As economists tell the ANC that it needs to make the pie bigger, and it wonders whether it might be time to form a ministerial task team to find out what pies are and whether you can make them while floating facedown in a pool of slowly warming champagne, the budget hangs in the balance.
(That was a long and exhausting sentence, but I thought you might appreciate it: after all, nobody else is handing out long and exhausting sentences, least of all the NPA, but I digress.)
On Thursday, as the DA denounced the 3.3% increase in VAT, and finance minister Enoch Godongwana accused its GNU partner of “compromising” the independence of the Treasury by calling his budget an “ANC budget”, experts cut through the politics to expose the cold, hard fact that tightening the screws on a shrinking and thoroughly knackered tax base will simply cause it to collapse faster.
The consensus was clear: the only way South Africa gets out of its fiscal mess is to grow the economy.
At this point some readers might be tempted to suggest that the ANC couldn’t grow a foot fungus in an equatorial gym.
At this point some readers might be tempted to suggest that the ANC couldn’t grow a foot fungus in an equatorial gym. This, however, is unfair since it is a fact that the party has overseen dramatic growth in many sectors of the economy.
Private schooling, for example, has flourished under the ANC. Almost every solar panel or inverter installed privately owes its existence to the ANC. In every town and city in this country, there are private security guards, private armed response teams and private bodyguards putting food on their children’s tables thanks entirely to the ANC. And that’s to say nothing of all those poor wretches who, unable to find work, or at least work that allowed them to lie down for most of the day, have been gainfully employed as deputy ministers.
Why, just this week the Special Investigating Unit told parliament that it had identified 334 people who are employed by Eskom but who also have direct interests in businesses that supply Eskom. The ANC is often accused of not knowing how business works, but those 334 people are clearly excellent entrepreneurs, and surely owe their double incomes to the ANC.
Still, I understand why many people are sceptical. Whether the ANC’s inability to grow the economy is the result of intellectually ordinary politicians getting locked into stale orthodoxies, the state-enforced entropy of cadre deployment, or simply the decadence that takes hold among people who have been guaranteed an ever-increasing pay cheque for 30 years regardless of how well they do the job, the fact is that the ANC is completely unequipped to do even the most basic economic spring cleaning.
The problem is, I’m not even sure it wants to.
Oh, it knows it has to, sort of, maybe. But how, when the DA has more or less cornered the pro-growth market? And it’s not as if the ANC can even give up and promise populist fairy tales: that’s territory already thoroughly staked out by the MK Party and EFF.
No, all it can do is keep doing what it’s always done: the same as last year — and hope nobody burns anything down.
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