PANDEMIC PUSHBACK

Once again, the Reserve Bank has left the price of money (the Repo Rate) unchanged at 3.5%. But they did also try to show that they are alert and watching by reducing their prediction of the amount of economic growth the nation will experience in the first three months of 2021 (yes, the quarter with 5 days to go!). It will be a thin 0.2% and not the roaring 1.0% they forecast earlier. The need to publish forecasts as meaningless as this is the fault of deadlines and schedules. If one doesn’t have a snappy answer to the journalist’s questions, then one falls from the survey and pretty soon you are forgotten! The true economic story is that the government’s reaction to the Covid-19 infection was so extreme that large swathes of private industry have been wiped out while others (including naturally the civil service) have survived. In some unexpected areas the recovery has been miraculous. It is likely that the historical legacy economic sectoral divisions and identities are no longer fit for purpose, and issues such as working from home and virtual meetings have totally reshaped the economic landscape and rendered the already dubious data gathering process incapable of probing fine details. Is it honestly unproductive to lie on the couch and think? And then there was the unwarranted and lethal prohibition on the sale of smokes and booze which clinically diverted tax revenues into crime proceeds for large portions of the year. This hammered conventional statistics of consumer spending into oblivion. And if rumours are to be believed, further banning may happen over the coming Easter period for no other reason than it is a demonstration of power. The pandemic has yielded some strange science but none that links Christian holidays with virus transmissibility. The story that a foreign manufacturer of vaccinations requires that a government buying their drug must have in place a no-fault compensation mechanism to cover “the unlikely but potential adverse effects” that the jab might have, is rather an eye-opener. Does our government have similar agreements for everything we import? This story surfaced because our government hasn’t yet arranged the mechanism. Probably because they don’t have the money; or even worse because they did, but it has gone missing. This apparent deliberate blocking of the Suez Canal by the pilot of a super large container vessel shows how easy it can be to disrupt the world in a big way and claim infamy. Shortly before solidly plunging the bows of the good ship “Ever Given” into the bank of the canal, this helmsman managed to take a course that has for all time drawn out a lewd picture on the vessel-tracking charts. Already there is a noticeable rise in traffic around the Cape of Good Hope and your scribe – the unofficial, unappointed, unpaid acting deputy harbour master of Durban – has cleaned his binoculars. The governing party is holding a shindig and chinwag session this weekend. Invariably there will be some alarming and threatening time and money-wasting ideas floated and discussed. New T-shirts with their own quirky spelling mistakes will be distributed. Demands will be tabled and ignored. And Coke and KFC will be served. The Zondo commission seems to have exposed some raw nerve endings and lawyers have been lecturing each other about appropriate behaviour. Which would be amusing if it wasn’t quite so worrisome. The fact, however, remains that no one is culpable of anything so really bad that anyone will actually be prosecuted. There are so many new teams and names in this season’s F1 that not only will it be hard for some of us to remember who is driving what, but the podium could see some new faces. Talking of which the current world champion has adopted a new mien which is moody, philosophical and morally guided. The pictures of Lewis depict a brooding troubled soul. Not really what one expects from this adrenaline-soaked sport. With relatives resident on the Pembroke peninsular and the world’s most beautiful granddaughter living in Edinburgh, tonight’s Six-Nations finale is easy to call. And anyway, the French are just too young, cocky and good. James Greener Friday 26th March 2021

ROYAL JOUST?

