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Sunday, May 31, 2015

SAB*

*Nee, nié Suid-Afrikaanse Brouerye nie, maar:

SUIWER AFRIKAANSE BRAAKSEL

"
My brother Pierre Du Plessis wrote:
'I am rather glad I attended this gathering. Like him or not, he is part of our political landscape. Listen and judge for yourself... He spoke for 2 hours.. Yes, that's me speaking to him at the beginning of this recording!'
This clip features Julius Malema - someone known for rather revolutionary soundbites - addressing a forum on the future of agriculture in SA. He is the leader of the Economic Freedom Front, and someone who has had bad publicity (depending on the views of the reader). However, in the minds of the white South African, he represents a threat. Not considered a friend of the white community, nor the governing ANC (who expelled him) - so therefore a lone ranger, yet with a huge following of the disenchanted youth who have seen no real change in the past two decades.
My own comment is below.
EFF-leier Julius Malema het Woensdag verskeie Bolandse boere in die Paarl toegespreek oor die toekoms van die landbou in Suid-Afrika.
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  • 2 people like this.
  • Andre Du Plessis I would have loved to attend this event and address him personally. I have so many questions for him. Yes, and as Pierre says, he is a player in the political landscape, and should be listened to, for he has the support of the grassroots. This is a democracy, and everyone is allowed to express their views, and although he has certainly not arrived on the scene in lily-white attire, I salute his effort to come and speak at this event. This 10-minute clip is an indication that he is a negotiator, and although he did not divert from his EEF agenda, he nevertheless used reason and common sense to bring his point across. Yes, and although he used simple illustrations to describe how to assist, and how that could potentially benefit the farmer, one should not discriminate against that naive request. For sometimes we talk leaves and branches, and miss the trunk. The bottom line is ..... farmers have benefitted from generations of labour .... loyal labour, and in this 10-min clip he has given one option to follow. In my opinion, probably not an unreasonable option as well, for what he suggested is that 'recognition' should be respected.
    I an not a farmer, nor a politician, but as a photographer I do knock on doors in the townships and in the farmlands. I have been doing that for 6 years now, and have visited tens of communities and more tens of farm worker's houses. Without exception I have experienced only loyalty to the farm owners. To their 'bosses' as Julius M used in this select audience. When he refers to generations, he is not wrong, for often three generations of one family are all present in their house, and all three generations have, and are still working for the same farm owner or sons / daughter. Many times, like on my recent trip into the Tzitzikame, have I thought : 'Gosh - you are so young, so well spoken, so pleasant and seemingly so intelligent - why have you not gone to school just over there in Knysna, at least to obtain some semblance of an education?' Yet, that opportunity never dawned upon the family, for there are no money, no vision to look outside of the immediate valley, and all hands need to work to get by. Is someone to be blamed for this? Probably yes, and most probably no, for what has been the system, seems to still be the system. Both in the minds of this young gent's elders, who could have given more objective guidance, and also in the minds of those that own the farm and govern the workers. However, one cannot appropriate blame, for this is the convention, and especially in the more rural areas - things change slowly. But ....... it is now more that 20 years later, and it seems appropriate and just that convention should accommodate thoughts that encompass a bigger and more inclusive vision.
    Like him or dislike his views - it is only fair that we listen and think what is best for all. Because only if 'all' becomes the motive, things will change for the better. And .... the sacrifices that seem initially might seem painful might actually not seem so acute, nor chronic.
  • Eliza Deacon Andre thanks for posting this...am really interested to listen to him, particularly after reading your words above. We know of him up here of course and for the more negative reasons that you list. Out on a job now, but back later and will have a listen.

Friday, May 29, 2015

HOE LANK IS 'N SLAP TOU?

