PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma was in fighting form last week as he replied, in Parliament, to opposition criticism of his state of the nation address the week before. Just you wait, he said. Just wait until after the election and watch my new administration really get this economy pumping.
Actually, the word he used was "transform". Just watch the "transformation" of this economy take off, in other words.
There is good and bad about that. If he means the "transformation" of a strangled Victorian economy unable to grow jobs, uncreative, and capable of neither fairness nor inclusion, then it would be great to see him try.
If, as experience would suggest, he sees "transformation" purely in terms of colour (or, worse, ethnic group), and that all is required is that blacks replace whites at the heads of companies and businesses, and that somehow black South African Victorian "capital" will behave entirely differently to the white version, then we are in for more of the same ineffective economic drift and spreading social discontent of the First Zuma Administration. It has been, by any standards, a disaster.
The reason why it is hard to know what the president thinks is because of the company he keeps.
Blade Nzimande is never going to raise the standard of our universities, not in a thousand years. Instead, he will "white-ant" them into the ground. All of them.
Ebrahim Patel and Rob Davies, to whom Zuma has handed over almost the entire content of our industrial future, are starry-eyed communists who know how to spend wealth but not how to create it.
They seem genuinely to believe that you can plan and "create" industries and industrialists where they did not exist before, as though no one anywhere else in the world is already doing it. As though no one has already made all the mistakes and no one already has as customers all the people who want the product we think we’re going to make.
How, unless Zuma finally has the courage to stand for common sense, can he transform this economy for the better?
Our ability to profitably beneficiate (apart from the most basic refining) locally the minerals we dig out of the ground is severely limited, no matter how low the government sets the price at which ore be made available to local "manufacturers" of whatever product.
We have no markets for beneficiated ores. We would have to take markets away from the people we currently sell our ores to. And they would fight back. We would lose.
Zuma’s "transformation", driven by his advisers, is more likely to create a new generation of shattered and broke black industrialists than anything else. Anyway, we don’t yet have the electricity to power a South African industrial Renaissance.
The only way out for this economy is to dig up as much ore as possible, create as many mines as possible, try, as far as possible to control the prices of what we dig, and to export it.
The same goes for farming, the only other thing we do well besides mining. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who owns the farms and it doesn’t matter who owns the mines. They just have to know what they’re doing.
Repeat after me. Grow more food and export it.... Dig up more rock and export it.
...
IN AN editorship as long as mine, you don’t make too many friends. That’s fine, most of the time. When people write in and call you names, I think you’re duty-bound to print their letters. Nowadays, on social media, the savagery is boundless and instant. It’s all good.
And occasionally you make honest mistakes. When we do, my policy has always been to defend what has to be defended; but if you’ve messed up you fix it quickly and in the same place where the error occurred.
But I know that I have occasionally hurt the feelings of people I like and respect because I’ve been thoughtless or forgetful.
The mention here last week of both Mzilikazi wa Afrika and Darrel Bristow-Bovey was pointless and I apologise. I am, just to reassure at least one Business Day reader, thrilled to have both back in print.
But my worst, my biggest (and oh how I’ve tortured myself for not fixing this when I should have) regret in close to 18 years as an editor in this fine newspaper group was the front-page story whose headline had Gidon Novick being fired from Comair about four or five years ago.
It just wasn’t true. And when he called to gently remind me, I swore to him I’d correct it.
But I never did. For whatever reason, I forgot. And then it seemed too late.
A wonderful guy with a genius for marketing (he was the brains behind kulula.com), he now runs the Vitality programme at Discovery. They’re lucky to have him and Gidon, it is really late now, but I am very sorry I let you down when it mattered.
President Jacob Zuma. Picture: MARTIN RHODES
PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma was in fighting form last week as he replied, in Parliament, to opposition criticism of his state of the nation address the week before. Just you wait, he said. Just wait until after the election and watch my new administration really get this economy pumping.
Actually, the word he used was "transform". Just watch the "transformation" of this economy take off, in other words.
There is good and bad about that. If he means the "transformation" of a strangled Victorian economy unable to grow jobs, uncreative, and capable of neither fairness nor inclusion, then it would be great to see him try.
If, as experience would suggest, he sees "transformation" purely in terms of colour (or, worse, ethnic group), and that all is required is that blacks replace whites at the heads of companies and businesses, and that somehow black South African Victorian "capital" will behave entirely differently to the white version, then we are in for more of the same ineffective economic drift and spreading social discontent of the First Zuma Administration. It has been, by any standards, a disaster.
The reason why it is hard to know what the president thinks is because of the company he keeps.
Blade Nzimande is never going to raise the standard of our universities, not in a thousand years. Instead, he will "white-ant" them into the ground. All of them.
Ebrahim Patel and Rob Davies, to whom Zuma has handed over almost the entire content of our industrial future, are starry-eyed communists who know how to spend wealth but not how to create it.
They seem genuinely to believe that you can plan and "create" industries and industrialists where they did not exist before, as though no one anywhere else in the world is already doing it. As though no one has already made all the mistakes and no one already has as customers all the people who want the product we think we’re going to make.
How, unless Zuma finally has the courage to stand for common sense, can he transform this economy for the better?
Our ability to profitably beneficiate (apart from the most basic refining) locally the minerals we dig out of the ground is severely limited, no matter how low the government sets the price at which ore be made available to local "manufacturers" of whatever product.
We have no markets for beneficiated ores. We would have to take markets away from the people we currently sell our ores to. And they would fight back. We would lose.
Zuma’s "transformation", driven by his advisers, is more likely to create a new generation of shattered and broke black industrialists than anything else. Anyway, we don’t yet have the electricity to power a South African industrial Renaissance.
The only way out for this economy is to dig up as much ore as possible, create as many mines as possible, try, as far as possible to control the prices of what we dig, and to export it.
The same goes for farming, the only other thing we do well besides mining. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who owns the farms and it doesn’t matter who owns the mines. They just have to know what they’re doing.
Repeat after me. Grow more food and export it.... Dig up more rock and export it.
...
IN AN editorship as long as mine, you don’t make too many friends. That’s fine, most of the time. When people write in and call you names, I think you’re duty-bound to print their letters. Nowadays, on social media, the savagery is boundless and instant. It’s all good.
And occasionally you make honest mistakes. When we do, my policy has always been to defend what has to be defended; but if you’ve messed up you fix it quickly and in the same place where the error occurred.
But I know that I have occasionally hurt the feelings of people I like and respect because I’ve been thoughtless or forgetful.
The mention here last week of both Mzilikazi wa Afrika and Darrel Bristow-Bovey was pointless and I apologise. I am, just to reassure at least one Business Day reader, thrilled to have both back in print.
But my worst, my biggest (and oh how I’ve tortured myself for not fixing this when I should have) regret in close to 18 years as an editor in this fine newspaper group was the front-page story whose headline had Gidon Novick being fired from Comair about four or five years ago.
It just wasn’t true. And when he called to gently remind me, I swore to him I’d correct it.
But I never did. For whatever reason, I forgot. And then it seemed too late.
A wonderful guy with a genius for marketing (he was the brains behind kulula.com), he now runs the Vitality programme at Discovery. They’re lucky to have him and Gidon, it is really late now, but I am very sorry I let you down when it mattered.