Through half-closed eyes and by exercising a modicum of wishfulness, it is possible, to detect a periodicity in the fortunes of the rand. It was weak in 2001-2002; 2008-2009; 2016 and then in 2020. While not yet as developed or extensive as the earlier recoveries, our poor runt has currently gained at least 20% against some currencies since the days when we were first learning to say the words virus, covid and lockdown. Soon we might again be able to afford overseas travel, provided of course, that the bureaucrats choose to reopen borders. This, however, seems unlikely as the disease detectives are claiming to have identified yet another wave of a Covid-19 variant that is already breaking over the planet. Why this should be possible now that many nations are attaining amazing levels of protection through vaccination has not yet been adequately answered beyond complicated suggestions that the jabs are not actually “vaccines” in the traditional use of the term. Examples of unfortunate individuals catching and suffering from multiple bouts of Covid suggest that there are many “unconventional” aspects to this disease. What a scary mess. Meanwhile, an admittedly superficial scan of a limited sample of this nation made while on a swift but long road trip reveals a visible portion of the population that has reclaimed their lives from the myriad mysterious prohibitions that grew out of the lethal lockdown program. Face masks and sanitizer are sighted but largely unused. Hurriedly backing out of a shop to return to the car for a mask is greeted with a jovial laugh and a wave to enter anyway. A single sample of a remote country hotel bar and dining room confirmed that a zest for enjoyment has returned to the platteland. The spoilers were the power cuts. Much of the week’s attention was directed to the “planting” of the recently deceased Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini. It seems that the selection of his successor will not follow the somewhat familiar European guidelines. There is no truth in the rumours that one of the many on-line betting shops has offered to sponsor a traditional stick-fight elimination contest. Ex-president and Zulu, Jacob Zuma, is an expert in this sport and has demonstrated his skill on many occasions. Just saying. One can set ones watch each year to the end of summer by the appearance of headlines about “a list of demands” prepared by students dissatisfied by the realisation that not all undergraduate life is party time. This time the rubber has hit the road by the indirect admission by the state that their NSFAS bursary scheme has almost no money to distribute. The hand-waving arguments are setting up breezes capable of driving a windmill. The two interlocking issues are of course that there is indeed little money available. The ridiculously optimistic national budget a week or so ago failed to admit that the disappearance of real taxpayers from their lists combined with ever more expenditure (including outright theft) had effectively drained the coffers. The second and even more unpopular fact is that we have little, in fact zero need for tens of thousands of soft-subject graduates. New Zealand won. Rugby followers are all too familiar with that headline. But this one belongs to sailing and refers to the latest Americas Cup event which culminated in a 10- race final in Auckland. This is a sport that on numerous scales might rate as the most expensive on the planet. It also is a record setter in adoption of technology. If you have not been paying careful attention for the past decade or so, you will not believe what has emerged from a relaxed and innovative attitude to rules interpretation, in respect to the design of the craft that compete. By the way, the Italian team came second! Not something their rugby team will do in the Six Nations. James Greener Friday 19th March 2021

KING DOWN

The sad news that Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini has died, comes just a few days after some other royals were pleading for privacy while willingly appearing on a televised interview with a record audience. It’s a hard job being consistently non-royal. The South African government department that does thing will doubtless have opened the handbook to the pages that set the standards for most important and expensive state funerals. This is going to make the “Matric Rage” super-spreader event look like a genteel sneeze into a silk hanky. Guaranteed the police won’t be out arresting people without masks. It’s going to be a long and lavish week and the best we bunny hugger bystanders can hope for is that no leopards will be killed. Zulu royalty are big on leopard skins. English royalty are hard on ermines. The death of Zwelithini must surely in due course reopen the Zululand ownership debate. Apparently, the bulk of the land is held in the name of a trust of which the late king was the sole Trustee. Just how this fits with the alleged shortage of land and the imminent “Expropriation without Compensation” legislation is not easy to say. Chancers of every stripe are soon going to fill the landscape. All Queen Elizabeth has to do is wait for it to settle down and then call the new man to ask if he’d like a chunk of England called Sussex complete with a Duke and Duchess. President Biden hasn’t yet granted an unscripted no holds barred Press Conference but he has donned a Santa Claus suit and dished out trillions of government money to folk who say that Covid-19 hurt them a lot. Worldwide, investors saw this injection of fresh money as good for markets and prices rose. Try that trick in SA and more luxury car makers open dealerships in Joburg. Earlier this week, Stats SA bravely published the GDP number for the last quarter of 2020. It was just over R3 trillion. Obviously, things have improved since the middle of last year when the nation was suffering the earliest economic hammer blows of the Government’s drastic measures to control Covid-19 and the equivalent figure was just R2.6 trillion. This improvement has naturally been much praised by talking heads looking for some good news. What has been less discussed is that a R3 trillion GDP was first reported in 2014 which means that more than half a dozen years of wealth creation has been wiped from the national score card by the lockdown and its consequences. Recall that the figures have been corrected for inflation so that gambit is not available. Some world class leadership and understanding of how wealth is created (Hint: not stealing public funds would be a good start) is desperately needed. Some of the pharmaceutical companies that have developed Covid vaccines and hold patents for them are complaining (who to?) that a hobo is constantly round the back, going through their trash. When challenged it turns out to be a beggar named Cyril with a long and sad story about how he can’t afford vaccine for his citizens and please will they give him the formula so the sangomas back home can brew a batch and he can use it to save lives. The affordability of these potions is undoubtedly an issue, but it ought to be very difficult and embarrassing to whine about it when he represents a government that has used the pandemic in ever more ingenious ways to steal huge amounts of public money. Reportedly SA is vaccinating around only 10 000 patients a day, so it’s going to take a while before our herd can even begin to start mooing about immunity. Meantime some nations are reportedly issuing so-called Immunisation Passports which theoretically confer upon their holders travel freedoms not dreamed of in the past year. It sounds wonderful. Surely the backyard printers are already churning out the counterfeits. It is so much fun reading that the other sides in the 6 Nations are scared of Scotland James Greener Friday 12th March 2021

