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Can SA afford the ANC? | Global
"Guardians" convene | Who was there | Trevor Huddleston | Publisher's Letter |
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CAN SA AFFORD THE ANC? |
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"THE rand is falling against the US dollar along with the currencies of many other large and emerging economies because we are judged, as a country, not to be a good enough bet. Investors do not like the presence of trade unions and communists in our government and especially they do not like the way these partners seem to be able to call economic policy into question. What South Africans are paying now is the price of the ANC’s unwillingness to go into next year’s election on its own and with a solid free market macroeconomic package to campaign to. As a political decision that probably makes sense for the ANC. The nation simply needs to understand what effect it has on its pockets.: - Financial Mail editorial comment, 19.6.98. The FM is dead right. SA, of course, could not expect to escape the spillover from the Asian blowout. But in our case other factors have helped crater our currency. An economy showing every sign of terminal cancer. A Luddite Labour Minister working hand-in-glove with Stalinist-era trade unions led by an African Scargill. Relentlessly high unemployment. The hallucinatory character of many of the ANC "reforms." Against that background, and in a menacing era of global economic cooling, we end up with a 65% fall in the value of the rand since 1964: as this is written, R5,50 to the $, R9 to the �. A damning indictment of SA strategies, if ever there was one. Truly has it been said that by their currencies shall ye know them. Side by side with the frenzied downward spiral of the currency you have massive upward pressure on interest rates, both movements hitting every citizen in SA society. The impact of the bloated interest rates on the housing market will be devastating, as thousands of property owners find their mortgages no longer affordable. People with cars or goods bought on variable interest rate hire purchase contracts could find themselves in Queer Street. The poorer elderly living on fixed incomes will be very hard hit. People employed by unprofitable or marginal firms will lose their jobs or go on short time. The domestic economy is already heading into tailspin, into recession. Clear message of all this: that SA is a country in crisis, not least because foreign investors, our one lifeline to economic survival, today have serious problems with SA’s fiscal reputation; that they perceive there to be something fundamentally wrong with ANC control of the economy. As a nation, we must ask ourselves: How much longer can SA afford this government, increasingly leading us to ruin and full-blown socialism? This is the story of the ANC’s supreme betrayal. When the Mandela regime took power in 1994, it promised to |
transform SA into a successful modern industrial society, race neutral, promoting freedom and a higher standard of living for all. More recently, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki went further. He told international investors that "the African Renaissance is upon us," that SA would be the lodestone that would bring multiparty governments, a crack-down on corruption, emancipation of African women and a reversal of the continent’s braindrain. How anyone believed this malarkey is beyond me. Nothing has survived of those promises. What we have in SA today, courtesy the ANC, is chaos, retrogression, degradation and demolition. These people are beyond incompetence. They have led SA, not towards open, multiparty democracy, but to an increasingly closed one-party state: and financial holocaust. Democracy is transforming before our eyes into something still uncertain but unmistakably absolutist. The stuffing has been knocked out of the economy. Millions of people, unemployed or under-employed, face total penury. The ANC’s expanding inadequacies in the important task of running the country are daily becoming all too clear. What we have done with our foolish "yes" votes and all the other flimflam is to replace one form of tyranny with another, far worse. Though not yet admitted, the effort to introduce democracy has come to naught. Now things are beginning to turn really nasty. Why did anyone expect anything different? Formerly, the ANC was recognised as the world’s most incompetent terrorist organisation. As a government it still calls itself a liberation movement rather than a political party: a protest, hard left revolutionary group trying to run a capitalist society. The ANC took power with virtually no administrative experience. Its gross managerial incompetence has steadily gone from bad to worse. In the vital fields of health, labour, education, security and justice, it has built one of the world’s most incompetent public sectors, economically disastrous and socially destructive. Flagrant with nepotism, greed, inertia, communist sabotage and profligacy, government at every tier needs urgent and far-reaching reform. Over and above all else is rampant corruption, now nearing Asian proportions and, as there, just as deadly to foreign investment. Talking of their own government, the Japanese say it has become "a haven for salaried thieves and crooks." At least in Japan, when caught redhanded with their loot, the culprits commit suicide or apologise at press conferences. As experience has repeatedly shown, many of the high flyers among the ANC nomenclatu- ra see their way to private wealth as |
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