CALLOUS AND CRIMINAL

What now feels like a very long time ago, just after President Cyril had placed the nation into a State of Disaster, that someone asked very sarcastically what possibly could go wrong with the forthcoming mixture of authoritarianism and ignorance. What an excellent question. The answers and our experiences six weeks later, exceed anyone’s worst nightmares. And the dreadful thing is that no one seems to be in charge. There are for example so many ministers deserving to be fired immediately. This week it’s a race between Lindiwe Sisulu whose department of water and sanitation has burned through billions of wasteful expenditure and Pravin Gordhan who is ignoring the advice of his own appointed experts and wants to revive SAA.

More than two weeks ago our President appeared on the TV screens to tell us, his employers, what in his opinion, is and should be going on. That was the speech where he announced a relaxing of portions of the lockdown which would include the sale of tobacco products. On this last item he amazingly was trumped a day later by cabinet minister NDZ citing the support of just 2000 petitioners and Cyril hasn’t been seen or heard of since.  This incident has prompted South Africans to do what they love and that is to send in lawyers to challenge their government (the reverse is also a popular use of taxpayers funds) only to be told that the minutes of the meetings of the National Command Council are classified. What!? The courts are now busy with that one too.

Anyone with an internet connection and a morbid fascination for sifting fake news from the truth can easily while away the days of the lockdown alternately cringing in horror and crying with emotion. There are few highlights but the movie clip of the fit athlete sprinting away from a chubby cop on a beach in the Cape is pure gold. Overseas readers will be interested to learn that our government has declared the beach and the sea itself out of bounds, even to those taking advantage of the daily three hour curfew exercise break in the overall lockdown.  By the way, someone has declared that exercise must involve moving one’s whole body, so yoga and the like won’t do and practitioners of these activities in public have been arrested.

Perhaps the central concern for us all is the lack of information about the data, methods, results and conclusions being used by who to form the strategy to get the country back to normal as soon as possible. The state is the sole custodian and distributor of all data relating to the incidence and spread of the corona virus so it is difficult for anyone else to corroborate the medical conclusions and social engineering attempts being derived therefrom. Much of the world is basing its responses on work published by the infamous Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. The technique appears to be variations of the lockdown scenario which in South Africa is having the utterly appalling effect of plunging many millions of people into starvation. This is exacerbated by the inability of politicians and officials to curb their own propensity to steal and loot supplies being donated to help the sufferers. Add to which the racist elements in government see this as an excellent opportunity to punish the minority groups. That our leaders appear to see no crisis deserving anything more than a huge military mobilisation is very alarming.

SPORT SECTION: Prof Ferguson already has poor form in interpreting biological data as he was largely responsible for turning an outbreak of foot and mouth disease into a country-wide disaster in the UK in 2001. His current work on the virus is also alleged to be shoddy. Plus the prof has manged to introduce an element of scandal so beloved of the Brits in connection with their heroes. He broke the lockdown in order to visit his lover – who, nudge, nudge is a married woman!

James Greener

Friday 8^th May 2020

IT’S OUR GOVERNMENT THAT IS AILING

The government has not explained exactly why it was necessary to hire a cohort of health professionals from Cuba. These folks arrived to much fanfare quite late one night this week and were whisked off to a fortnight of quarantine. It would be interesting to know if that is what they expected and how they will pass the time without reading material and TV channels in Spanish. The last time we hired a team of foreign doctors they were not thrilled with the rural settings to which they were posted and then there were complaints that neither side could understand what the other was saying. What makes the current incident even more puzzling is that reportedly this country is awash in under utilised and even unemployed local medics. The cost to the nation of this “selfless and generous gesture by our Cuban brethren”, to quote President Cyril, will be more than R2 million per brother. This figure doubtless allows for some cadre commissions. The medics themselves could collect as little as $1000 each for their stint, as it is well known that this doctor export program is a great foreign exchange earner for the Cuban government.

Coming down from a stringent and vindictive five-week Lockdown during which the authorities even tightened the conditions, will not be simple. The complicated, inconsistent and economically suicidal multi-level plan began to decay even before it officially came into effect today. A survey has determined that we all now understand and try to eliminate, as far as practical, interpersonal infection opportunities. The government and indeed the people are no longer much concerned about COVID-19. However, the former is keen to keep and grow the control they have enjoyed while the latter just want to get back to normal as soon as possible. We are quite done with being told what we may not do, eat or drink and are very restive and increasingly rebellious. And now there is a night time curfew. The government is getting scared of us. This is why so many new soldiers have been put on the streets.

