OPINION:
Don’t hold your breath for the annual January 8 Statement by the African National Congress. Perhaps it is time to liquidate whatever South African assets you have (or reasonably can) and convert them into foreign – or foreign currency denominated – investments. But you may only have Friday to do it. Cape Messenger editor Donwald Pressly writes
6 January 2017 – South Africans may be in for a shock this weekend. Our hapless – and some would say crooked – President Jacob Zuma is set to read the January 8 statement.
What one can be sure of is that it is likely to bore one to death, especially if you are one of those bussed into the Orlando stadium on Sunday for the big event, and you can’t just leave. The ANC has organised 800 busses to ferry ‘supporters’ to the 40 000-seater stadium. Party bosses say the stadium will be filled.
But for the rest of us we may be jolted out of our somnambulism by an announcement of a cabinet reshuffle. It is not expected that there be a reshuffle announced in the January 8 statement (it is predicted it will happen later in January), but then one never knows.
If that reshuffle were to include Prexit (the axing of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan) then we are in for a rough political, fiscal and economic ride for months to come. We will probably have immediate downgrades by the three significant rating agencies. All one can say, let us hold one’s thumbs that this won’t materialise. At least with Gordhan still in office, we can hope that the ship will sail through the political tornadoes that are going to hit us in the year ahead.
My esteemed colleague BizNews editor Alec Hogg warned his readers to ‘take some deep breaths’ between eating all that traditional turkey – in a note to readers before Christmas – as his ‘usually reliable’ source in the ANC had warned him that we are in for it with the Zuma shenanigans continuing in the year ahead. The insider told Hogg that ANC bigwigs were konkolling this week ahead of the statement. Zuma and his allies would push for an ‘accelerated radical transformation’ mandate. Hogg said he was dubious about his source’s warnings until he heard the speeches of Collen Maine – the ANC Youth League leader – and of Zuma himself. Just before Christmas the President addressed about 2000 people at an ANC Youth League ‘economic freedom’ lecture in Durban. The Citizen reported that the president had heard news reports about an international business chamber calling for his resignation. He said he didn’t owe anyone an explanation for his decisions. “I will never, on my own, resign. If I did so, I would be surrendering to the monopoly capital,” he said. Zuma posed a question to his audience: “What is it that I have done wrong?”
If the president still doesn’t know what he has done wrong, he will never know. What it means is that he is also capable of taking the most foolish decisions possible in the months to come. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he could – as Hogg has warned – take South Africa on an economic journey like what we have witnessed under the regime of Robert Mugabe.
If there is advice to give in these circumstances, make sure you don’t have all your eggs in the South African basket. If you have any spare eggs, invest them abroad. One doesn’t have to spell out what the impact of more foolish Nenegate-like decisions could have on the economy, on the currency, on interest rates, on economic health in general. Ordinary South Africans need to work smart in an environment where one has to work from the position that the state has effectively been captured by elements which will undermine the stability of the entire nation and the economy. One certainly hopes that Hogg and his source have got it dead wrong.