MICHAEL MORRIS: Transformation Fund will fall short of helping black-owned businesses
Michael Morris
I don’t actually know of anyone in my personal circle — apart from some dutiful colleagues who had to — who bothered to listen to last week’s state of the nation address (Sona), even those I’d confidently imagine are quite fond of President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The main reason is that most of us could have written his address in advance; we knew what he was going to say, or mainly, what he wasn’t going to say. We knew the limits. We are practised at knowing the limits.
What immediately came to mind was commentator William Gumede’s pre-Sona piece (“ANC renewal will require shock therapy”, February 5), arguing that if the governing party really does want to avoid electoral oblivion, it will have to take drastic steps to renew itself.
Gumede suggests the party could follow Singapore’s People’s Action Party and “appoint new, pragmatic and skilled leaders who have successfully run enterprises outside politics and the state”.
More than that, they would have to be people “who are ... not steeped in recycled, outdated ideology positions such as the ‘national democratic revolution’ or blaming apartheid, colonialism and ‘white monopoly capital’ for every self-inflicted failure”.
Just how big an ask this is, is borne out by the exhausted themes of 30 years of parliamentary debate, rehashed in last week’s Sona. Here, for example, is Ramaphosa talking about the next “transformation” penalty to be inflicted on the economy:
“For many decades, our economy has been held back by the exclusion of the vast majority of SA’s people. Black South Africans were deprived of land, of capital, of skills and of opportunities.
“Our economy was starved of the potential it has. This is why we need to transform our economy — to make it more inclusive. This is why our focus is on empowering our people — on empowering women and persons with disabilities, because they were deliberately excluded from playing a role in the economy.
“We will set up a Transformation Fund worth R20bn a year over the next five years to fund black-owned and small business enterprises.”
This, surely, is a contradiction in terms. How can a business enterprise be a business enterprise if it’s funded by the government? Real businesspeople, black and white, must be flabbergasted at this insult to their intelligence, and their grasp of what it takes to succeed, and be able to say: I own a business enterprise, I run a business enterprise.
But, like a bad habit, “transformation” rolls off every ANC tongue as greasily as the idea of South Africans needing to prop up well-connected cadres and their crony capitalist chums.
Here’s a question: when Ramaphosa begins his litany of woe by saying, “for many decades, our economy has been held back by the exclusion of the vast majority of SA’s people”, does it occur to him not only that it is one of the truest things he has said, but that, inescapably, it does now incorporate a whole three decades of ANC governance — longer, by the way, than Nelson Mandela spent in prison?
In this sobering context Ramaphosa might wish to contemplate the pith of this less-than-50-word extract from the post-Sona press release penned by my colleague, Marius Roodt:
“The only way for SA to reach its potential and sustainably reduce poverty and unemployment is through rapid economic growth. This will not be possible while the ANC continues to push policies such as National Health Insurance and BEE, and while the deeply flawed Expropriation Act remains as is.”
“Transformative” is the word that comes to mind.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.