too - rather than a few politically connected individuals - can share in the capital gains of business.

I even wrote a column in February 2012 expressing the view that Esops, as these programmes are known, are top of the pops. If it works in the UK with the John Lewis chain of upmarket department stores, it can be made to work here just as effectively.

None of this is easy to achieve and it requires a big-bang event with plenty of fanfare and media coverage. Indeed, it should be beamed live on one television channel.  

At the convention should be government and the leaders of the other political parties; big and small business; representatives of the unions, the professions and civil society; and especially the South African entrepreneurs who have created companies with world-wide interests out of nothing. One could perhaps ask Mark Shuttleworth and Elon Musk to come from overseas to attend as well.

Moreover, we should have a hashtag #EconomicCodesa so that the public can join in with innovative suggestions and make their own comments on the proceedings. Just like the political Codesas, there will have to be plenty of negotiation because sacrifices will be needed on all sides to reach the goal of economic freedom and employment for all.

However, the final document should be as sacrosanct as our Constitution with measurable outcomes that can be tested in a court of law.

The main argument which has been used against the viability of an Economic Codesa is that there is not the same sense of crisis as existed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a result of the domestic events of this last week, I think this issue falls away.

Equally, people contend that the economy is too complex a topic and the participants too wide apart in circumstances and ideology to reach consensus. In response to the second objection, I would like to quote the final paragraph of the very first book I wrote in 1987 about South Africa taking the High Road:

 “My parting shot is this. Just think that 200 years ago, in the summer of 1787, there was a nation which was in danger of falling apart. Then fifty-five men assembled at a convention and drew up a document which has served as the basis of government for that nation ever since (with 26 amendments). The place was Philadelphia and the nation was America. That event was not predictable - it was made to happen by great men. The same can be made to happen here. I hope this book has sown the seeds of action, because in the end it is only action that counts.”

We did it once against all the odds. We can do it again.

“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”

― Nelson Mandela