How Long will South Africa Survive?
THE short answer to the question that is the title of RW Johnson’s new book, How Long will South Africa Survive?, is roughly two years.
That is when, he suggests, given the increasingly dire state of the economy, the country, cap-in-hand, will approach the International Monetary Fund for a bail-out which, in turn, will result in a regime change of some kind.
It’s a scenario he unpacked at the Cape Town Press Club recently as part of the hurly burly of public engagements to promote the book. It will more or less be like this:
Unemployment would continue to soar. The budget and trade deficits would continue to rise. Foreign investment along with domestic capital would continue to leave the country. Downgrading by the ratings agencies would continue, resulting in the inevitable junk bond status. With that, the cost of our debt will sharply rise to a point where it may become impossible to service the debt at all.
Should these trends continue –– “and currently they are continuing” –– it was only a matter of time before government realised the headlong pitch into a debt trap could not be avoided without IMF assistance.
This, Johnson believes, would signal the final failure of ANC governance –– kissing off their economic sovereignty. As he explains in the book, “For the IMF would, of course, demand conditions for its support, the government would lose control of economic policy and inevitably part of the deal would be huge spending cuts, certainly in the public service pay bill and perhaps also in social grants. In addition there would, inevitably, have to be a liberalisation of the labour market which would give the coup de grâce to Cosatu and thus the SACP. And much more besides.”
“And I think that this is not more than about two years away,” he told his press club audience. “We are clearly heading in that direction. I don’t think that government has grasped this. . . Well, [Minister of Finance Nhlanhla] Nene has grasped this, but I don’t think anyone else has. I’m not pessimistic or depressed about this because I think it will be actually quite good for us. But I think we are in a situation where things have got to get a bit worse before they get better.”
Two years? That’s it?
“Well,” Johnson said in our interview later that afternoon, “I’m guessing. Everything takes a bit longer than you think. But if you look at our current situation . . . It’s obviously possible that the ANC can pull themselves together and just miss the fate that I’ve said they were heading for, but I doubt it. Equally, I don’t think that’s the very worst by a long way. I think if they were to refuse that deal then, sure, you would see chaos.”
* * *
THE last time Johnson stuck his neck out like with prattle of regime change was in 1977 with a book he called, oddly enough, How Long Will South Africa Survive? (The title was retained for the new work, he explained, partly for nostalgic reasons.) That earlier book provided an analysis on the survival prospects of the apartheid regime. At the time, he said, white South Africa was in a state of crisis –– this was just after the Soweto riots –– and the possibility of a regime change was on the agenda, but Johnson argued that it would take longer than most commentators suggested, and probably only in the mid-1990s.
Although the new work is completely different, he argues that the country was facing a crisis once more and, again, the possibility of regime change was in the air.
“I reach this conclusion on a number of grounds,” he told the press club. “But I start off with the fact that there is a sort of iron law about South African history that, ever since the discovery of deep level gold, this country has worked on the basis of a steady inflow of foreign capital. It’s been fundamental for our development for over a century. And if that is ever threatened, it stops, and you do get a regime change.”
The last time this happened, Johnson said, was in 1985 when the rand collapsed in the immediate aftermath of then-president PW Botha’s Rubicon speech. “I would argue that the change that took place in 1990 when [FW] De Klerk took over was simply ringing up what was in the till already from 1985 and then you had a prolonged period of no investment and stagnation, I remember that period very well. It was a really awful time.”
Much like the period we’re in now, he added.
The “very clear sign of this” was how the market just kept moving “up and up” because, although they were making “good money” and generating profits, companies were piling up cash reserves rather than reinvesting into the economy. The effect, Johnson said, was “an investment strike”.
His chief point here was that the ANC government –– “although not wishing to do this” –– had repressed economic activity in various key sectors, including manufacturing, mining and agriculture. Manufacturing, as a proportion of GDP, had fallen by half since 1994. Mining had been “hobbled by all sorts of crazy laws” with the result that production was under considerable downward pressure.
Farming was under the same pressure. “What should be happening is huge investment in commercial agriculture and, of course, it’s not happening and you know the reasons why not. Farms are under threat of being taken away.” On top of this, were other difficulties farmers faced –– electricity and water shortages, “difficult labour laws” and so on.
“The net result of which,” Johnson said, “has repressed economic activity and the growth rate has fallen to 2%. The fact is that it is even that high is simply due to the fact that we have the highest concentration of mineral resources in the world. And that’s still what’s really driving things.”
Enter then the IMF. A greatly alarmed IMF. . .
* * *
