Thinking South Africans were shocked after their corrupt President removed a respected Minister of Finance (and deputy) for the sole reason he is incorruptible. ANC stalwarts, the business community, church leadership, organised labour and most of the media are furious. They have started to mobilise, with the first of planned rolling mass actions yesterday building up to Friday’s mass stay-away and a march on the Union Buildings.
It’s a start, but to succeed a lot more is needed. Paid Twitter and acolytes who fancy themselves as future “Black (Johann) Ruperts” are publicly smirking at the efforts of Save SA and other anti-Zuma forces. They draw confidence from those putting cold cash on the table who tell us resistance is futile. Mr Market says the protest action won’t have an impact; he anticipates half the dissenters in the ANC Top Six will do nothing more than grumble; and believes Jacob Zuma will continue chuckling at the frustration of his enemies.
Zuma supporters point out that the Rand has weakened but not fallen off a cliff. Bond rates have risen but not into the stratosphere. And share prices of interest rate sensitive stocks have dropped, but not catastrophically. Also, they are quick to make a comparison with Nenegate.
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In the two sessions after Zuma fired then Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene, the JSE’s 17 largest financial and property stocks lost R290bn in value. Last week the same 17 stocks lost R132bn on the Gordhan firing. That’s huge, but as the Zuma camp will quickly point out, less than half Nenegate losses.
But Mr Market is often very wrong. And even if it is being downplayed, a double digit percentage decline in the price of banking stocks is no small matter. Also, optimists think SA assets prices have avoided a similar collapse because of a belief that Zuma has over-reached and will now be impeached – as recently happened to similarly corrupt Presidents in Brazil and South Korea. With civil society starting to mobilise, odds of that have obviously risen.
The emotionally detached like Nomura’s Peter Attard-Montalto, however, read it differently. The City of London’s go-to analyst on all things South African predicts there will be serious attempts to eject Zuma, but puts only a 20% chance of them succeeding anytime before May 2018. Montalto has halved his next three years’ GDP growth forecasts in the wake of #Zumicon, but still believes Zuma’s ex-wife will win the ANC’s elective conference in December.
Arguments for both sides show the country is on the brink. Any thinking South African will hope to prove Montalto wrong and redouble efforts against the plunderers to make it so. Africa’s youngest democracy is in danger. If its citizens fail to unite this week, the smirks of the plunderers will become permanent. And the country really will have the government is deserves.
