Your leaders are making you poor. They have been doing so since 2009 and will keep going as long as they can while becoming richer themselves.
As the scandals of the rotten Jacob Zuma administration pile up, we have all focused on #GuptaEmails and the deep tentacles of the corrupt gang he leads. Everything we have known has been confirmed. The rot stretches in all directions.
Ayanda Dlodlo, the new communications minister that some of us always regarded as incorruptible, had her trip to Dubai paid for by the dastardly Gupta family that seems to pay all in our cabinet.
When she was appointed, even Julius Malema said the only person he respected in that reshuffle was Dlodlo. Now it emerges she too is implicated. At least she had the decency to confirm the trip and give her side of the story. But these are small mercies in a cesspool of corruption and denial.
But your leaders are making you poor. Fast. Indeed, at the rate that the Zuma administration is going, the cupboards will be bare when the man hightails it to Dubai in 2019.
Mark my words: Zuma will turn this economy into a Zimbabwe by the time he leaves office. You, dear reader, will be waiting tables in Botswana very soon because your country’s economy will have collapsed.
Don’t believe me? Last week it was announced that the SA economy is in a technical recession. Technical? Really? As the editor and columnist Peter Bruce put it in Business Day, poor people know that “we are in a recession, plain and simple”.
If you don’t agree, just look at the unemployment numbers. StatsSA announced last week that unemployment was now back at 2003 levels at 27.7%. When Zuma and his cronies kicked Thabo Mbeki out of power in 2008, it was at 21%.
Zuma, the man who in 2009 promised us half a million jobs within six months, has been steadily destroying jobs since he came to power eight years ago.
Last week, we learnt that SA had slipped into a recession after its gross domestic product declined 0.7% during the first quarter of 2017 after contracting by 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2016.
The economy is no longer growing. That means that jobs are no longer available, that taxes for government expenditure are lower and that – crucially – we cannot even increase the grants of those on social welfare. SA Inc is stuck in the mud.
Why are we here? The answer is right in front of us. No businessman or woman, no investor – domestic or foreign, trusts Jacob Zuma. A young woman in Thabazimbi will set up a cosmetics shop if she knows she will not be robbed every day.
A global mining company will buy a coal mine if it knows that the president’s friends will not squeeze it out of business so the mine can be stripped and flipped.
Under Zuma neither the young woman nor the mining investor can be assured they won’t be robbed.
There is no confidence in SA. There is too much political uncertainty. Is Zuma going to stay or will he go? If he stays is he going to expropriate property without compensation (as he likes to tell traditional leaders in KwaZulu-Natal) or will he stay within the confines of the Constitution (as he likes to tell the handful of bankers who still like to waste their time meeting him)?
Zuma’s midnight cabinet reshuffle – in which confidence-inspiring leaders such as Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas were removed from the finance ministry – in March was pivotal in shaping sentiment towards South Africa.
Moody’s, the ratings agency that has consistently been the most positive on SA, was forced to join others and downgrade South Africa last Friday – by one notch to BAA3.
This is now just one notch above sub-investment grade. It wasn’t unexpected. Moody’s had placed South Africa on review for a downgrade in April after Zuma’s reshuffle.
The two other agencies, S&P Global and Fitch, still have us at sub-investment grade or “junk”.
For working South Africans, things are going to get tougher in the next few years.
Food‚ petrol and the cost of home or car loans will begin to go up. Government needs to keep spending while the costs of its own borrowing will now be more expensive – so it will look to you and me. That means taxes will rise. Ordinary people will get poorer. All this thanks to Zuma, a man who is getting fabulously rich through his corrupt association with the Gupta family.
Much has been said about the numerous scandals roiling SA at the moment. Many more are coming. The country is being looted right before our very eyes.
The real tragedy of what we are seeing here is that the well-off are becoming poor. The poor are getting poorer. The number of jobless people swells.
The marginal are now desperate and will soon be begging at the street corner. Zuma is making you poorer, and poorer, by the day.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” said Bill Clinton once. Nobody here is listening.
