As the Israeli-American wrecking ball continues to swing wildly at the global economy, South Africans are once again about to become poorer, with Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump setting fire to another gigantic pile of our money in service of their corruption and murderous megalomania.
Of course, some ideological shills of the Axis of Assholes will object to this angle. Eight weeks ago, when Israel finally found an American president stupid and corrupt enough to attack Iran for it, and the price of oil blew up like a US-made bomb dropped by Israel on a Palestinian refugee camp, some of us who pointed out that things were about to get much more expensive were scolded online by people who’d suddenly found a small and very specific splinter of morality after remaining silent about Gaza for years.
What was a few months of high prices, they asked, compared to the imminent liberation of millions or Iranians and the toppling of the vicious regime that has squatted on them for decades? How dare we react with such venal selfishness to a story of hope and the triumph of the human spirit, or at least the triumph of Netanyahu and Trump over the criminal justice systems of their respective kakistocracies?
It was nonsense, of course, and the last two months have shown it up as the fraud it always was. The Iranian regime is still in power, possibly with more support than before the war as some Iranians reportedly decide that the only thing they hate more than their oppressive mullahs are colonial Israelis and Americans.
Even more absurdly, there is a chance that the on-again-off-again peace talks will end with Iran more firmly in control of the Strait of Hormuz than it ever was.
On Thursday, Trump announced that there was “no timeframe” for ending the war, presumably because his family hasn’t made enough hundreds of millions from insider trading or the Israeli Defence Force hasn’t yet hit its monthly quota for murdering journalists in Lebanon.
All of which means it is very unlikely that the oil price is coming back down to $60 today or tomorrow or even next week. But even it if did, the shockwaves will keep hitting us for months to come.
South African motorists are preparing for another increase in the petrol price in the next fortnight — at the time of writing somewhere in the region of R1.50 per litre seemed likely — meaning that the average driver will probably be paying somewhere in the region of R200 a month more for petrol than they did in February.
Diesel has never been more expensive in South Africa than it is today, but if the state cracks and reinstates the R3 fuel levy next month, it will shoot up by almost 40 percent to near R37 a litre, a figure not only completely unprecedented in our history but also staggeringly destructive to our national wellbeing.
But it is the price of diesel that is the real hammer-blow to our economy and the prospects and well-being of millions of South Africans.
Only about a quarter of the vehicles on South Africa’s roads run on diesel, but they punch far above their weight, comprising the millions of long-haul trucks, delivery vans, working bakkies and many diesel-powered taxis that are the economic lifeblood of this country. And that’s to say nothing of the hundreds of millions of rands worth of diesel Eskom is still burning every month to keep the lights on.
Diesel has never been more expensive in South Africa than it is today, but if the state cracks and reinstates the R3 fuel levy next month, it will shoot up by almost 40 percent to near R37 a litre, a figure not only completely unprecedented in our history but also staggeringly destructive to our national wellbeing.
Of course, we’re not alone. Trade credit insurer Allianz Trade estimated on Thursday that more than 15,000 firms will go bust worldwide over the next two years as a direct result of the Iran war, with Asia taking the heaviest hit.
Still, that will be scant consolation to those South Africans who slide deeper into poverty in the coming years. Because in many ways, this is a personal attack on them and on all of us; an entirely avoidable and unnecessary crisis inflicted on all of us by two broken men leading morally bankrupt countries.
So next month, as you shell out that extra R200 on petrol and God knows how much more on food, spare a nasty little thought and perhaps a vicious four-letter word for Netanyahu and Trump as they literally burn your money on the altar of their self-worship …
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