TOM EATON | Cyril and his jolly crew of buccaneering roustabouts must be made to walk the electoral plank

It’s a gripping tale of chaos on the high seas; of desperate men and exotic ports on Africa’s southern coast. Yes, the pirates have returned to stalk our harbours. Their flagship is the dreaded Transnet, and they fly no flag but the Jolly Cyril. Nobody is safe.

Of course, pirates have been preying on this country for centuries. Some of them have statues of themselves outside colleges in Oxford. Others have more modest memorials, like firepools or hastily abandoned mansions in Saxonwold.

Many of their customs, too, have remained more or less unchanged: today’s pirates still prefer to take their booty in cash, to be buried in banks or stuffed into couches.

The effect they have on local shipping, likewise, has barely changed in 300 years.

Just this week we learnt that 41 container ships are hovering nervously at sea, unable to approach our major ports, while the huge Maersk line is now avoiding Cape Town entirely, preferring to unload in Mauritius to avoid running into Pravin “The Garrote” Gordhan, a captain whose mild manner belies the relish with which he strangles businesses to death.

What is radically new, however, is the fact that our pirates, the ones who have so violently interrupted all sea trade with this country, have never set foot on a boat, unless you count the 1/25th scale model of the Queen Mary that Cyril Ramaphosa sometimes sails around his guest jacuzzi. They are lubbers, one and all, who’ve managed to cause more economic devastation than Blackbeard and Henry Morgan combined, simply by being their catastrophic selves.

Admittedly, Transnet and the desperadoes who fly the Jolly Cyril aren’t the only buccaneers lurking in these parts. Many privateers — what the press calls the private sector — are just as quick with a knife as any of Pravin’s boys, and sometimes more so.

Indeed, according to minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, standing resolute on the poop deck of her rapidly sinking metaphorical ship, it’s the private sector that’s the real problem.

“We have maintained ... that the performance of the rand and sometimes the performance of the economy has been manipulated by [the] private sector,” she said, a sector which, she insisted, “has no interest in the development of this country”.

Now, I studied neither economics nor finance so it’s possible that there’s a whole discipline dedicated to understanding how collapsed economies and penniless consumers are great for private enterprise. Just because I personally have never met a business owner who tries to keep their customers poor in order to limit the number of products they can buy, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen all the time.

Of course, it’s also possible that Ntshavheni, being a member of Ramaphosa’s cabinet, is feeling a bit threatened by the relative competence and efficiency of private enterprise.

It’s possible that we’re about to experience not just load-shedding but product-shedding, an entirely new sensation brought to us by the ANC, whereby shops put up schedules for when they think they might be getting such-and-such a container containing such-and-such goodies.

There was more than a twinge of envy, for example, when she claimed that the private sector continues to “do machinations to ensure that the government collapses”. I can understand how this rankles: when you’re part of a government that is trying so hard to collapse itself, but you don’t have access to anything resembling a machination, it must be pretty demoralising to have to keep doing it one qualified audit — and one unqualified cadre — at a time.

At least, that was the modus operandi until recently. Now, the collapse of the government, by means of the collapse of the economy, has been dramatically hastened by Captain Pravin and his blockade of our ports. I’m sure a few odds and ends are still getting through, mostly humanitarian essentials like Chinese-made T-shirts to hand out at ANC rallies, but importers are already fretting that Christmas might be hit.

Indeed, thanks to Captain Pravin and the Jolly Cyril he serves, it’s possible that we’re about to experience not just load-shedding but product-shedding, an entirely new sensation brought to us by the ANC, whereby shops put up schedules for when they think they might be getting such-and-such a container containing such-and-such goodies.

Of course, it’s extremely unlikely. But we live in a country that is itself extremely unlikely, endlessly sat upon by mediocre people whose rise to the position of cabinet minister is most unlikely of all. In this country, almost anything can happen. Well, except finding out what happened at Phala Phala.

The so-called Golden Age of piracy came to end in the early 18th century, though I suspect a lot of us gave it a damned good run for its money in the mid-1980s copying LPs to tape.

Mostly, it was ended through violence, which is absolutely out of the question in this analogy. But it wasn’t just cannon fire and public hangings that slowly squeezed the pirates off the map of the world. It was also the arrival, in the places once infested by criminals, of government in the modern sense; of professional bureaucracies; of a respect for — or at least a grudging acceptance of — the rule of law.

Ultimately, what ended the pirates was the refusal of a modernising world to stay trapped in an economic system based entirely on charismatic predators taking what they wanted.

Ramaphosa and Gordhan are neither charismatic nor predatory — both are too comfortable to hunt what they eat — but they preside over a fleet of country-killers. Next year we must sink it at the polls, or it’s the plank for the lot of us.