OPINION: Your leaders are making you poor
As the scandals of the rotten Jacob Zuma administration pile up, we have all focused on #GuptaEmails and the deep tentacles of the corrupt gang he leads. Everything we have known has been confirmed. The rot stretches in all directions.
Ayanda Dlodlo, the new communications minister that some of us always regarded as incorruptible, had her trip to Dubai paid for by the dastardly Gupta family that seems to pay all in our cabinet.
When she was appointed, even Julius Malema said the only person he respected in that reshuffle was Dlodlo. Now it emerges she too is implicated. At least she had the decency to confirm the trip and give her side of the story. But these are small mercies in a cesspool of corruption and denial.
But your leaders are making you poor. Fast. Indeed, at the rate that the Zuma administration is going, the cupboards will be bare when the man hightails it to Dubai in 2019.
Mark my words: Zuma will turn this economy into a Zimbabwe by the time he leaves office. You, dear reader, will be waiting tables in Botswana very soon because your country’s economy will have collapsed.
Don’t believe me? Last week it was announced that the SA economy is in a technical recession. Technical? Really? As the editor and columnist Peter Bruce put it in Business Day, poor people know that “we are in a recession, plain and simple”.
If you don’t agree, just look at the unemployment numbers. StatsSA announced last week that unemployment was now back at 2003 levels at 27.7%. When Zuma and his cronies kicked Thabo Mbeki out of power in 2008, it was at 21%.
Zuma, the man who in 2009 promised us half a million jobs within six months, has been steadily destroying jobs since he came to power eight years ago.
Last week, we learnt that SA had slipped into a recession after its gross domestic product declined 0.7% during the first quarter of 2017 after contracting by 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2016.
The economy is no longer growing. That means that jobs are no longer available, that taxes for government expenditure are lower and that – crucially – we cannot even increase the grants of those on social welfare. SA Inc is stuck in the mud.
Why are we here? The answer is right in front of us. No businessman or woman, no investor – domestic or foreign, trusts Jacob Zuma. A young woman in Thabazimbi will set up a cosmetics shop if she knows she will not be robbed every day.
A global mining company will buy a coal mine if it knows that the president’s friends will not squeeze it out of business so the mine can be stripped and flipped.
Under Zuma neither the young woman nor the mining investor can be assured they won’t be robbed.
There is no confidence in SA. There is too much political uncertainty. Is Zuma going to stay or will he go? If he stays is he going to expropriate property without compensation (as he likes to tell traditional leaders in KwaZulu-Natal) or will he stay within the confines of the Constitution (as he likes to tell the handful of bankers who still like to waste their time meeting him)?
Zuma’s midnight cabinet reshuffle – in which confidence-inspiring leaders such as Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas were removed from the finance ministry – in March was pivotal in shaping sentiment towards South Africa.
Moody’s, the ratings agency that has consistently been the most positive on SA, was forced to join others and downgrade South Africa last Friday – by one notch to BAA3.
This is now just one notch above sub-investment grade. It wasn’t unexpected. Moody’s had placed South Africa on review for a downgrade in April after Zuma’s reshuffle.
The two other agencies, S&P Global and Fitch, still have us at sub-investment grade or “junk”.
For working South Africans, things are going to get tougher in the next few years.
Food‚ petrol and the cost of home or car loans will begin to go up. Government needs to keep spending while the costs of its own borrowing will now be more expensive – so it will look to you and me. That means taxes will rise. Ordinary people will get poorer. All this thanks to Zuma, a man who is getting fabulously rich through his corrupt association with the Gupta family.
Much has been said about the numerous scandals roiling SA at the moment. Many more are coming. The country is being looted right before our very eyes.
The real tragedy of what we are seeing here is that the well-off are becoming poor. The poor are getting poorer. The number of jobless people swells.
The marginal are now desperate and will soon be begging at the street corner. Zuma is making you poorer, and poorer, by the day.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” said Bill Clinton once. Nobody here is listening.
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