It is clear to everyone that President Cyril is no longer in charge of the country and the one-time presidential wannabe, NDZ in effect now outranks Cyril who is being kept in order to provide diversion and light relief. Unfortunately, her camp is home to some of the more clueless and racist ministers. But they are corrupt. The decision to renege on the president’s promise to allow the sale of tobacco product at this level of lockdown has preserved the very useful cashflows being generated by the cigarette (and probably the booze) smuggling operations. The cadres are pleased. The taxman this week acknowledged a revenue of shortfall of R1.7bn because of the ban on legal sales of these “sins”.

The move to a notionally more lenient lockdown level has delivered the very welcome concession of permitting outdoor exercising (including the family dogs) for a short period every day. It is not explained why a time restriction is necessary as it forces all the exercisers out on the roads at the same moment that there are more cars about. Interestingly, the permitted exercising area is a circle of 5km radius (presumably) centred on one’s home, which absent shorelines and the like, permits a route almost as far as a standard marathon. But few will manage that in the 3 permitted hours! Take-away hot cooked food is now available but not from supermarkets and only for delivery not collection. Job creation I suppose.

The trickiest job tackled by your government this week was deciding which language to use when announcing the return to school dates. For some unknown reason they chose not to use the one understood (if not spoken regularly) by virtually everyone listening. However once that was sorted out it is clear that a huge effort had been put into trying to draw up a schedule.  It doesn’t help that several hundred school premises have been savagely vandalised during the lockdown and that the distance learning already in use at privileged schools will never be available for the vast majority of South Africa’s children. For most of them 2020 will likely forever be a gap in their education.

For others, the awarding of the Premiership to Liverpool is a dubious idea.

James Greener

Workers Day 2020

SUSPEND PERSONAL INCOME TAX

When everything is stripped away, controlling the spread of this nasty COVID-19 infection comes down simply to keeping far away from someone else who is infected. This is made difficult because it is not obvious who is infected. Therefore, we have been told to practice so-called social distancing – or perhaps that should be anti-social distancing – and cultivate a fanatical habit of washing hands and not touching your face.

Governments around the world have decided that their citizens will find these simple things too hard to do without coercion and so the lockdown phenomenon has entered our lives and lexicons. Unfortunately, here on the southern tip we have a bureaucracy just itching to crank up its control of the population and the result has been heavily armed and unsympathetic forces harassing and even murdering desperate and hungry people. The measures have been extreme and the bureaucracy heavy. We now have a schedule of 5 levels of the infectability of economic activity decided upon by a committee. But fortunately for our sanity, the ludicrous is also plentiful. Take for example Minister  Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (NDZ for short and the ex-wife of a previous president) explicitly banning the sale of “cooked hot food” after her counterpart in the trade and industry department, Ebrahim Patel discovered to his chagrin that some stores were selling rotisserie chickens and warm sausage rolls and pies. NDZ is minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs. Not a word about food in that portfolio, although KFC is now pretty much a traditional affair in SA.

Out in the world of markets and prices, the oil price is plummeting for a number of reasons partly to do with the virus and the expected global economic slowdown (when did you last buy petrol?) and partly because big oil producers are having a price war. Commodity Futures are a popular way for participants to gain exposure to these markets and this week certain oil contracts began to trade at a negative price. That is the sellers of the contracts were not only getting out of their positions, they were paying the buyers to do so! Those buyers are brave or else they are actually oil consumers, because if not, early next month a tanker will pitch up at their front door enquiring where to offload several thousands of barrels of crude oil. Which they will have to pay for in full. Messy.

The most significant and important news of the week was the announcement by President Cyril of an economic rescue package totalling half a trillion rands. To put this in context the total annual government income is currently around just three times that, so this package isn’t trivial. It is not yet clear where this money will come from. There was some eyebrow raising mumbling about international institutions without dwelling on the dislike that the communists in government usually have for these money lenders and their usual loan conditions. The distressing thing though is that during this harrowing time for all South Africans, and despite the last decade having shown that this racist policy does not work, the state continues to insist that aid distributions will adhere to BEE conditions. But the biggest problem with this package is that the thieves who have already brazenly stolen so much public money are still at large and not in prison. They are already at work dipping into aid food parcels and hoarding emergency water supply tanks. Citing urgency and novelty of the situation suggests that even the flimsiest of financial controls are unlikely to be exercised over these funds.

So, here’s an idea. Half a trillion rand is almost exactly what the state expects to collect in personal income tax this fiscal year. So why not simply abolish all personal income tax for the next 12 months? That is, leave that money in the public domain without moving it through government agencies. This is exactly the cash flow intended by President Cyril, but without any chance of corruption and zero state interference. The income shortfall in the National Treasury will force the trimming of the state payroll and encourage migration to the private sector and self-employment.

Sushi, however, is still for sale in some food stores. But its not hot and cooked. So that’s OK.

James Greener

Friday 24^th April 2020. Day 29 of Stage 5 Lockdown