Let God’s water flow over God’s field, is the old Afrikaans expression that best describes Cyril Ramaphosa’s style. Just watch, let things happen, don’t intervene. Tomorrow is another day.
Like planning a dramatic 2% increase in VAT, but waiting until two hours before the budget speech before consulting his own cabinet, which no longer consists of just ANC members.
Like wanting to tackle South Africa’s dangerous national debt with more loans and higher taxes – while more than a fifth of our national budget already goes to loans and debt repayments.
Like having no clear vision to stop the pattern whereby population growth is faster than economic growth. The result is that South Africa’s unemployment and poverty increase year after year and will soon be at completely unsustainable levels.
Like condoning and allowing ANC cabinet members and parliamentary committee chairs who are accused of corruption and/or identified as crooks by the Zondo commission to simply continue. (The Gupta henchman Malusi Gigaba now speaks on behalf of parliament about defence.)
Like seeing to it that an ANC-deployed person apparently gets priority over more deserving candidates to become the head of SAA, against the wishes of the SAA board.
Like allowing mineral and petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe to utter things like South Africa may ask Iran to build a nuclear power station, well knowing that co-operation with Iran is the reddest red line of verboten for the US and Europe, with US President Donald Trump already foaming at the mouth.
Like remaining inactive about the increasing collapse of so many cities and towns. Millions of citizens are without reliable water and electricity supply, and raw sewage flows from dysfunctional sewerage works into our rivers and dams.
Nationwide protest actions over the delivery of local services decreased after last year’s election but are now rapidly becoming an almost daily occurrence again.
While Ramaphosa is still preparing to send a delegation to Washington and Europe to counter Trump’s punitive actions, the Solidarity movement has already been at the White House, and is now touring Europe to request further pressure on South Africa.
A sleepwalking president
Ramaphosa has done only one big thing in the past few years: he facilitated the government of national unity (GNU) rather than climbing into bed with the MK Party and the EFF under pressure from his own ranks.
Actually, correction: he has at least also begun to involve the private sector more, and made the greater generation of green energy possible.
But then consider the recently announced rearrangement of the ANC’s leadership in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng: it was a concrete step, sure, but with the goal of making the ANC stronger, not South Africa.
Ramaphosa has also ignored the outspoken advice of one of the strongest and most successful state functionaries, the head of the national revenue service, Edward Kieswetter. Namely, that higher taxes will not bring greater state income and will rather hamper economic growth.
Kieswetter’s plea that more be invested in the revenue service, so that an estimated R800bn in taxes that the service could not collect can be levied, was also ignored by Ramaphosa. Kieswetter repeated these proposals on Wednesday during a panel discussion of the G20 finance ministers.
The business sector, most economists and many pressure groups in civil society have been insisting for a long time now that something drastic must be done to curb corruption, bureaucratic red tape and the waste of state income. This, it is widely believed, could save hundreds of billions.
Yet still no decisive reaction thus far from President Sleepwalker.
It would benefit Ramaphosa to listen to his biggest partner in the GNU, the DA, before the new budget is announced in two weeks.
The DA proposes a “three-month sprint to identify low-hanging fruit”: programmes and projects that can be cancelled or reduced to free up money for priorities that need to be funded in the next financial year. This must go along with an overarching review that reorients state spending towards critical priorities.
The minister of finance, with the support of the GNU, must then announce ambitious economic reforms with clear deadlines, the DA asks.
State of the nation
As it stands, services provided by most state hospitals and clinics in many provinces outside the Western Cape continue to deteriorate, yet health minister Aaron Motsoaledi continues to aggressively market the controversial National Health Insurance scheme, to the cost of millions of rands. Then this week he announced further tariff regulations of general practitioners and specialists in the private sector.
Then there’s the expropriation law, which Ramaphosa said again this week aims to return farms to black citizens. The reality is that the state – through entities like the South African National Defence Force, Transnet, Eskom and other state-owned enterprises – sits on millions of hectares of land that are not productive, while so much of the land that has already been redistributed now lies empty due to a lack of state support or inactivity.
The South African Navy these days consists of just a small handful of seaworthy vessels that bob around in the bays now and then. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of rands’ worth of valuable property in the main base in Simon’s Town that is no longer used or maintained and could be sold.
Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency, Brazil’s ambitious project to curb corruption – Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash), from a decade ago – and the UK’s Thatcherism of the 1980s are expensive lessons in how not to allow interventions to damage the national interest.
But without our own drastic intervention against corruption and a wasteful big state, South Africa will enter dangerous waters that might just sink our little ship.
And still, we wait for the captain.
Top image: Cyril Ramaphosa. Picture: Gallo images, Sharon Seretlo.
ALSO READ:
Sign up to Currency’s weekly newsletters to receive your own bulletin of weekday news and weekend treats. Register here.
