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I enjoy Cees Bruggemans’ writing because it’s real, honest and gutsy – without being pessimistic about South Africa. As he mentions in his post below, the value of foreigners from African countries is completely overlooked in South Africa. They bring much to our economy and grab any opportunity they can to make a better life for themselves and their families back home. I’ll never forget a car guard I once met years ago when I was in my early teens. I was wearing my tennis kit and he struck up a conversation about how much he loves tennis and how he used to play it all the time back home before things got difficult for him in the DRC. He told me how much he misses it and that he’s in South Africa just trying his best to make a living for himself. He took the initiative of becoming a car guard – a decent human being, who loved to play tennis, trying to earn a few rands. Perhaps if we knew the stories behind each foreigner who comes into SA, there’d be more compassion and understanding. – Tracey Ruff I enjoy Cees Bruggemans’ writing because it’s real, honest and gutsy – without being pessimistic about South Africa. As he mentions in his post below, the value of foreigners from African countries is completely overlooked in South Africa. They bring much to our economy and grab any opportunity they can to make a better life for themselves and their families back home. I’ll never forget a car guard I once met years ago when I was in my early teens. I was wearing my tennis kit and he struck up a conversation about how much he loves tennis and how he used to play it all the time back home before things got difficult for him in the DRC. He told me how much he misses it and that he’s in South Africa just trying his best to make a living for himself. He took the initiative of becoming a car guard – a decent human being, who loved to play tennis, trying to earn a few rands. Perhaps if we knew the stories behind each foreigner who comes into SA, there’d be more compassion and understanding. – Tracey Ruff
By Cees Bruggemans
Undocumented foreigners have of late found themselves unwanted. Allegations of taking away jobs from locals is heard most often. For traders and other foreign informal business people, competitive strains with locals is presumably also a reality. It reminds of taxi wars of earlier decades. And even other more historic traditions.
This at a time when new jobs are non-existent, money-making opportunities are fewer, money is tight, and hardship is rising among the poorest of outsiders of all origins, local and foreign. Charles Dickens called it Hard Times. That was 160 years ago on another planet, but we should nonetheless get it what it really means.
We hear all kinds of appeals being made, from being nice to foreigners to being less beastly. Protect them even. Also, the painful admission that many of our erstwhile freedom fighters, from President Zuma down, in their early freedom struggle years found themselves at large all over Africa, and well received.
It is now an embarrassment to have to explain to foreign African governments that their nationals are not safe, have been harassed, haunted in some instances, killed even, and that we will have do everything within our means to change that, look after them better.
Will we really?
There is first the observation that our porous borders are not particular effective barriers policing our immigration policy. Besides legitimate immigrants often facing a corrupt gauntlett to get the right stamps, many foreign nationals are apparently willing to swim crocodile-invested rivers and thereafter traverse lion country.
That says something about our long borders, about the apparent attractiveness of our relatively wealthy country, absolute deprivation experienced elsewhere and the willingness to challenge great odds to be here, unprotected but willing to work, make ends meet, send savings home, and be law-abiding citizens.
Why we don’t want more of such people in our midst is totally beyond me.
But that brings me to the second point, general hardship. It isn’t getting better, it is getting worse. To the point of considering foreigners as a threat rather than appreciating that they fulfill useful functions and contribute to our general well-being. No longer seeing the forest for the trees, are we?
The obvious remedy here is not necessarily to get draconian. After all, many of our incoming foreigners are not undesirables that won’t fit into our society or economy, as perhaps the case elsewhere such as in Europe. In many instances, they fit only too well among us.
Instead, the real challenge is to get more demand growth in the economy, so that there may be more income generated and money circulating, creating also income generating opportunities for the poorest, less well-skilled in society. Enough to keep everyone happy.
This isn’t as difficult as what it may sound, or made appear to be by politicians of the highest self-serving calibre.
It is true that our global commodity starvation diet yielding us much lower Dollar export prices is a function of the world economic reality, and not something that will reverse quickly, or anything we can do about. For now our Dollar export prices are low, and the country the poorer for it, even when we make internal amends through a weaker Rand, supporting our exporters by way of higher prices to our domestic users.
Also, government finances really are tight now. Other priorities, such as public wage bill, have been generously supported in previous years, the budget deficit has remained high, the slow economy doesn’t suggest a strong case for higher taxation, and the obvious lesson drawn is to live within our means. It implies less scope to stimulate the economy through fiscal policy. In fact, no scope at all.
SARB monetary policy also can’t do much at all, as reasoned last Monday in my Rex Column (“The SA growth machine” 20 April 2015). What does that leave?
Well, there is always the private sector. Its confidence is running low, courtesy of a dilapidated infrastructure, poor government bedside manners, and unionised labour on all kinds of missions, except the national interest one.
We all know by now the infrastructure will take years getting better, and we will all need to adjust to that as we do. But even then the whole show can be better managed, as we are now likely to encounter under Brown & Molefe, and through better interaction with the private sector.
As to government’s own interventions, and the way it allows unionised labour to throw its weight around, the choice is between reasonably vigorous growth and no growth, between generating reasonable income growth opportunities for all, or getting these increasingly intense delivery protests and outbreaks of outright social warfare giving us a poor reputation, and undermining all our Africa efforts.
In typical political fashion, we may let the damage hurt where it falls, without lifting a finger, refusing to change direction, persisting with policy agendas that are clearly damaging and hurting, directly and indirectly, in the way they give us economic stagnation and progressive social breakdown.
Must we then have MORE protest, violence, unrest, breakdown before someone somewhere decides the farce has gone on long enough?
This is our paramount economic question of the day. Those poorly informed don’t understand it but I sometimes wonder whether all those well connected insiders do any better.
Yesterday, yet another new alliance was born, dedicated to the idea that all this deprivation is due to neocolonialism. The answer is accelerated transformation. In other words, hand over all your goodies & be gone. Such people don’t seem to get it that this destroys confidence, increases uncertainty and makes business even more cautious, in the process withdrawing yet more defensively, the very opposite of what a market system needs.
Yet such progressive thinking is highly fashionable, and convinced it will work. Anthropologists have a term for them. Modern Cargo Cult people. Unfortunately there are many in our midst. Theirs is a destructive course yet to be deflected.
We need to get urgently back to a much higher growth rate, on a sustainable basis and not by persisting with ever sillier policies, and making even bigger mistakes. The road is open, the signals are clear. So why ever not???
Or is a little breakdown now and then par for the course? Coming with the territory? For which no ideals or ideology will bend even a fraction? Deploying the military a more acceptable option?
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