These are frightening times for our country. We are caught in the middle of an emerging-markets crisis as the dollar strengthens and plummeting US unemployment pushes up interest rates there. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump's trade war with practically the entire world has only just begun. It could have a devastating effect on small but open economies like ours.
The rand and the stock market, like equities and emerging-market currencies all over the world, have taken a sickening dive. Foreign investors, on whom we depend to supplement our poor savings rate, have been selling South African debt - government bonds - at such a rate (R34.7-billion since January is the official number but probably an understatement), that the drain outpaces the sell-off after the 2008 financial crisis.
It's grim. The government borrows up to R20-billion a monthto pay for schools, hospitals, welfare and, since former president Jacob Zuma doubled the public service, salaries as well. It is a formidable task and the bond sell-off means the National Treasury has to offer increasingly higher interest rates to attract buyers. Earlier this year it calculated our interest payments alone at R214-billion a year by 2020-21. That is more than R850-million every working day.Into this mess we add a progressively worsening crisis of political leadership. President Cyril Ramaphosa is distracted by infighting in his own party and cannot fashion a secure economic future. In the vacuum, the South Africa story foreign investors are reading is reduced to the fog of land expropriation and elevated racial tensions.
All fancy policy ideas aside, economic growth is the only effective way Ramaphosa can anchor his leadership. Instead, he is treading water and we are on the edge. Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe's new Mining Charter will repel investment, not attract it.
Meanwhile, picking fights with Israel (and by consequence, the US) over its appalling treatment of Palestinians also ignores our wider economic interests. No gesture we make will have the slightest impact on the Israeli government. We should send our ambassador back to Tel Aviv and continue to raise our voice against human rights abuses.
Equally, the ANC's determination to take South Africa out of the International Criminal Court threatens to further isolate us from sources of support and investment. Principle is one thing, but someone should put a price to it before asking South African workers to pay it.
Almost worse than the ANC's inability to grasp the imperative for growth has been the clear collapse of leadership in the official opposition, the DA. Where it should be fighting loudly and daily for economic common sense, its pursuit of Patricia de Lille, its errant mayor of Cape Town, has all but consumed it.
De Lille's court victory this week preventing the DA from expelling her on flimsy and opportunistic grounds undoes much of the work the party has done over the years as an effective opposition. Heads at the top of the party should roll.They won't, of course, but the DA will pay a price in the elections next year. And with a weakened opposition there are fewer brakes on the pursuit of destructive policy. Former DA leader Helen Zille may have made a hash last year of praising Singapore for the way it emerged from the literal swamp of colonialism, but I doubt she would have allowed the De Lille saga to damage the party the way the current leadership has.
Zille cannot stand for another term as Western Cape premier next year, but she is at least a warrior. Nominated unopposed as leader ahead of the DA's 2015 elective congress, she stood aside for Mmusi Maimane after failing to persuade Athol Trollip to stand aside for Wilmot James as party chair.
Trollip jumped with joy after beating another challenge for the chairmanship from a black colleague, this time Tshwane mayor Solly Msimanga, at the DA elective congress earlier this year. The job must mean a lot to him, but along with Maimane and the party's federal council chairman, James Selfe, he must bear responsibility for screwing up the De Lille affair. We will all pay for their bungling and conceit.
South Africa lives precariously and we are not alone in that. Perhaps we have an innate ability to step back from the abyss, from the kind of failure that would invite the world's lenders of last resort to step in and tell us how to save ourselves. But, boy oh boy, we're pushing our luck right now...