Pliny the Elder (AD23-79) is reputed to have said “Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre” which, translated, suggests that Africa always brings us something new.
However, a French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, wrote in 1849: “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” The more things change the more they stay the same.
The latter quotation seems to me to better reflect the reality of Africa than the first.
In his monumental work, The State of Africa (2005- Simon & Schuster), Martin Meredith describes the period in the 1980s when a number of African countries were in dire economic straits and looked to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to bail them out.
The IMF/World Bank agreed to assist. But they laid down conditions, the basic thrust of which, as Meredith notes, was “to get governments to shift from consumption, so favoured by elites, to investment.”
Immediately, notes Meredith, this “aroused strong opposition in many quarters.”
He adds that “the IMF/World Bank insistence on economic efficiency as the criterion for their aid threatened the system of patronage and patrimonialism that underpinned the rule of most African leaders.”
Sounds familiar, does it not?
Meredith goes on: “Africa’s bloated bureaucracies and systems of regulation were crucial political assets, the means by which the ruling elite provided jobs, contracts and other opportunities for kinsmen and political supporters.”
Sounds more and more familiar, doesn’t it? And it brings to mind our own dysfunctional cabinet of 35 ministers and 38 deputies not to mention thousands of “advisers” and, spokespersons, secretaries, drivers, security guards, pilots, vast homes in Pretoria and Cape Town, domestic staff and so on and on.
The UK has a cabinet of 20. Their GDP is almost $3 trillion while ours is $312bn, about 10% of theirs. By the way, our GDP has declined from $416bn in 2011 as our currency collapsed under the weight of ANC corruption and incompetence
Of course, our giggling, dancing, philandering, innumerate president flits about the world on his private jet like some brilliant statesman from an important country. Important? Our GDP is 0.5% of the world’s total. If we disappeared overnight no one would notice.
One suspects that Zuma is quite happy to part with a trillion rands of our money for a Russian nuclear plant because he actually has no idea whatever how much a trillion is.
Meredith quotes Douglas Rimmer, an economist at Birmingham University who specialises in African affairs, and has written that Africa’s political leaders have never been primarily concerned with economic growth but rather with the maintenance of political power and the distribution of wealth to themselves and their supporters.
“They were unaccustomed to restraint. African elites faced losing the perks and privileges that economic control of the state had given them.”
Rimmer adds that these elites “regarded public enterprises as a symbol of national sovereignty, however badly they performed; for years, they had treated private-sector entrepreneurs with disdain and discrimination.”
Thus we have the farce of one of Zuma’s lady friends, the unqualified Dudu Mnyeni, running SA Airways into bankruptcy all the while blaming the costs of the pilots for its troubles.
She appears blissfully unaware that there is a world-wide shortage of commercial pilots, that the highly successful Middle East operators such as Emirates, Qatar, Etihad and so on are actively recruiting pilots and that she is running SAA into the ground while being championed by the lecherous Zuma.
So for Christmas I thought I might present Zuma with a copy of The State of Africa. He would surely enjoy it more than he does The State of Capture by Thuli Madonsela.
