Obama’s US jobs success highlights Zuma’s failures

Everyone gets a raw deal every so often. Barack Obama, the President of the United States, got his the year he won his first presidential campaign in 2008 – the American economy imploded, affecting economies across the globe, and millions lost their homes and jobs.

In January 2009, when Obama was sworn into office, more than 750000 people lost their jobs in the United States and unemployment was nearly at 10%.

Last week Obama was on the Jimmy Fallon show and crowed about his achievements. It was one particular achievement that he kept on repeating, and for any leader anywhere in the world it would be worth repeating with pride.

This is how Obama’s chief economist Jason Furman put this achievement recently: “In 2016, the American economy is in the midst of the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record, with businesses adding 14.6 million jobs over 74 straight months. Unemployment has been cut in half from its peak during the recession, and now stands at 5%. Rising home prices have brought millions of American homeowners back above water.”

Read that again: Unemployment retreated from 10% to just five percent.

Let me bring this back home. I have written long articles about why the President of South Africa is going nowhere soon despite the clamour for him to do the right thing and take an extended holiday at his beloved Nkandla.

That’s my analysis of the balance of forces inside the African National Congress, an organisation which once was great, proud and clear about the fact that it existed for the liberation of the poor and oppressed and not for the enrichment of a narrow, connected, political elite. Of course, the state president’s position may be weakened somewhat depending on how the party performs in the August 3 elections, but for now he is master and commander.

To my mind, though, one of the problems with my, and many other’s, analysis is that we are not judging the president and his administration on his true failures. Sure, the man has allowed the brazen undermining of key state institutions (this is a man who allowed an alleged mass murderer of his own people, Sudan’s Omar al Bashir, to escape justice despite a clear court order instructing our president to ensure that he is kept here) and has led a looting spree across state-owned enterprises.

The man’s transgressions are legendary, but small fish compared with what he has failed to achieve.

Last week it was reported that South Africa’s economy shrank by 1.2% quarter-on-quarter, according to the latest gross domestic product (GDP) figures published by StatsSA.

Read that again: Shrank. It did not slow down. It is going backwards.

Then there is unemployment. Our jobless rate was 26.7% in the first quarter, the highest in at least eight years. Eight years? That’s how long Obama has been in power in the US. That’s how long Zuma has been in power in South Africa.

You might think this unemployment figure is terrible. It’s far worse than you think because it does not include “discouraged” job-seekers (those who have given up looking). If you include these then the unemployment rate soars to 36.3%! In total, there are 8.9-million unemployed people in South Africa.

In February the World Bank said South Africa needed annual economic growth of 7.2% from 2018 to achieve the government’s targets of reducing the jobless rate to 6% by 2030. It is 2016 and our economy has contracted by 1.2% in the first quarter. In 2008, when he fired President Thabo Mbeki and promised to do better, it was growing at 3.6%.

It goes without saying that Zuma has been a disgrace to the great movement that was once the ANC. His actions over the past 10 years have turned all South Africans into a laughing stock across the globe. He is a shame to himself and his glorious movement.

All this is insignificant, though, when compared with his betrayal of the poor, the downtrodden, the desperate “masses of our own people”. Instead of creating jobs, he has since 2009 run a criminal cartel that has failed the poor at every level. There are no jobs on the table. In his maiden state of the nation address in parliament in June 2009, Zuma said government planned to create about 500000 job opportunities by December of that year. He was lying, of course, just as he lied in parliament about former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene going to the Brics Bank.

The Americans will be saying goodbye to Obama at the end of this year. He has something to celebrate. They have something to celebrate.

South Africans? Sadly we have a man who has achieved nothing, a man who will achieve nothing, still with us for another three years.