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I SPEND a lot of time on Facebook. There, that’s a confession to start the New Year with!
I have chosen my FB friends carefully, and apart from the very near and dear, my list is full of interesting people: journalists, of course, authors, political commentators, academics and a number of very bright people who are independent thinkers.
The other day, up popped a post from consultant Gauta Komane (and yes, I have his permission to share it):
"There's not much structured economic debate going on in this country. That worries me. Debates are taking place daily in our trading partners, driven by centres of learning, economists, think-tanks and research foundations. I have a Youtube account and almost every week I receive a video of a seminar or lecture which focuses on contemporary crises and proffers solutions.
“In contrast, you'd think Pretoria knows best and Finance Minister Nene has everything under control, which of course is not true. We have deep structural problems. Our GDP was R3,5tr in 2013 and is sluggish. External debt is $142bn (that is R1,42tr) and growing. We are deindustrializing and shedding jobs. Our public education is going south while infrastructure is deteriorating.
“Why are we not engaging these matters in a meaningful inclusive forum? The radical left led by Numsa wants to picket on budget day. What a puerile reactive approach to a complex matter! Fiscal policy, industrial policy and other measures must be debated... The ANC leadership and riff-raff are engaged in politics of make-believe while the economy is melting down in the context of deepening poverty, inequality and unemployment. Universities are not generating debates and producing research as much as they should on these challenges. Historically black universities are a disgrace really. And the less said about provincial and local governments the better.
“We hear PAC and the pesky EFF demanding land restitution and redistribution, and that's about it. The ANC policy paper is not even discussed, not even by its army of unemployed faithful. Where do we get the exceptionalism? Or don't we know how to talk anymore?”
That rang a loud bell with me. I asked Komane if I could share his thinking, because, I said, I believe “it is time to put very interesting, off-the-wall, out-of-the-box, ground-up economic concepts on the table and rewrite the paradigms we run the country by”.
I am aware of a ferment of discussion going on elsewhere. I read columns by Yanis Varoufakis, emails from the new economics foundation (nef), news about the activities of the students aiming to Kick It Over (the stranglehold of the neoclassical economic thinking, that is), the intense discussion provoked by Piketty, arguments that refer to Rod Hill and Tony Myatt’s The Economics Anti-Textbook or the writings of Manfred Max Neef (the Barefoot Economist, who few in our country have ever heard of, I find)…
Few, if any, of the ideas that surface in such forums ever surface in our local discourse. Which is a great loss to us, because even if you thoroughly disagree with an idea, laying out exactly WHY you disagree is often a constructive exercise.
No sacred cows
A number of times I’ve heard the suggestion that we should have an ‘economics Codesa’, as radio presenter John Robbie puts it, and I agree heartily. It’s time we put our heads together and decided what kind of country we want and what kind of economic policies would get us there.
But if this is to happen, I have a request. I suspect that many of those who propose this think – subconsciously – that it will result in ‘the others’, those who disagree with ‘our’ assumptions about the world, coming round to the ‘right’ way of thinking. (Whether that’s the traditional free market or the traditional socialist way.) And the invited guests and speakers and delegates would line up accordingly.
That, in my view, would be a mistake. We need injections of fresh thinking, fresh experience, perhaps models from the global south that have taken a pragmatic route to success (there are a few I can think of).We need to open our minds to the unthinkable. For example, if I ask a neoclassicist (to use a common term) whether ownership of property by individuals and corporations should be done away with, he or she will respond, “You’re mad!” A trad socialist will say, “The state should own the means of production.” But there are other ways of claiming use/ownership of land – perhaps we should think about whether they’d be better for the community and for the preservation of our precious planetary resources?
It would, I believe, be tremendously liberating and useful to have such a meeting – or series of meetings – where there were no sacred cows, where we were able to look, with a combination of pragmatism and humanism, at what works and what doesn’t, tease out the whys of that, and come up with our own, unique solution.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
