Commies take us back 100 years

Last week President Obama's man in Pretoria was quoted as saying that labour relations in South Africa were 40 years behind the times.

Such utterances by the de facto head boy of the diplomatic corps are deeply puzzling, even worrying. Especially when they come from someone who was once considered one of the brightest sparks at the White House.

On the day that His Excellency Patrick Gaspard was making his statement, Iqbal Survé's rags were quoting, at length, one Castro (yes, really) Ngobese, the national spokesman for metal union Numsa. Ngobese used a large piece of newsprint to bemoan the appointment of Lesetja Kganyago as governor of the Reserve Bank. (What I like best about Kganyago's appointment is the consternation any news item about him is going to cause among foreign TV presenters when they have to pronounce the new governor's name; they had it easy with Gill Marcus.)

Arguing that banks should be nationalised (starting with the Reserve Bank), Ngobese railed against Kganyago's appointment, saying that it ". opens old but unhealed wounds among workers, given his brutal and ruthless pursuit of neo-liberal capitalist financial policies when he was deputy director-general of the Treasury".

Accusing the Reserve Bank of applying "sado-monetarist" policies - by making money expensive - Ngobese went on about evil capitalists, including SABMiller, Old Mutual and Anglo American, which, he suggested, should have been forced to keep all their profits and dividends in South Africa and not take them overseas and then argued for more exchange control, not less.

Unless I'm particularly misinformed, Numsa is one of our biggest trade unions, and when a senior official comes out with such utterances it is hard to believe that we could possibly have any sort of labour relations that are only 40 years behind other grown-up countries. Bizarre anachronisms like Numsa and the Bolshies running it would take us back a century to the good old days when Vladimir Ilyich and his revolutionary comrades were on the cusp of fomenting a whole new world order. Sadly, that didn't work out, and today the Russians only put up with Vladimir Putin because he reminds them of cuddly old uncle Joe Stalin.

Where was I? Oh yes, having a go at Numsa . Every year, as regular as clockwork, the metalworkers' union embarks on a nationwide orgy of violence which reminds one not so much of anything that happened 40 years ago as of the Dark Ages. Little steel fabricating businesses in unfashionable industrial parks are besieged and vandalised and scabs terrorised. And the cops turn a blind eye because their bosses are, or were, in alliance with the union bosses. You see, to suggest that we're 40 years behind the rest of the world on labour is crazy; with the likes of Numsa on the scene, our labour relations are to harmony what Attila the Hun was to diplomacy.

Sharing the Opinion page with Ngobese last week was an equally pie-in-the-sky piece of wishful thinking, a transcript of a speech delivered by President Jacob Zuma at the opening of the Dube Tradeport Industrial Development Zone (IDZ) near Durban.

Apparently they're going to make aeroplanes at Dube Tradeport which will, by 2060 (when the president is, I reckon, 117 years old), be contributing 0.5% to our GDP. That's an awfully long time to wait for decent job-creating economic growth, but it is better than nothing. Which is what we will have if the dyed-in-the-red-wool Commies like Ngobese have their way.

We now have eight IDZs, their very existence a sad admission of failure; that foreign investors want to have their cake and eat it; that they want to use our labour but don't want to pay proper taxes and would prefer to be fenced off from hot-headed unionists who will try to burn down their factories whenever they feel like it.

One thing you can be sure of is that investors in IDZs are jolly well going to move their profits wherever and whenever it suits them. I don't like profit-crazed capitalists any more than Ngobese, but we need their investment if we're going to create jobs.

And you can't get foreign investment if you tell investors that they have to invest everything they make into Nando's franchises or Sanral bonds.

(Follow @peterdelmar)