Small business suffers bane of holidays

Today's lesson should have appeared last Wednesday but, well, it was a holiday and so there was no paper that day.

As South Africa went to the polls, we all congratulated ourselves on the fact that, while we we're mostly happy to elect any old crook to public office, we are at least very good at voting.

A turnout of 73%, the pundits told us, was world class, way more than the US where, traditionally, only half the electorate votes. (Or Saudi Arabia, where no one votes, but nowhere near as good as North Korea where 110% voter turnouts are commonplace despite the electorate only being allowed to choose one guy.)

On Wednesday last week, I drove to my local voting station although in all honesty I could have walked there. The IEC laid on so many voting stations there were almost as many of them as there were voters. In fact, 14 parties which contested this year's election received fewer votes than there were polling stations.

I left home at 8am and was back by 8.30am, hardly exhausted by my participation in the democratic process, and wondering what to do with myself for the rest of the day.

Normally by about 8.30am, if I'm not doing the school run, I've already done two hours of remunerative work but there wasn't much I could do last week because the rest of the country was at home, loafing around the back yard after their brief brush with democracy, ignoring phone calls and e-mails.

The Thursday before that we celebrated Workers' Day - by not working. And the Sunday before was April 27, a momentous occasion on which we marked the 20th anniversary of our precious democracy.

And how did we do our bit to build our fledgling democracy? By staying at home and doing nothing the next day.

(The only people I managed to get hold of on Monday April 28 were self-employed.)

Just a few weeks ago, we had the long Easter weekend. Since mid-April, clever salaried South Africans have been able to put in a few days' leave and get a fortnight or so off work, fully paid, without adding a jot of value to their employers' businesses or the national economy.

It comes just three months or so after the country actually got off its backside again following the prolonged December-January holidays, preceded as always by the traditional November slowdown.

Now we're only a month or so from strike season - a time of year when hundreds of thousands down tools because that's what's expected of them.

Some economists have calculated that each public holiday costs R1-billion, which would mean that taking off 14 official days costs us R14-billion a year - a figure that is the worst kind of thumb-suck which no one can take seriously. Any suggestion that public holidays cost just R14-billion a year is about as believable as the suggestion that Julius Malema ties his own shoelaces.

Economists are, as we all know, mostly salaried people (or academics who, when they're not on sabbatical, only work slightly more days a year than Father Christmas or the Easter bunny).

The go-slow entailed by two-thirds of the supposedly economically active population goofing off for days or weeks on end in April and May while we celebrate democracy, nation-building, the proletariat and all things bright and beautiful, might be great for the work-shy but it's the last thing entrepreneurs and others who actually work for a living need.

Millions of South Africans still have little to celebrate 20 years after democracy while a minority drive shiny new Toyota Corollas and get paid to stay at home for a large chunk of the year.

We need to get serious about building South Africa. And that means working a great deal harder than we do at present, not going on strike when we're not on annual leave or throwing as many sickies as we think we can get away with.

We don't need a whole day off to vote and we certainly don't need Mondays off just because a particular day of celebration happens to fall on a weekend.