Just over a year ago we were all fretting
that the rand might breach the 11.50/USD level. These days we are a rand worse
off. Our currency at present has stalled just short of 12.40 to the USD and it doesn’t really help
to say that this is mostly all about dollar strength. The euro is in fact
faring far worse than us and the folks there should be bracing themselves for
hordes of American tourists this summer. The All Share index is off around 2%
so far this month with just the cell phone sector offering a bit of comfort.
The miners are a train smash.
Any pretensions we have to being a
grown-up and serious nation must surely have been finally swept away by the
events of this week. Yet another CEO of ESKOM, the power utility, has been kicked
out almost before he gets to choose the new fittings for his en-suite
wash-room. Number 1 put on an Oscar-winning display of hurt and puzzled
ignorance of any accusations of his lamentably corrupt behaviour when he ventured
back to parliament. And the official opening of a nudist beach on the south
coast has run into a thicket.
Also starting to heat up is a stupid and
pointless argument about the race of shareholders on the JSE. All kinds of folk
have rushed into the fray waving calculators and data in support of their own
view. The unexplained part is why or how anyone is able to issue any analysis
broken down by skin colour. Even discarding for a moment the fact that very few
shareholders are own name individuals, unless the JSE’s client broker
accounting systems have changed recently, there has never been a field to
record the race of a stockbroker’s client. And of course the race of an
institutional account in the name of a pension fund or unit trust or an
overseas bank and so on, is meaningless.
The government tripped up on a similar
lack of information when it tried to interrogate the land ownership registry
recently. It was unable to get the results its ideology was so sure must exist.
And does the hopelessly inaccurate eNatis car registration system record the
ethnicity of each vehicle owner? How would it classify rental fleets? It seems
that most of our asset register systems are sensibly and agreeably blind to the
matter of race.
With the rather disgraceful JSE exception
of a handful of listed securities restricted (how?) to black shareholders in
terms of the wealth destroying BEE schemes, all South Africans actually do have
economic freedom to buy and sell any assets of their choice. Juju’s mantra has
always seemed foolish when what he actually is demanding is money for himself
and his supporters. But a “Give Us Money” party would result in the letters GUM
on the red berets and that looks like a glue advertisement.
Who knew that a lowly wheelbarrow could
attract duties as high as 32.32%? Apparently the Chinese are dumping these
dumpers into our market and local manufacturers are screaming blue murder.
Either the imports are flimsy rubbish unsuited to the local task of lugging
crates of quarts from the bottle store, or something very odd is happening in
the secret world of wheelbarrows.
It’s official. “Durban
ranks as the highest city for the quality of life in South Africa.” There’s something
wrong with the order of words in that boast from the mayor but the point is
made. Now all we have to do is fix the rugby team. The Sharks are sinking fast.
The Proteas will meet Sri Lanka in
the cricket world cup quarter-finals next Wednesday. I guess no team that got
this far is a pushover and those chaps from Ceylon look very determined and hard
to get out. It will be a tough match. Let’s hope AB and the lads carry us
through. An unkind email doing the rounds points out that the English team is
being carried by a British Airways plane to Heathrow.
James Greener
Friday 13th March 2015.
