When Tito Mboweni presented the emergency/revised budget on Wednesday, he made it abundantly clear that this is a crisis. But his ANC colleagues don’t seem to be listening.
Mboweni cannot be faulted for the performance he delivered this week. He was absolutely crystal clear that SA is 3-4 years away from a complete meltdown.
On current trends, in a couple of years, we will experience a sovereign debt crisis. Unable to meet our obligations, funding will dry up. The SA government will be forced to either slash spending to the bone, accept an IMF loan that requires it to slash spending to the bone, or print money to pay its bills leading to spiralling inflation Ă la Zimbabwe. None of these scenarios constitutes a happy ending.
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And Mboweni didn’t say that this may happen. He said that it will happen unless we take immediate and dramatic action to stop it.
There’s no need to continue arguing over whether SA is on the right path. It isn’t. The economy is shrinking. The vast majority of young people have no jobs and maybe never will. At all levels – electricity, roads, ports, trains, healthcare – the country’s capacity is falling apart. This is a red alert. The missile is headed for the bunker. There is no debate: We are at the end of the line.
And that’s OK. It’s OK to be at the brink – if you have the will and capacity to walk back from it. Many nations have faced similar breaking points. What matters is turning things around.
And that, dear reader, is where the problem lies. The simple fact is that the ruling party is either incapable of fixing things or unwilling to try.
To be clear, the problem isn’t necessarily at the very top. Cyril Ramaphosa and his hand-picked team are clearly competent. The problem is that the ANC is fundamentally unable to rise to the challenge. It seems that a crucial mass of the party’s apparatchiks has no interest in fixing SA’s problems. They are interested only in the promotion of their own wealth and power.
For far too many ANC politicians (and their enablers in the private sector, of whom there are plenty), the country looks something like a kudu carcass looks to a hyena – something to be feasted on quickly, before the good bits are gone.
Many ANC stalwarts truly believe that the party has a unique right to rule SA and that it is the only party that can steer the country to the promised land. Many senior leaders have spent decades immersed in a certain set of ideologies. They have learned to think a certain way and party discipline prohibits them from thinking differently.
They do not seem to question some of their basic assumptions about governing – that party loyalists make better appointees than meritorious candidates, that business is the enemy of the people and should be squeezed at every turn, that only the state knows what is best for the people, that acts of corruption are morally justified because they target the proceeds of an unfair prior system.
These people hold the levers of power in the SA government. While Mboweni has what looks like a reasonable plan to turn the tide on SA’s debt, the people who will decide whether or not that plan is implemented are the ANC members who sit in parliament, who control departments and ministries, and who make a thousand mid-level decisions about how to allocate resources, who to hire, and what projects to prioritise.
Those are the people who hold the future of the country in their hands. While business and ordinary people have important roles to play, those are the people who will be setting the ground rules and building the environments in which those “important roles” are played out.
For the last ten years, those are also the people who have signally failed to do what must be done. The ANC has driven SA deeper and deeper into crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic is simply shining a light on the rot. And, perhaps most frustratingly of all, the ANC is likely to remain in power for the next ten years because SA’s political class has been unable to produce any actual, viable alternative.
Without a serious commitment from the ANC – the whole ANC – to stop thinking inside its tiny box, to pull its head out the sand, and to start dealing with the very brutal reality facing SA, the “mouth of the hippopotamus” that Mboweni warned us about is going to swallow the country whole.
