ZimZuela on the horizon, fuelled by race and flawed policy
Political parties, social media, the media in general, and much of our society is riven by race.
This is hardly surprising, given our relatively recent past, and the reservation of opportunity and spoils by a racially defined history spanning more than a century.
And so, it’s racial classification rather than class that now defines and informs the historical tit for tat we are witnessing.
The extractive relations visited by some black tribes on others has been forgotten, no matter how brutal. What seems matter, above all else, is the unifying privation visited on black people by whites.
Our fortunes, a result of colonial and post-colonial integration into world markets, are tied to a global engine and system that has presented us with opportunities beyond the wildest dreams of pre-colonial existence.
We are now part of this global society; we were drawn into it as a result of colonial integration. Our nation states, even, owe their existence to this impetus.
Post-colonial society has evolved beyond the forced exclusion of people on the basis of race. We all now compete with what we have, what we inherited, and with what we are able to dynamically fashion, to provide us with a competitive advantage.
Yes, there are historical issues of racial redress; if we go back a little further, there may be issues of tribal redress. The hierarchy of redress may even necessitate, in the eyes of some, a gradated approach.
Redress, redress, redress: this has been the focus, in large measure of successive ANC governments, over the past quarter of a century.
Some redistributive progress has been made. Access to basic rights and services have been democratised to a degree. The output could have been remarkable, but was held back by graft, poor policy, worse implementation, elite entrenchment, and layers of cost – quantum and quality – that that has resulted in the evolution of a state poised on he cusp of failure.
Yet, we obsess about race – a zero sum, divisive approach that detracts from inclusive building of our comparative and competitive advantage.
It infects every strata of society, every political party, and almost every discussion. It acts as brake to what we could achieve - together.
More homogenous societies – India, China, and Korea, for example, have made huge strides since the days of colonial domination. Some diverse societies – the US and Brazil come to mind – have achieved differential measures of progress.
The point is, that they have all made these strides because they have, built on their advantages – inherited and fostered.
We, on the other hand, are focused on racial redress, and policies that aim to socialise the little we have – instead of growing the proverbial pie, and ameliorating the position of the disadvantaged on a non-racial basis. Equality of outcome appears to trump carefully-costed equality of opportunity. The result is an absence of fiscal space – commonly defined as the budgetary room that allows a government to provide resources for public purposes without undermining fiscal sustainability.
Add to this the protection of a labour aristocracy in the face of unemployment around the 30% mark, hopelessly inefficient state-owned companies that live off bailouts from treasury, and a rent-seeking corrupt elite that consumes without creating, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Toss into the mix, the expropriation of property without compensation and the introduction of a National Health Insurance scheme based on a failed pilot project and an inability to run a parallel credible and functioning public health sector, and you accelerate the speed at which disaster is courted.
The one area where valuable dividends could have been paid into the nation’s prospects – education – has been mismanaged and woefully neglected despite the hugely disproportionate spend by comparison to peer counties.
What more needs to be flagged, by way of warnings?
To make matters worse, there is little leverage by the ANC government of those sectors and indicators in which South Africa has a significant advantage – the efficiency of corporate boards, quality of management schools, market size, financial market development, availability of financial services, innovation advantages, an abundant mining sector and the potential of agriculture.
It’s all very well to mouth platitudes about the 4th industrial revolution while aiming to create 11million jobs by 2030, while we sit at 10million-plus unemployed, in a shrinking economy, on a ship charted by a stolid and ossified plan, while a department of planning straight out of GOSPLAN in 1950 Moscow, steers the ship towards a wishful Nirvana.
In reality dystopia, in this dark dawn beckons, and it matters little whether a Ramaphosa or a Mabuza delivers us to this undesirable place.
Ghaleb Cachalia MP is DA spokesman on the Presidency.
