Relax, no-one has a clue what’s going on

If you’re worried that you don’t really understand what’s going on, relax. No-one has a clue and anyone who says otherwise — sharp business types or switched-on social media types with “breaking news” — is lying to you.  

There’s also an almost 100% chance that what you’d like to happen and what is  actually  happening are entirely different things. History’s slow, Donald Trump’s a stuck record, and the fighting between the ANC and the DA over the budget and VAT is what coalition politics look like every day in much of the world. 

Language matters. By proposing an increase in VAT by half a percentage point in May to 15.5% and another half a percentage point next year, ANC finance minister Enoch Godongwana is trying to fool you into arguing whether half a point really is worth worrying about. 

In fact, what he is proposing, in English, is a hefty 6.6% increase in VAT over two years, “percent” and “percentage points” being handily interchangeable for politicians. It’s not nothing. It’s a lot. Watch ANC spin doctors try to keep the conversation to “half a point” and DA “blackmail” over the next weeks. 

In fact, a 6.6% hoik in one of our biggest taxes is a compelling reason to trigger a budget crisis, as the DA and other smaller parties have done. For the second time in as many months, an ANC finance minister has had to bring to parliament a budget for which there is no majority. Who would have thought?

Economic growth is a mystery to this end-stage ANC. It just doesn’t see the need. To be effective, the DA leadership should be out there every day  making clear the case for growth to a bewildered public who thinks it comes from BEE 

Certainly not the ruling party, which is physically incapable of cutting its spending because if it did the people receiving the spending would stop keeping it in power. Almost everything the government buys is consciously overpriced. Take the R250m spent on former president Jacob Zuma’s home at Nkandla. For those of you who remember that rural spread, it would have cost, max, R40m to build. There’s no way South Africans should be paying 7% extra on VAT because the government can’t control its own spending. 

And keep an eye too on the fact that while the ANC is happy to accuse the DA of trying to bring back apartheid by rejecting the VAT increase, it would rather not talk about once more  having no identifiable plan to grow the economy fast enough to absorb the number of people coming into the jobs market each year. 

There was nothing about growth in the budget apart from a promise to spend up to a trillion rand over three years on electrical, transport and water infrastructure. Take that with a pinch. This government couldn’t spend a trillion rand productively in three years if you put its feet in a fire. The R220bn allocated to electrical infrastructure, for instance, would be the 14,000km of new transmission lines the state says it needs, but the state hasn’t even described in writing yet what it might be asking investors to fund. 

That only happens later this year. And then at the end of the year, the investors get to express their interest in the projects involved. By the end of next year they might actually get to tender, and when enough land has been expropriated for the power lines we might get a spade in the ground  before the 2029 elections. But in the meantime, what is that R220bn doing? Where is it? 

Economic growth is a mystery to this end-stage ANC. It just doesn’t see the need. To be effective, the DA leadership should be out there every day  making clear the case for growth to a bewildered public who thinks it comes from BEE. 

Nothing it does though could neutralise the idiocy of our ambassador in the US Ebrahim Rasool saying this week that US President Donald Trump represented a “supremacist assault” on America and implying that black people were among its targets.

His language has triggered a serious crisis and he has been declared persona non grata by Washington and will have to return home. 

It is a seismic diplomatic failure by a country that knew it was in trouble with Trump and deliberately chose to insult him anyway. 

Trump really is scary but he is saying nothing new: “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States ... Why are these nations not paying the US for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?” 

Familiar vintage Trump. But that passage is from an advert he placed in the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 2, 1987, and he hasn’t changed his story  by a single comma since. The same applies to import tariffs, which he  says the exporter pays. 

Trump’s an unpredictable, unmanageable, empty vessel. He’s a reality TV star whose only currency is the constant creation of conflict. 

Sadly, like fools we have gone and fed this madness. The hubris and conceit of the ANC is boundless. This will only get worse now.