Nene's fall shocking - but a change had to come

President Jacob Zuma’s sacking of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister this week was a shock to the country.

For all, everybody is currently praising Nene for his economic sobriety – we’re one notch off of junk status.

Our rand was already collapsing, our deficits were already up, unemployment is at a quarter of the working population, and things are all round bad.

Whether it is Nene's fault, or the fault of general corruption in our government, our economy currently sucks, and it was well on the road to worsening long before Nene was hired and fired.

When you’re on the highway to hell, changing direction isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But does David van Rooyen represent a change in direction? I don’t think so. I think van Rooyen represents accelerating on the precise same course we were on with Nene.

And that course is massive spending on stuff that doesn’t help our economy, but rather expands the economies of others.

An economy where we hear that there isn’t money to do this or that, but the head of state can get a new jet.

When corrupt ministers buy German cars or French planes – it doesn’t stimulate our economy, it stimulates the European economy.

This is one of my major beefs with austerity – it is a concept in which the rich are deemed gods, and their priesthood in politics demand the poor make sacrifices.

The priesthood wears Armani as it takes the economic knife to the throats of the poor. When they tell us the gods demand sacrifice, isn't it funny how the priests are never the ones being sacrificed?

We need an economic policy of stimulus – something to boost local demand, to boost local production, to boost the world’s thirst for the Rand in order to give us some control over the value of our currency.

We’re currently subject to a situation where we massively disadvantage ourselves and act like that is patriotism.

We need a macro-economic revolution – which means a serious analysis of how our current economic system works, and how to make it work for us.

Nationalisation does not change things all that much for us. That is still the old thinking of mines being our major economy – even as the mines run dry.

What we need is new products, new businesses, new ways of thinking.

We need to think of how we can create situation where we don’t worry about being employable, but about finding employees, to find the arrogance to unlock the talent we as a nation have.

Humility is leading to our humiliation, because generally we as a people do know better, we do understand our problems, and we don’t want to brag.

We also don’t want to be the ones others point to when our ideas fail. We lack leadership, because we don’t want to lead.

And that hurts us because we can become a first world power, but it will not be an African miracle when we do. It will be through the brains and hard work of our people, it will be the result of us figuring it out together.

And yes I say when not if, because we cannot spend all the rest of our time as a species arguing over the latest bullshit pulled by our latest president. There has to come a time when we step up and fix things.

The only question is – will we do that now, or will we continue to wait for things to get worse?