POP GOES THE WEASEL

As at the end of January our government was spending at an unprecedented average rate of just over R150bn a month. This is more than 10% higher than a year previously. Many questions arise from this bald statistic. The first being that Finance Minister Chef Tito Mboweni has forecast that the deficit will fall, which necessitates that revenue grows at greater than this rate – which it’s not doing by a very great margin. Even in the heady pre-Covid days, annual tax income growth rarely reached double figures. Currently it is around -5%pa! President Cyril is not getting the message through to his cabinet which should be in bold capitals. REDUCE EXPENDITURE. Therefore, the second question is what must he do to get their attention? Firing half the cabinet does come to mind as surely, they never will be missed. But another thing that will not be missed is any attempt to trim the various payments which are the result of a quarter century of enthusiastic socialist gifting by government to voters and employees. Indeed as we write, civil servants are gearing up for a strike. The money required every month comprises the shockingly small R350 a month Covid relief handout, all the way up to the mega-million salaries doled out to far too many civil servants who in many cases are less productive than the recipients of much smaller amounts. The local bond market is currently not displaying much enthusiasm or belief in the reducing deficit story. Just as in the US, yields are lurching upwards. Local share prices, however, suggest that some scouts have seen signs of a decent economic revival on its way. Chatting to the man at the end of the bar it does seem as if many who have survived the appalling depredations of all the world’s “saving lives” lock down strategies, are doing ok. His son in law’s small “bakkie business” is doing just great. Neither of us though, dwells on all the gaps along the bar where other people’s sons in law have recently fled their homeland, its rapacious tax collector, and lawlessness. The price of obtaining exposure to gold the metal is at 1-year lows and may weaken further. Is this a sign that even the doomsday cults feel that the Virus is being brought under control? What is certainly not under control, however, are the world’s bureaucrats who seizing upon vaccination records to create a great data resource that can be used to control people. Privileges (like travel) can now be withheld from the non-conformists (or sceptical scaredy-cats). Citizen’s relation with their governments have not been improved by the events of the past year. In fact, the whole vaccination story is rapidly spiralling away from one of pharmaceutical triumph to one of coercion, politics and profit. And yet in this past year a space craft travelled to and landed on Mars and began sending back pictures just as crisp as the ones of my granddaughter who lives in Edinburgh. My inner scientist has revelled in all this news about human ingenuity and skill. Although, despite the most serious public relations efforts, the terrain looks little different from places in the Northern Cape. So far without any sheep. And fortunately, there were no lives (even sheep) lost in the failed experiment by the Pretoria boytjie Elon Musk to land a rocket after use. It was a pretty big bang. Rather like the one at my Alma Mater, Exeter University, where a recently unearthed unexploded German bomb was detonated just meters from a path which I used many times. Whew. Another topic getting a great deal of glossing from the spin doctors is Formula 1. Much has changed since the last “proper” Grand Prix with crowds, beautiful people without masks strutting the grid area, and more cars that were competitive with each other. The sport did recently gain a knight to its numbers and the Google entry for him reads “Sir Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton MBE HonFREng is a British racing driver, activist, fashion designer and musician.” Hmm. Well yes. This will take some remembering. And a German driving in British Racing Green? James Greener Friday 5th March 2021