And a happy Year Zero to you, too

Ah, a new year! That wonderful time of momentarily unbridled optimism and hope.

Except that one knows things have hit a new low when the only time of the year that the country is assured of electricity, is during the three-week festive season holiday break. It’s that time of the year when the most onerous burden on Eskom is to keep the fairy lights flickering on the Christmas tree.

It’s also a new low for SA when President Cyril Ramaphosa’s solemn, hand-on-heart promise to the nation that there would be no load shedding between December 17 and January 13 had been broken by January 4. The King Canute-like failure of Ramaphosa to decree a national power supply is emblematic of the failure of a “command” economy of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

It also signals the president’s general political impotence. Given the rate at which Ramaphosa is at present effecting change, he will have to be president for life to make the necessary impression. We do not have that long.

When the final figures are crunched, 2019 will be shown to have registered close to zero percent growth. And while analysts are excited about growth in 2020 being as much as 1.7%, everyone knows SA needs at least double that.

The scale of the problem is shown by tax statistics just released. Sars paints a bleak picture.

The corporate sector contributed 18% of tax revenue, but there were about 600,000 fewer companies registered in 2017-18 – and of those registered, only one in four made any profits. A mere 380 entities pay 57% company tax.

The dependence on the individual taxpayer is enormous, with 38% of revenue coming from this source. Out of a population of 56 million, three million pay 97% of personal tax and a minuscule 190,000 – earning more than R1 million a year – paid 37%.

Government figures show 29,000 public servants now earn more than R1 million a year. So, the creation of wealth, in both the self-employed and corporate sectors, depends on fewer than 160,000 individuals.

Yet, with the destruction of private healthcare and the expropriation of private property, the government is doing everything it can to alienate this group. The Professional Provident Society has just surveyed its members, finding that 72% of all professionals would leave if the National Health Insurance Bill is implemented.

About 40% of SA Medical Association’s members hold similar sentiments. And 41% of all health professionals in a Solidarity survey said they were considering emigrating – 21% had already taken steps to do so.

Even if only one in 10 of those contemplating emigration will actually do so in the next two years, the economic effect will be calamitous.

The tax base will shrink, making impossible a system supporting 17.6 million social grant recipients, 1.3 million public servants, 920 elected representatives, about 700 SOEs and 62 Cabinet ministers and deputies. The government will have to either cut out the deadwood, or watch the tree topple over.

Perhaps, worse, is that the national knowledge store will be grievously depleted by that scale of emigration. Institutional memory will be irretrievably lost.

Year 2020, the beginning of a new decade – or maybe just another step in the ANC’s project heading towards a revolutionary, Pol Pot-type of Year Zero.

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