Cape Town - ANC Youth League leader
Julius Malema could not even make a chair at high school, but now wants to control mines that are five kilometres underground.
This was jocularly said by political analyst
Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of former president
Thabo Mbeki, on Tuesday evening at a discussion of his new book, Advocates for Change.
Mbeki did not mince his words, taking the South African government under President
Jacob Zuma thoroughly to task for steering the country’s economy into a culture of consumerism rather than one of manufacturing its own products.
South Africa is importing finished products, said Mbeki, adding that about 20% of the chickens we consume is imported.
The new emerging elite – and those who voted for them – are all using imported goods. We are in a revolution going nowhere, he said.
In Mbeki’s view entrepreneurs are the cornerstone of Africa and any country’s development.
Without them, one can forget about the future. He is particularly worried that young South Africans are saying they want to become either politicians or partners in empowerment transactions.
But, he said, that’s not the way to take a country forward.
He warned that South Africa cannot compete with Asian countries, that its people simply do not have the work ethic of the Chinese or Indians, and that they are less productive.
Moreover, he said, South Africa has relatively old industries with outdated management practices – mining being an example. The mining industry still uses management practices introduced by American engineers a century ago.
South Africa is not in the same class as mining countries like Australia, Canada and Indonesia, he said.
As a consequence, those countries’ mining industries are growing at 15% to 17%, while that of South Africa has for the past decade been shrinking by at least 1% every year.
Mbeki also had a go at Land Reform Minister
Gugile Nkwinti for his “nostalgic and unrealistic” ideas on agriculture and land redistribution.
There’s no point in harking back to small-scale farming, he said. South Africa lost its peasant farmers at the beginning of the 20th century when people migrated to the cities to work in the mines, Mbeki went on.
Today, if you were to hand a township dweller a piece of land and say “become a small-scale farmer”, he would not know where to start.
Government must stop dreaming, said Mbeki, and rather start managing commercial farming properly.
- Sake24
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