These fellows at the International Monetary Fund are a soft touch. They have agreed to loan our government $4.3bn at a reported interest rate of around 1.1%. No payments of either capital or interest are required until late in 2023 at which stage the debt must be extinguished within the next couple of years. Apparently, the conditions attached to the loan are rather benign, merely expecting that this nation will behave like gentleman and use the money wisely. The cash could arrive within a month. The already deeply disillusioned and sceptical commentators like Tidemarks are amazed that it is all so simple. Even without the highly probable misuse of this loan, the real downside risk is that it is denominated in dollars and who knows how many rands will be required to buy a dollar that far out? Of course, repayment is due after the next general election and the communists may by then have been sent packing and the rand could be at parity with the USD. Joke.
Is there not one ruling party politician who, despite being totally blinded by their cockamamie ideology, cannot see the complete disaster of a nation with fewer people gainfully employed than there are collecting social grants. The difference is now at least 1 million upturned palms. Of course, passing this tipping point around now is a consequence of the official response to the Covid-19 pandemic but it has been headed this way for a long time. The State of Disaster -- which now has only a fortnight left to run its originally declared course -- has provided a wonderful and readily acknowledged smokescreen for the Marxists, behind which they have ratcheted up the pace of their program to reduce this nation and its people to impoverished beggars utterly dependant on the state for decisions and livelihood. Our sole hope lies in those private sectors which have sufficient customers to be able to cock a snook at the lockdown regulations or find illegitimate routes for meeting customer demand. The former is of course famously the minibus taxi industry and the second are the manufacturers of booze and cigarettes. Sadly, the education sector has fallen prey to fanatical left-wing trade unionists uninterested in facts and careless of the future of the pupils. And because the health sector has been the beneficiary of large amounts of poorly managed cash to help it with the crisis, it too has become a major focus for the crooked tenderpreneur classes who have turned the provision of simple infection control supplies into a cash cow far bigger than any of President Cyril’s buffalo bulls. The utterly obscene fact that sales of super luxury exotic cars are growing while death by starvation is taking place, makes every South African except those whom we pay (far too much) to do something, to hang their heads and weep with anger and shame.
There is something of a traffic jam on the route from Earth to Mars. For a reason based on space geometry, three craft have been launched for this journey in just the last 10 days. The latest, a NASA mission with a rover named Perseverance, left just yesterday for a one-way flight lasting about 7 months. Assuming a successful landing on the red planet, it will then spend at least a year rolling around, poking a huge array of sensors into its surroundings. Among the most intriguing instruments it will deploy are a microphone and a soil sampler. The first will presumably listen to what any passing Martians have to say like “Yanks Go home!”. The samples however will be stored in tubes for later collection by another space craft to be launched in the next decade or so. This reveals that the problems of a two-way journey to Mars and back are certainly not yet solved. So, beware any slick salesmen named Elon from Tshwane selling vacation breaks on Mars!
Not everyone involved in professional sport is despairing of the lack of crowds of spectators in the stands. Presumably the slick on-line betting businesses get lots more action from the armchair-bound fan than from one in the wet plastic seats juggling a beer and their smart phone with a patchy signal.
James Greener
Friday 31st July 2020