IN terms of Article IV of the IMF’s Terms of Agreement, member states are subjected to regular inspections and appraisals concerning their obligations and duties regarding fiscal policy. In 2012, the fund’s delegation to South Africa, according to Johnson, had “expressed considerable shock at Pretoria’s priorities”. It is one of the more startling chapters in Johnson’s book, the summary of which was delivered to his press club audience as follows:
“They say, ‘There’s this extraordinary thing. We’ve never seen anything like this anywhere else in the world. We’ve seen this huge [global] financial crisis, the downward dip in the economy, and here [South Africa] correctly increased its expenditure, that was quite right, like you should have done, that was good, but what did you spend it on? You gave your civil servants a 40% [pay] rise. I mean, people who are already in employment, quite well paid, suddenly get this enormous bonanza? This was absolutely crazy. We’ve never seen any other government in the world ignore its unemployed to the extent that you have just done. That money should have gone on infrastructure, it would have created new jobs. It would have been good for the economy. Yet you gave it away to people who are already at work. What on earth did you think you were doing?’
“And the result, is that unemployment in South Africa has gone up more than any other middle-income developing country. I think it’s quite a point when you get the fact that the ANC government is being reprimanded so solidly by the IMF for not being sufficiently sensitive to the needs of the unemployed. I mean, this is really quite a situation.”
This “downward drift” was unlikely to be stopped anytime soon. “Government,” Johnson continued, “will be the last people in the country to understand the nature of the economic crisis as well. Their minds are on other things. Like getting rich, staying in power, whatever. Various ANC priorities.”
And so the steady march to a situation where the only way the country could pay its debt was by further borrowing.
“I think there are many pressures for this. The energy crisis is obviously one. That’s cutting our rate of growth. Slow growth is another. The fact that social grants are predicated on the assumption of at least 3% growth, which we’re not getting, so what happens? Politically it’s impossible to cut the things. But at this rate they won’t be able to put them up either.
“Another thing is the public sector workers who are again demanding large increases and I notice [government] has upped its pay offer from 4.8% to 7%. Now there’s no way they can afford that –– 4.8% where economic growth is 2% is quite nice, really. But they’ve upped it to 7%.
“Now Nene quite rightly said, ‘We can’t give you more than 4.8% because the only we can pay that is to borrow money in the financial markets abroad to pay your salaries. And if we don’t do that, then we’ve got to cut somewhere else to pay them. So that’s why we can’t go more than 4.8%.’
“But, as I say, they’ve just abandoned [Nene’s thinking]. Now all these things will exert pressure towards a further downgrading, along with such crazy projects as the National Health Insurance Fund, which means enormous portions of the GDP suddenly going on a new and almost certain-to-fail project.
“The new scheme for creating black industrialists is another such thing. I mean, in a situation where your manufacturing sector has fallen by half, hanging on to the industrialists you’ve got is quite a struggle, let alone creating new ones.”
* * *
THERE would, Johnson suggested, be great resistance from certain quarters to any deal with the IMF. Their bail-out conditions would likely signal an end to Cosatu and the SACP’s hold over the economy.
“That means, of course, that they must resist,” he said. “It’s a survival of the fittest. So you can be absolutely sure that those segments of the ruling alliance will fight back tooth and nail. And of course there will be other people in the ANC who will feel the same.
“This was exactly the point that was reached in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, which ended up with [President Robert] Mugabe saying to the IMF, ‘You must go to hell.’ Now, all Zimbabwe’s crises that have unfolded since then have basically come as a result of that one big decision.”
While there may be strong political resistance to accepting an IMF bailout –– and possibly adopting a similar position to Mugabe’s –– our position, Johnson claimed, was not the same as that of Zimbabwe’s.
“And we are not the same for two reasons. Firstly, [Zimbabwe] was a largely rural country, with two large towns, Harare and Bulawayo. If push came to shove, people could move back into the rural areas and scratch out a living on the land. It’s not great, semi-starvation. But they could do it.
“Secondly, they could move in their millions down here. Or, to a lesser extent, to Britain and Australia and other countries. Botswana and so forth. Now if we face anything like the same situation there’s nowhere south of us to go. We don’t have that safety valve. And our fundamentally urban population is not going back to the countryside. So we are much more locked in and the things that allowed Mugabe to get away with that refusal do not exist here.”
And so the overwhelming pressure, Johnson maintained, to accept the IMF bailout. When that happens, he added, a coalition government would be ushered in. There are three possible coalitions. One is an uneasy DA-ANC partnership which would have to meet its obligations regarding any arrangement with the IMF.
Another is a coalition between Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters and the ANC . “But this is based upon a refusal [of an IMF bailout]. But if you refuse, what do you do then? I mean, you still need the money, you still need to get out of the hole you’re in. There isn’t actually an alternative. Now, I think if you did pursue that route, you’d end up with the dissolution of [a unitary] South African state.
