Covid’s gift to SA economy

Many on SA’s hard left argue there is no point in tinkering with the economic system that sustained race discrimination.

Just blow up the whole damn thing and start over, taking China as your template. To these ideological Bravehearts, Covid-19 is not a disaster.

It’s an opportunity to restructure the racist, colonialist, capitalist edifice and put into its place a socialist alternative based entirely on black economic empowerment (BEE).

The Black Management Forum’s Dumisani Mpafa explained this, somewhat inarticulately, at a webinar in May, just as the government was getting into the swing of aggravating the pandemic’s effects with the world’s harshest lockdown.

Mpafa said: “We’ve been trying but we have not been able to, you know, achieve sustainable progress in terms of transformation.

My view is that this is because we are dealing with a solid economic architecture that is so strong that unless something drastic happens, it simply perpetuates racial inequality.

“And, of course, there are voices that argue that the architecture of this South African economy is so strong and structural that you can’t sabotage from (sic) it. You have to bring it to its knees and rebuild it afresh if you want to achieve transformation.

“And, well, it is not a social campaign that has brought it to its knees, strangely, it’s the coronavirus and so one can argue that Covid-19
has gifted the country with an opportunity to build a new economy, an economy with explicit, you like, defined, you like, new economic edifice that does not exist in the economy we have in this country.”

What I took Mpafa to be suggesting – as have a number of radical economic transformation (RET) thinkers – was a course of action akin to burning down the house to get rid of the white mice, at which interpretation the webinar organisers took umbrage.

What Mpafa was actually saying, they earnestly explained, was the exact opposite: “The part about bringing the economy to its knees and starting afresh isn’t Mpafa’s own opinion, but an opinion he’s rightly disturbed to have heard from others.”

The incident merits retelling, partly because it illustrates an intellectual dishonesty that is rife in SA – advancing destructive scenarios but
refusing to take responsibility. But more importantly, because the “something drastic” that the ideologues wanted, has now happened.

The economy, indeed, has been “brought to its knees”. Seizing the Covid-19 opportunity, the government has done great damage to the alcohol and tobacco industries.

The economy has shrunk by an annualised 51%. About 2.8 million jobs were lost in April and mostly not been recovered. At the expanded definition, unemployment now exceeds 50%.

But the ideologues see the silver lining. A new economy is emerging and demeaning work is being eradicated, with more than 250,000 domestic worker jobs lost.

RET will also be infrastructural. President Cyril Ramaphosa envisages smart cities and bullet trains. To this end, RET squads are hard at work.

The entire rail network that the arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes had hoped would run from Cape Town to Cairo, is being removed.

To be more exact, it is being dug up, kilometre by kilometre, by thieves. Railway stations are being painstakingly dismantled and powerlines
removed.

One is struck dumb by the perverse and self-defeating enthusiasm that so many have for destroying our national assets. As bad, they do so with impunity.

But, hey, wait until you see the new economic edifice that the zealots are going to build.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.