I’m Alec Hogg and here’s the Rational Perspective for Monday, the 2nd of March, where we are actually sitting in Cape Town. Well, some people have to have this kind of life, don’t they? It was interesting to see this morning that President Jacob Zuma is back at his support of the sometimes indefensible that is offered to him by those people close to him.
We’ll get into that in a moment, but over the weekend, a very worrying fact came out of Moscow, where Boris Nemtsov, the strongest political opponent to an embattled Vladimir Putin – the president there – was assassinated in broad daylight. He was shot four times in the back, by drive-by shooters. Yesterday, 21,000 people turned out to express their disapproval of this. Of course, the likely result is that people are going to blame Putin, who has Russia in his grip as though he had it in an iron glove.
This incident got me thinking about our (South Africa’s) relationship with Russia and the fact that President Jacob Zuma has a loyalty that sometimes stretches beyond the factual developments. He’s very close to Vladimir Putin. He likes the man – clearly. The two of them come from a similar background in the intelligence agencies and that loyalty was again reflected in a response to criticism that Jacob Zuma made in the State of the Nation Address when he said, ‘only three percent of JSE-listed companies are held in black hands’. Clearly, that isn’t the case. The reality is that it’s 23 percent, which is held through various institutions that the JSE itself has been able to track down.
What’s more disturbing about this is that the President is listening to people who are telling him things that clearly are not accurate. If you say three percent is held by blacks, then people think that 97 must be held by whites. Consequently, you get all kinds of racially charged issues that really don’t need to be raised. My view on these things is quite simple. When I’m in a hole, I stop digging. This is Alec Hogg with the Rational Perspective.
