US President Donald Trump’s propensity to tell lies may turn out to have done South Africa some good. His insistence — in a televised ambush of President Cyril Ramaphosa in Washington last month — that there is a genocide against white Afrikaner farmers has generated shrill debate at home and abroad.
In the process, the genocide accusation has been comprehensively discredited. The influential British TV host Piers Morgan assembled a panel of South Africans for his show last week, and put the same accusation to them — from nationalist to soft Left, to conservative and far Right, they all denied it was happening. How could they otherwise? Police report six murders on farms in the first three months of this year — two farm owners killed were black, two were black farm workers, and one farm manager killed was black. The one white killed was a farm dweller.
Where Trump has unwittingly helped is in highlighting the sheer weight of crime in our country and our future. And, also, the inability of the ANC government to stop it.
The party best able to lucidly describe the tangible, crippling effects of crime, from a single murder — and the resulting erosion of reputation, confidence and the destruction of investment — to the 25-year-old graduate sitting jobless on a beer crate under the rural Mpumalanga sun, has a bright future.
But none attempt it. Instead, they all fatuously promise “jobs” without doing the harder work of explaining how a new job — and the pension that should come with it — is actually created.
That’s to say nothing of the ANC’s compulsive embrace of transformation as its central economic mission. The way it is going about transferring wealth from white to black, without creating real new national wealth, is borderline disgraceful given the amount of time it has had to measure the economic effects of its neglect — or ignorance — of actual wealth and job-creating economic growth.
Does anyone in parliament understand how hard it is for an entrepreneur to keep enough money in the bank to pay salaries — not just this month, but the next and the next and the next? The risks involved in running a sustainable business are absolutely staggering, yet the people who do it are routinely disembowelled by the ruling party.
Former DA leader Tony Leon recalls in his new book, Being There, that at one of the first gatherings between the DA and the ANC in the search for the current governing coalition, ANC treasurer-general Gwen Ramokgopa said “redress must be at the core of the new government”. You can see her point. The ANC is funded by the black middle class, but even the old apartheid Nats had that obvious item figured — in the Bantustans it grew many of the generation of bureaucrats, policemen and soldiers who run the country today.
Our population growth is breathtaking and we simply do not have ... the people, the money or the policies to cope
The surprise is that the DA went along with it, when the core of the new government ought to have been for growth and accountability. And, then, the transparent and independent costing of all future and not yet implemented legislation and, second, a clear, transparent, independent and public assessment of the growth effects of any current and future legislation.
The DA figured it was saving the country — from the EFF joining the government, and its leader, Julius Malema, being given some power. That White House meeting would have looked a lot different if he had, but I doubt Ramaphosa would have gone along with it. The DA would still be the official opposition, supporting growth-enhancing policy and stable government. Instead, it has possibly been co-opted — and there will be a price to pay for that.
No thinking white South African would begrudge any black man or woman their job or their house or their wealth. God knows, they and their parents and grandparents suffered enough for it. But the job today is different and it’s on fire. Our population growth is breathtaking and we simply do not have — all prospective reforms included — the people, the money or the policies to cope. And the moment you top that investment urgency with a transformation super-priority, you are almost certainly lost.
The answer — as the world closes its borders and its hearts — is to do the opposite. To be countercyclical. Open our markets, not to dumping but to innovators and technology, and lift all export taxes and limitations. Turn the entire country into a special economic zone.
The government owns millions of hectares of land — why it is not being farmed? If there must be black empowerment, make it voluntary and encourage it with tax policies. What’s to lose? In five years, artificial intelligence will change the world we know and the jobs we desire beyond recognition.
The “core job”, as Gwen Ramokgopa described it, is achieving 5% economic growth, whatever it takes. The poor and the destitute, and our middle-class sons and daughters, would thank us for it.
For opinion and analysis consideration, e-mail Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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