It’s not every day that talk of a R2-plus increase in the petrol price isn’t the most alarming bit of petrol-related news. But here we are, in the last gasps of ANC-run SA, at the bottom of a world having a panic attack about energy.
In case you haven’t heard, or are in deep denial like me, there are strong indications the cost of a litre of fuel will rise next month from its current price of No Come On Man to about Well This Is Just Stupid.
Should things get worse, the state has even been murmuring about rationing fuel, which I assume will be a process whereby taxi associations yank off the gates of petrol refineries, shoot the guards and reverse fuel tankers towards whichever pipe isn’t on fire.
One thing we won’t be doing, according to Gwede Mantashe, is buying cheap and nasty oil directly from Russia. For once the DA agreed with him, insisting we should keep buying ours from much more respectable sources, such as those enlightened humanists over in Saudi Arabia who bomb Yemeni hospitals rather than Ukrainian ones.
It all gets very silly, very quickly. What is clear, however, is that SA is hurtling towards some severe economic pain.
How we got here is slightly more complicated. According to Iqbal Survé over at Independent Online (which, in case you’d forgotten, unblushingly publishes Russian state propaganda verbatim), the soaring oil price is the result of — well, why don’t you try to guess?
Has the oil price gone stratospheric because Russia invaded Ukraine? Not quite. The spike in the price of crude is the result, says Iqbal, of “sanctions by Western countries on Russian oil”. I suppose it’s not technically a lie, but still, you have to admire the man’s determination to do Moscow’s bidding.
But you don’t need to be a historian or currency trader to see that steady decline turn into a rout, as criminal negligence crippled Eskom and Mbeki’s policy of cadre deployment replaced capable bureaucrats with human ficus bushes in every municipality outside the DA-run Western Cape.
How we really got here, of course, was via Covid-19, which slashed the world’s consumption of energy and prompted oil majors to start the complicated (and very slow) process of scaling back production. The moment they’d effectively wrestled an immense and complex cork into the well, the global economy came roaring out of the pandemic far faster than the cartels could wrestle the cork free. Putin’s invasion might have spiked the oil price, but that came on the back of a relentless upward march that has lasted almost a year.
For SA’s tens of millions of poor citizens, already unable to afford the average basket of basic household goods, the surge in the prices of petrol and diesel have been a catastrophe, with staple foodstuffs and taxi fares taking an unbearably large proportion of their incomes.
It’s a disaster for all of us. But it’s also a disaster for the ANC, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing for our collective future.
To be clear, the ANC is not responsible for the oil price. But it is absolutely culpable for accelerating the decades-long slide of the rand, the value of which is a key element in the price of petrol.
When Nelson Mandela took office a US dollar was worth R3.64. On Thabo Mbeki’s first day as president it was it was worth R6.08. Shortly before Jacob Zuma pretended to take the oath of office it was R8.44. Cyril Ramaphosa started his term with a dollar worth R11.65. Since then it has hovered between R14 and R16. At the time of writing a Ramaphosa Rand is worth roughly a third of a Mandela Rand.
Again, there are mitigating factors. The rand started its decline before the ANC took power: in 1985 it “crashed” to — do not scream — R2 to the dollar and had been tracking gently lower through the 1980s and early 1990s.
But you don’t need to be a historian or currency trader to see that steady decline turn into a rout, as criminal negligence crippled Eskom and Mbeki’s policy of cadre deployment replaced capable bureaucrats with human ficus bushes in every municipality outside the DA-run Western Cape.
The next few months are going to be horribly tough. But perhaps they will be enough to get the message through once and for all ahead of the 2024 elections: SA can have an economy or it can have the ANC.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.