The Common Sense’s Diary

The budget was a triumph for the finance minister. The fact that the economy does not grow is not the fault of the Treasury. The minister and his staff have to make do with the growth rate handed to them by the balance of the Cabinet. It is remarkable therefore that they have been able to stabilise the debt curve, secure multiple years of primary surplus, and now credibly predict cutting the deficit in half.

That they have further narrowed the inflation target and moved towards a fiscal anchor bodes even better for the country. The inflation target met with great opposition from the left of the South African spectrum. Well done to the government for standing up against that sort of recklessness. Leftist activists love nothing more than impoverishing the already poor even further in order to prompt a climate of populist revolution, and they know that letting inflation get out of hand would achieve exactly that.

The fiscal anchor is a move to mitigate the damage that a future populist leadership might do in that regard. The anchor would place a hard limit on government debt levels, making it difficult for a future leadership to wreck the economy through borrowing. That danger is something Nelson Mandela warned the ANC off after his release from prison, when he had to fight off the left flank of his party. It is good to see that the lesson has not been lost.

An albatross tells us that even if the next ANC leader is Paul Mashatile, he may opt to stay in the Government of National Unity. Making a deal with MK and EFF to govern would let the ANC’s key rivals into the government and give them easy access to loot. Almost the best thing that could happen for the DA would be that the ANC/EFF/MK hook up again and try to govern, after Ramaphosa goes. That will make the choice facing voters in 2029 binary. Given the balance of public opinion in the country, the effect should be to spur DA growth.

If it’s not Mashatile, then who? Fikile Mbalula? That just does not sound serious for the ANC. Patrice Motsepe? Our sense is he will do it if the decks are cleared and the ANC unites around him, in other words, a no contest race. But it’s too early to begin to know.

It’s a pity that the Americans are getting it wrong on South Africa. Their opportunity was to draw support from South Africa’s broad centre-right Christian conservative centre. At least seven-out-of-ten South Africans fall into that camp. You could stretch that to nine-in-ten if you made the Cs really small. But they’ve fluffed it in doubling down on the Afrikaners. Afrikaner values and the values of that broader base are virtually indistinguishable. And Afrikaners are not alone in suffering from murderous crime, threats to property rights, and the abuse of black economic empowerment (BEE) rules in aid of corruption. They have those experiences in common with all South Africans. The best shot the Afrikaners have of a long and stable future in South Africa is to build bridges – supported by common values - to the conservative black majority. They would be damn fools if they instead play to the divisive racial politics of the West.

The thing the Americans must understand is that South Africa has not followed the West into a binary ideological divide between right and left. Seeing South Africa through that prism is to get the analysis horribly wrong.

James Myburgh made the point on the Makin Sense podcast this week, of how dangerous it is to misstate the nature of a threat. South Africans suffer a murder rate around 10 times the global average, a literal avalanche of violence. The numbers are being worked on now and will soon be published that reveal that farmers are more likely to be attacked than the balance of the population, and that those attacks are greatly more likely to end in murder. That is a frightening reality. It also applies in equal measure to black and white commercial farmers. Calling what the Afrikaners face a genocide is to misstate the nature of the problem, and this allows people who don’t care about the killing of farmers, or who even revel in it, to deny that there is anything wrong at all and to call the whole issue a hoax.

Trump’s G20 exit has triggered a little cascade of heads of state exiting. At last count, Argentina and Mexico were out. So too China and Russia. It’s a pity China is out. And absurd that Putin is facing an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant which is being flighted as the reason for his stayaway. Such silliness has no place in serious global politics and diplomacy. It actually undermines diplomacy. South Africa should have made plain that they won’t execute the warrant and Putin is welcome. And then moved to exit the ICC.