The point to
keep in mind when trying to make sense of the Social Grants Payments debacle is
that the privately-owned Cash Paymaster Services is the only game in town. They
have grown up alongside the huge increase in beneficiary numbers and are alone
in having the institutional memory and in-place capacity needed to tackle this
mammoth monthly task. They are not going to share that with any competitor –
even SASSA itself. Minister Bathabile Dlamini and the top people in her
ministry clearly have known this for some time. Indeed, they appear to have
been comfortable with it. They did nothing until way too late to seek
alternatives, and even that was very half-hearted. She sucker-punched everyone
including parliament and the Constitutional Court into believing there was an
alternative to the reviled CPS and that her department was on top of a change over.
But it was simply not true and so with just days until the next grant distribution
date there is absolutely no alternative. And there probably won’t be for a very
long time.
Aside from
the beneficiaries, who also wins from the renewal of the contract? CPS
themselves will have in mind a substantial fee increase. The scent of all this
money will attracted clouds of flies looking for a place to land on the trough.
And at least one asset manager has hung onto his Net1 shares and is struggling
to hide his satisfaction behind claims of good analysis. It is alarming however
that top officials in the Department of Social Development have resigned or
taken sick leave. Presumably the learned judges of the Con Court are none too
pleased with having been used to hand down opinions that were always going to
be ignored but everyone should note that Number One himself this week expressed
total confidence in Minister Dlamini, so she might now be bullet-proof. The
biggest takeaway from this event however is that this social grant handout
program is now all that stands between far too many citizens and starvation so
that no government will be able to prune it without triggering a terrible
backlash.
The only way
out of this problem is for the country to enjoy a huge economic resurgence
which gets everyone back to work and gives families opportunity to earn far more
than the hand-outs provide. Unfortunately, this week’s GDP growth number for
2016 – a shocking but not unexpected 0.3%p.a. – indicates that such a
resurgence is a very long way off. Optimists claim that there are flickers of
good news to be found in the thousands of numbers provided by Stats SA in their
quarterly GDP publication but they are faint. Also fading is confidence in the
quality of the information being provided by official documents such as this. Some
of us who have made a living from “interpreting” data feel uneasy with the look
and feel of the numbers data which, given their provenance, should move only
slowly from one quarter to the next and change direction rarely. For example, what
were the major changes in manufacturing activity that could deliver four consecutive
quarterly growth figures for the sector of 0.6%, 7.6%, -3.3% and -3.1%. It
seems improbable.
Highly
probable, however, is that more and more CVs will have a line or two devoted to
the candidate’s tenure as a director at a State-Owned Enterprise. There must be
few well-connected young men and women who haven’t got their knees under a polished
piece of expensive hardwood boardroom furniture in recent years. Only to be
turfed out together with some senior executives when the wheels come off their
particular vehicle. Entire boards are fired from one social media message to
the next. The hiring part often takes far longer and a list of SOEs with acting
Chief Executives is quite long. Yet more reason to privatise all these
functions the state believes it needs to do for us.
Is there a
glimpse of something special from Ferrari from the start of season testing
sessions? Testy personal relations seem still to be playing out in the Mercedes
camp though. The new 2017 liveries are nice and distinctive however. Meanwhile
it’s unpleasant seeing umpires wearing gloves on a cricket field. If a nation
can’t provide somewhere warmer to play a test they should stop playing the
game!
James
Greener
Friday 10th
March 2017
I’m going to
listen to music in Wakkerstroom next Friday so the tide will be out.
