TOM EATON | Tell me about economic freedom, but don’t be a sellout

Many debates in parliament are simply an opportunity to showboat or tick a name on the class register. But this week’s so-called “Freedom Day Debate” offered some refreshing insight.

I’m not talking about the “debate’s” unanimous conclusion that poverty is preventing many South Africans from accessing the freedoms of democracy. We’ve known that since 1994, and any MP who thinks it’s still up for debate in 2022 probably has no business being an MP.

No, I’m talking about the participation in the debate of a certain Tina Joemat-Pettersson, and, indeed, the fact that she opened proceedings.

According to Joemat-Pettersson, simply having a constitutional democracy was “not enough”, and to this end, she explained, the ANC was trying to embark on the next phase of the struggle.

For a moment I wondered if this second phase would include things the ANC has been so far unable to do, such as hard sums, or not stealing any money that isn’t nailed down. But she quickly explained that she was talking about “economic freedom”.

Now, I’m a big fan of economic freedom. I’m especially impressed by how the leadership of the EFF have put it into practice, securing economic freedom for themselves atop a wonderfully efficient multilevel marketing scheme. Hell, they didn’t even have to buy heaps of Tupperware or diet pills to sell on: their product is rhetoric, and their profits are parliamentary salaries and perks forever.

But with all due respect to the ideals of Freedom Day and the generally sensible idea of debating its current successes and failures, any parliamentary debate about economic progress in SA which features Tina Joemat-Pettersson has been concluded before it starts.

This, after all, is the person who was energy minister when SA sold 10-million barrels of oil from its strategic reserve in a secretive deal, shortly after the oil price had plunged from over $100 a barrel to about $35, offering private, undisclosed buyers further large discounts and the option for the state to buy back the barrels at hefty markups.

Joemat-Pettersson was cleared of any personal wrongdoing in the deal by public prosecutor Busisiwe Mkwhebane, who found that the minister hadn’t acted with malice but had been duped and was therefore merely a gullible rube and not a criminal.

But I’m not sure that anyone who was involved in that scandal, whether through wickedness or stupidity, or who defended and upheld the rapacious regime of Jacob Zuma, has any business being in parliament, let alone being involved in a debate about SA’s economic future.

So no, the Freedom Day debate and its unanimous conclusion told us nothing new. But they showed us exactly why we’re in the state we’re in; a state in which people who have no business in government continue to occupy parliament, talking and talking and talking about the next phase of a struggle they sold out years ago.