“The state would be progressively less able to carry out its functions and in that sort of situation I don’t think that you can bet upon South Africa remaining the one country. This country was put together artificially by a lot of blood and suffering a hundred years ago. It wasn’t a natural union and if the central state runs into the sort of chaos you’d get then I think all bets are off, we don’t know what would happen.”
The third possible coalition would be between the DA and EFF. This, Johnson suggested, would be a pragmatic way for the former to get a majority control of the large metros. “[The DA] would have to accept that,” he told me, “with one or two portfolios, the EFF would make a nuisance of themselves, and so forth. You’d have to allow them to do that, appoint their little buddies here and there and so on. But if it were like Cape Town, the election after that would result in an overall majority for the DA and they’d say, thank you very much, and goodbye. So it would be five-year experiment.”
* * *
AS our interview wound up, Johnson spoke at some length on the present administration’s ills. His book opens with an astute analysis of Jacob Zuma’s rule and his world. It is an era of “family corporate behaviour”, he writes, that “has brought about the sweeping criminalisation of the South African state”; under Zuma, the party has become “directionless” and, in the words of ANC Gauteng spokesman Dumisa Ntuli, “a complete mess”.
Asked if Jacob Zuma could be seen as the real legacy of Nelson Mandela’s presidency, Johnson replied, “Yes, I think it’s all one thing. I don’t agree with the DA view that Mandela was wonderful, [Thabo] Mbeki was alright, and Zuma’s terrible. I think it’s all a continuous slide from the beginning.
“At the moment the big truth is that since 1994 the ANC has relied upon the inherited infrastructure from white rule. Roads, airports, electricity supply, water. The whole thing. They’ve gradually been running it down by failing to do maintenance and so forth. No wonder the Mandela period did better because the running down had only just begun. And Zuma is getting it in the neck because now we’ve had 21 years of running it down and it’s becoming very threadbare and worn and obvious.
“Look, the ultimate truth is that, if you look at our cabinet, there probably isn’t enough proper talent there to run a medium-sized town in Europe or North America.
  • 9 people like this.
  • Johannes Boshoff Well said and true. I for one would think the Afrikaner " ie white" will break away and start their own homeland and economy.
    1 hr · Like · 3
  • David B Hutton Not only that Johannes Boshoff, the Afrikaner will systematically take full control again. Even Russia & China prefer to deal with stable governments. The current govt is using its last few years to stockpile as much as they can as they are aware that their days are numbered.
    1 hr · Like · 1
  • Bennie Barnard "Hear-hear"...!!
    1 hr · Like
  • Colin Beazley There is zero chance for an Afrikaner homeland, the world at large will simply not allow that to happen. 
    Not on the grounds of practicality or anything else, just on the grounds that it will immediately be seen as a return to apartheid and that cannot happen. 
    The reality will not matter.
    1 hr · Unlike · 3
  • Coenraad Beukes The sad reality is - South Africa can keep going for a LOOONG time. That same people who owned most of the stock market in old SA and still own it now will keep it going! If things get bad they will pump in more cheap money and the "game" shall just continue as long as there is minerals to mine (Zimbabwe very good example). For Russia - they have committed themselves elsewhere and will be kept busy there because the US is trying to contain them. China prefers non-stable governments, stable governments in Africa is a illusion. Unstable governments are much easier to bribe/control - again just look at rest of Africa - who is mining rest of Africa without a stable governments - China is pumping in cheap money and building infrastructure to suite themselves and pretty soon will be able to back up their "colonisation" of Africa with military power and are already making those sounds. China does not want a strong and especially white SA! The same people who rationalised themselves into voting YES in 1994 shall help keep it going because they will have a nice house a car. THERE IS NO POLITICAL SOLUTION! UNTIL WE FIX IT WITH GOD AS A PEOPLE IT SHALL JUST CARRY ON and ON and ON!
    1 hr · Unlike · 4
  • Hendrik Pieterse This is a excellent summary, I travel extensively in Africa and it has happened in every country, how will SA be the only country to miss the effects of mismanagement and incompetence.
    1 hr · Like · 2
  • Francois R P Schutte Coenraad Beukes jy is reg, hul kan dit nog lank aan die gang hou kunsmatig. Wat ek egter tans ervaar is 'n baie meer versnellende nood (selfs opmerkbaar in week tot week tendens) by blanke gesinne (finansieël). Ek het in die 20 jaar nog nie so tendens soos tans aanskou nie - ons ken nou amper geen familie in werk, kerk of skool waar die nood nie reeds begin, of net voor die deur staan nie. Ek vermoed die wa kraak nou hoorbaar. Gaan hy breek of gaan hul hom kan spalk?
    37 mins · Like · 2
  • Hendrik Pieterse Francois R P Schutte , ek dink spalk se tyd is verby , geleentheid is gemis. As ek kyk na die survivors in die res van Africa is dit indiers en lebinese . Hulle vorm "clicks" van ekonomise en sociale support. Type van n bende stelsel wat werk in africa-opset . Jammer om te se maar ons is swak daarmee. Ons het n meer f@#$ jou ek sal dit self doen gesindheid. Dit het ons baie goed gedoen in die laaste 350 jaar maar dit is die een wat met verandering kan aanpas wat gewoonlik wen. Adapt or die , kan ons vinnig genoeg aanpas ?