Penny hasn’t dropped for ANC, while SA’s economy stutters along

In the late ’70s, when the British economy was in a pit darker than a Welsh coal mine, the comedy show Not the Nine O’Çlock News produced a deadpan “news bulletin” about the dire state of affairs in the country.

“The government announced today,” it ran, “that the drain on Britain’s gold reserves has finally ended… they’ve all gone.”

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That graveyard humour was appropriate to a country brought to its knees by years of ill-conceived socialist policies aimed at setting up a welfare state Utopia and by unions that held everyone at metaphorical gunpoint.

The Labour governments had spent more than they earned in taxes.

Many say a complete collapse was only averted by the “harsh medicine” of the Margaret Thatcher era, with civil service cutbacks, the reduction of social benefits and by the wholesale privatisation of state entities.

South Africa could be sitting at just the same pre-Thatcher watershed.

The country is teetering on the edge of a bankruptcy, which could push the economy into total collapse.

That’s the warning from Business Leadership SA’s Busi Mavuso.

If government does not cut its spending, then we could be headed down the road of Argentina, Greece or Zimbabwe, where there could be massive disruption to public services, the retrenchment of much of the public sector workforce and the collapse in value of government debt.

If we don’t curtail spending, she warns, even the social safety net we do have at the moment could disintegrate.

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Yet, the ANC is unlikely to see the economic writing on the wall.

Its sheltered employment for cadres and its social grants are the ways it buys votes – and a critical election looms.

Yet the taxpayer cupboard is looking bare as the economy stutters along.

It’s time for the government to start listening to its experts in National Treasury and they are saying: cut spending.