LET God's water flow over God's field, is the old Afrikaans expression that best describes Cyril Ramaphosa's style. Just watch, let things slide, don't intervene. Tomorrow is another day.
Like planning a dramatic 2% increase in VAT, but waiting until two hours before the budget speech to consult his own cabinet, which no longer consists of ANC members only.
Like wanting to tackle South Africa's dangerous national debt with more loans and higher taxes – more than a fifth of our national budget already goes to loans and debt repayments.
Like having no clear vision to stop the pattern of South Africa's population growing being faster than its economic growth. The result is that unemployment and poverty increase year after year and will soon be at completely unsustainable levels.
Like condoning and allowing ANC cabinet members and parliamentary committee chairpersons who are accused of corruption and/or identified as crooks by the Zondo commission to simply continue. (The Gupta henchman Malusi Gigaba now speaks on behalf of parliament about defence.)
Like seeing to it that an ANC-deployed person gets priority over more deserving candidates to become the head of SAA, against the wishes of the SAA board.
Like allowing Gwede Mantashe to utter things like South Africa may ask Iran to build a nuclear power station, well knowing that co-operation with Iran is the reddest red line of verboten for America and Europe, with Donald Trump already foaming at the mouth.
Like remaining inactive about the increasing collapse of so many cities and towns. Millions of citizens are without reliable water and electricity supply, and raw sewage flows from dysfunctional sewage works into our rivers and dams.
Nationwide protest actions over the delivery of local services decreased after last year's election but are now rapidly becoming an almost daily occurrence again.
Solidarity was there already
While Ramaphosa is still preparing to send a delegation to Washington and Europe to counter Donald Trump's punitive actions, the Solidarity movement was ALREADY at the White House and is now touring Europe to request further pressure on South Africa.
Ramaphosa has done ONE big thing in the last few years: He facilitated the government of national unity rather than climbing into bed with the MK Party and the EFF under pressure from his own ranks.
Correction: He has at least also begun to involve the private sector more and made the greater generation of green energy possible.
The recently announced rearrangement of the ANC's leadership in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng was indeed a concrete step, but the goal is to make the ANC stronger, not South Africa.
Ramaphosa ignored the outspoken advice of one of the strongest and most successful state functionaries, the head of the national revenue service, Edward Kieswetter, that higher taxes would not bring greater state income and would rather hamper economic growth.
Kieswetter's plea that more be invested in the revenue service so that an estimated R800 billion in taxes that the service could not collect could be levied, was also ignored by Ramaphosa. Kieswetter repeated these proposals on Wednesday during a panel discussion of the G20 finance ministers.
The business sector, most economists, and many pressure groups in civil society have been insisting for a long time now that something drastic must be done to curb corruption, bureaucratic red tape, and the waste of state income, which, it is widely believed, could save hundreds of billions.
No decisive reaction thus far from President Sleepwalker.
Critical priorities
It would benefit Ramaphosa to listen to his biggest partner in the GNU, the DA, before the new budget is announced in two weeks.
The DA now proposes a “three-month sprint to identify low-hanging fruit": programmes and projects that can be cancelled or reduced to free up money for priorities that need to be funded in the next financial year. This must go along with an overarching review that reorients state spending towards critical priorities.
The minister of finance, with the support of the GNU, must then announce ambitious economic reforms with clear deadlines, the DA asks.
The services provided by most state hospitals and clinics in many provinces outside the Western Cape continue to deteriorate, but the minister, Elias Motsoaledi, continues to aggressively market the controversial national health insurance, also through advertising campaigns costing millions of rand. And this week he announced further tariff regulations for general practitioners and specialists in the private sector.
Expropriation Act and the reality
Ramaphosa said again this week that the new Expropriation Act aims to return farms to black citizens. The reality is that the state – the SANDF, Transnet, Eskom, and other state enterprises – sits on millions of hectares of land that are not productive, and that so much of the land that has already been redistributed now lies vacant due to a lack of state support or inactivity.
The South African Navy these days consists of just a small handful of seaworthy vessels that bob around in the harbours now and then. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of rand worth of valuable property in the main base Simon's Town that is no longer used or maintained and could be sold.
Elon Musk's Doge, Brazil's ambitious project to curb corruption, Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash) from a decade ago, and Britain's Thatcherism of the 1980s are expensive lessons to learn how NOT to allow drastic interventions to damage the national interest.
But without our own drastic intervention against corruption and a wasteful big state, South Africa will enter dangerous waters that might just sink our little ship.
We're waiting for the captain.
♦ VWB ♦
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