IT'S NOT IN THE BUDGET. GO AWAY!

A year ago we were proudly preparing to do our bit and “flatten the curve” to help our health services deal with something that had been declared to be a pandemic. We had no idea what any of this jargon meant and more importantly what it would do to our lives and economic wellbeing. Now we can see that it resulted in the destruction of nearly 50% of the earnings of the shares comprising the Financial and Industrial index on the JSE. For tens of thousands of small businesses, this figure was 100%. Currently we are equally in the dark about how long it will take for those businesses to recover. And even if they ever will. The wild-eyed and left-leaning of the commentariat are promising a “Great Reset”, in which recovery will come in an hitherto unrecognised form. Old curmudgeonly bears like Tidemarks are certain, however, that if it does not also reduce public service headcount and salaries to far less than half the current levels, then widespread personal success, growth and prosperity will be a “Great Chimera”. The main impression gained while trying to watch the Budget Speech is that our leaders are old, weary, overweight, bored and totally uninterested in learning what a modern state should be doing for its population. Let alone vigorously guiding us towards that vision. Their collective grasp of any topic which is not about the alleged historical and social causes for their grumpy and suspicious mien is zero. They waffle about technology revolutions, smart cities, universal broadband access and more recently, viruses and vaccines without the slightest clue what they are talking about. Pleasingly, the younger energetic educated citizens are disinclined to get sucked into the maelstrom of corruption and preferment which is all that our political landscape has become. Unless of course they have blood ties with the appropriate families. However, their numbers are few and growth in the size of the diaspora of talented and able young South Africans seems to be limited only by airline departures being hampered by the corona virus, and visa issues. As usual our National Treasury did a sterling job on keeping us in touch with the Budget numbers. Precisely as the information embargo was lifted so too was the portcullis on the gateway to the website, and a range of well-produced documents were released for our reading pleasure. Some are shortish pamphlets a few pages long that try in very basic language to explain the budgetary process and the way the government decides where to spend the tax money it collects There are nuggets of information for even the most careworn and cynical analyst tucked away in these pages but by and large, precedent is the strongest driver. The real meat is published in a hefty tome named the Budget Review. In any well-run enterprise, well-thumbed documents like these are referred to frequently. Especially when an excited underling bursts in with an idea for a project for which he needs a few hundred million to give to a mate who just happens to have number of oversized train sets for sale. Unbudgeted, unauthorised, and wasteful expenditure? This year’s Budget would best be described as devoid of originality and merely “pie-in-the-sky” unreality. Tito is long past his “sell by” date. The insensitivity and stupidity of those provincial officials in the drought stricken Eastern Cape who obviously had long been planning to spend a big chunk of their department’s share of the budget expenditure on renaming places which already have useful and inoffensive names, is beyond belief. Defenders of the proposal miss the key points which are that it is a waste of (a surprisingly large amount) money and deeply off-putting to travellers and tourists who are following ideas and recommendations from earlier times. As is frequently the case, looking up the new names reveals largely unknown corners of about our nation’s very interesting past and a measure of agreement that they could well be memorialised. But choose something new and currently nameless for the honour. Formula 1 are talking about holding a Grand Prix race in Africa. The last one was at Kyalami in 1993. Since then, minibus taxis have been required to display a 100kph maximum speed limit sticker. It is merely advisory. James Greener Friday 26th February 2021