At the end of 2020, optimism is essential… but I’m sceptical

Hooray! It’s my final column for 2020 and after yet another year of being a curmudgeonly old bastard, it’s good to hit a happy, high note.

After all, hope has its own cycle. A new year beckons, the world economy continues to defy gravity and the rand has clambered to its knees from a knockout count.

And optimism is essential. Without it, we’d just curl up and whither.

But, alas, I am sceptical. The almost palpable buoyancy that has manifested as we approach the end of this grim year is illusory.

Among wild animals, being alert to threats and nimble at sidestepping them is key to survival. So, too, with governments. In a world undergoing tectonic shifts, speedy adaptation is of the essence.

Weak governments and weak states, however, are not nimble. They are reluctant to shift from comfortable positions and when the threat is so great as to eventually prod them into lumbering action, they are as likely to charge into danger as to avoid it.

SA has a weak government perched precariously on top of a faltering state. Under President Cyril Ramaphosa’s well-intentioned but ineffectual leadership, we have belatedly bestirred ourselves in the face of imminent peril, but are lurching in the wrong direction.

It should be unnecessary to list the many examples of weak ANC governance. If you haven’t noticed, then you haven’t been paying attention to what is happening around you.

There are tangible dangers, the ones that media harp on about all the time. But like the threat of the stalking leopard, they could conceivably be outmanoeuvred had South Africa the collective wit and will to do so. We don’t.

The ANC is consumed by the imperative to hold onto power. The populace continues to vote it into power despite its every failure.

As in Zimbabwe and most of Africa, by the time that desire for electoral change awakens, it will be too late.

As if all these omens were not gloomy enough, it gets worse. As part of its calculated determination to make an alternative ideological future impossible, the ANC has successfully stacked with its cadres the institutions that are supposed to guard our democracy and shaped them, instead, into mechanisms to protect the ANC’s narrow understanding of democracy.

In their shared approach to the issues that will determine our near future, the Human Rights Commission and the Constitutional Court are steadily and willingly excluding minorities from the great South African experiment.

There is already a fresh exodus of the middle class – not only of minorities but also of some black African professionals – taking place. Add in directed investment portfolios, the scramble to increase and find new administrative taxes and an enthusiastic lobby for a swingeing inheritance tax, and emigration is bound to increase.

This is reflected in two potentially explosive sets of statistics.

In the first three months of the lockdown, more than a quarter of a million domestic worker jobs were lost. Add in gardeners, drivers and private security guards, and that rises to 311 000. A large proportion of these jobs will never be recovered.

Then there’s the collapse of the small, medium and micro enterprises. A Finfind report found that 43% of SMMEs surveyed across every sector had closed during lockdown.

To return to the bush analogy, our Springbok is trotting determinedly towards the undergrowth where the predators lurk.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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