President Cyril Ramaphosa made a soaring speech a week ago to a Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation conference in the Drakensberg on inclusive growth. "If we are to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the past and the troubles of the present," he intoned, "we must be prepared to dream.
"We imagine a country where no one is afraid to walk the streets at night, where families sleep peacefully and all pay tax knowing that their hard-earned money will be well spent and properly accounted for.
"We see a country that has embraced the benefits of technology for economic growth, social development and for more effective governance."
And so on. But watching from afar, the conference, a great opportunity for actually describing in granular detail what inclusive growth might entail, was just ordinary. The ANC has been talking about inclusivity for decades and it still hasn't been able to describe in any detail what it entails.Welfare is not inclusive. It merely keeps the poor poor. Our electoral system isn't inclusive either - it doesn't make public representatives accountable. Economic growth as we measure it isn't inclusive. It is just a number. The new draft Mining Charter is the opposite of inclusive - it will merely create more elites as the floor for black shareholding rises from 26% to 30%.
Inclusivity requires, of every law and every activity of government, that it measurably includes more South Africans in its benefits. It is hard and intricate work, going beyond the dream of clean government to make absolutely sure that in some way every single South African has a material stake in the physical wellbeing and prosperity of our country.
There is only one path to follow to get there. We must reform the way we create wealth and the way we distribute it, and the vehicle for doing that is profit.
Profit is new money, it is created wealth. It is delivered through the mechanisms of capitalism.Not the sclerotic Victorian capitalism we have and still cling to, where a few take most of the spoils. Capitalism is infinitely flexible. Provided we protect the profit motive here, we can do almost anything with it.
Instead of dreaming about it, Ramaphosa could instruct his finance minister, in his next budget, to create and fund a scheme whereby every child born here from May 1 2019 receives R50000 from the state. There are 1.1million births a year in South Africa. The scheme would cost R55-billion a year, a fraction of what is stolen or wastefully spent by the state.
The actual money is put into an actual bank account for the child on the day they are born. It belongs to them. It is real savings. It is invested by the best fund managers in the country. Their target is a 10% annual return (inflation plus 4%, let's say).
The children get to pull the money when they turn 21. If the fund managers have done their job, there will be R370012.50 in an account for them.
Some will waste it. Others won't. Buy property. Buy 10 cows. The state has first dibs at the child's estate when they die.
By law, workers should have a seat on the board of every single South African company. The sight of Eskom workers triggering load-shedding as Ramaphosa was speaking was just tragic.Had they been on the Eskom board when the Guptas controlled it they could have cried foul. They would have got the same board packs at the same time as the rest of the directors. They would have known it was being horribly overstaffed and cruelly looted.
They could have warned their members and the rest of us. All we have now is the cry that workers should not pay for the sins of their managers.
And land is the easiest problem to solve. Follow Helen Zille's chain of thought when she praised Singaporeans for the way they had turned their colonial slum into an economic powerhouse. What they did was expropriate land.
They paid, but capped the compensation. Then they built like crazy, producing their first economic boom. And the more title they handed out, the more wealth and value they created.
Our time for dreaming is past, Mr President.
The ANC balks at fiddling with the market because it doesn't understand the power of profit or of stakeholder capitalism.
The result is that we are in a time warp, working with a wealth-creation model more than 200 years old and expecting it to work in an economy that simply no longer exists...