Presidency’s budget vote another reminder govt is dangerously out of touch

Punch-drunk at being the continual bearer of bad news, the big media houses fall back on the trite and tested. It’s all celebrities and mundanities, calculated to reassure us that life in our abnormal society is proceeding, um, normally.

But it’s not optimism and reliance on feelgood platitudes that are needed. What is needed is to get to grips with nasty realities.

Instead, the presidency budget vote this week was another reminder that the government is dangerously out of touch.

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President Cyril Ramaphosa assured us that tourism is booming, overseas investment is flooding in, the energy crisis is under control, a national electricity blackout is implausible, and that universal healthcare is imminent. An array of ANC MPs and ministers then took turns to lavish praise on Ramaphosa.

We are blessed, gushed ANC chief whip Pemmy Majodina, to have a strong leader “who [doesn’t] go to ground when there are challenges”.

Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni revealed that the business community was awash with confidence in the president, aside from a few pesky “outliers”. That may indeed be so.

Corporate executives have a vested interest in being accommodating towards a government that, like many governments, has both the power and inclination to retaliate vengefully against its critics. But it is arguably better to seek the country’s pulse beat of confidence among the hundreds of thousands of ordinary folk.

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These people, because they are risking their own wealth and not that of anonymous shareholders, take the most soberly assessed decisions of all. It is at the granular level, in the actions of individuals, that our South African future is shaped.

The power of small actions is coincidentally also the theme of an analysis done by the respected but unconventional economist, Claude de Baissac, CEO of Eunomix. In an article at the beginning of the year, he painted a dismal picture of a country that he concluded had no more than 15 months to change its fatal course.

On the positive side, there was, however, an “improbable window of opportunity”. Disaster could be averted if Ramaphosa was to act decisively, taking a series of small steps which, collectively, would equate to a giant leap to safety.

The plan was simple and open-ended. A crisis Cabinet, working in small teams to tight deadlines, would have as its sole mission “to enact small, decisive policies currently in place but hobbled, and new policies that deliver fast”. That was six months ago.

So far, Ramaphosa has done nothing. But hope springs eternal.

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In this week’s budget vote, Ramaphosa mentioned that he and Deputy President Paul Mashatile had, in recent weeks, met ministers to identify specific tasks that required focus. Among these were the impact of load shedding, unemployment and poverty.

However, hope should be tempered with realism.

One troubled entrepreneur contemplating bailing out deserves the last word.

“SA’s downward trend is exponential rather than linear. A lot of factors are now coming together very quickly and I would not be surprised if things come to a head sooner than expected. What lies on the other side remains to be seen.”

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