Feeling hopeless after yet more presidential platitudes and promises? Try this, writes brucebusiness.
A man walks down a beach and sees thousands of starfish washed up. Before long they will all be dead. As he walks along the waterline, he occasionally bends over, picks one up and gently puts it back in the water.
South Africa, for at least half of its population, is a miserable place to live. With unemployment running at 43%, no end in sight to electricity shortages, the economy tap-dancing on the edge of another recession, and investors wary of committing capital to projects in a market with so much uncertainty, the outlook is grim and the presidential platitudes of the state of the nation address are meaningless.
South Africa has one of the world’s highest unemployment and inequality rates, but thanks to the independence of the Reserve Bank and its inflation targeting regime, which requires the monetary policy committee to keep inflation between 3% and 6%, most prices are kept in check most of the time. These indices are imperfect. For what it’s worth, during the pandemic Bloomberg put South Africa as the third-most miserable economy in the world.
slowly but surely there is a tacit acknowledgment that what got us into this mess will not get us out, hence a stealthy privatisation of once exclusively public services is happening, from electricity provision via the long overdue licensing of independent power producers to partnerships between the private sector and entities like Transnet too.
“We have two boys in school and three young women at varsity. As a reminder, we try to choose the children who are hard workers but not academic or sporting stars. Some of them have really flourished, one of the young women at varsity finished at the top of her class last year . Before we met her, she had obtained varsity entrance to her chosen universities and then her dad died, and her mom lost her job.
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