'JZ’s wrecking ball bulldozing your financial wellbeing'

A SERIOUSLY concerned citizen explains how President Jacob Zuma's regular reckless actions devastate the financial wellbeing of South Africans. He writes:

Mmusi Maimane and Julius Malema should seriously concern their parties with the prevailing market turmoil and nervousness. This presents a huge political opportunity like little else can.

The average voter needs to clearly understand the devastating effect of JZ’s regular reckless actions on their personal situation and financial well being.

During the recent past, JZ managed to single-handedly destroy immense financial value of regular South Africans belonging to some kind of retirement fund or some form of savings plan for retirement, be it a pension fund, provident fund, retirement annuity, endowment policy, unit trusts or an exchange-traded fund.

All these savings vehicles are mostly directly correlated to financial market movements. The effect of JZ's cowboy actions is immediate and dramatic, irrespective whether your saving investment choices are weighing more towards interest earning instruments such as money market funds, bonds, income funds, balanced funds, stable funds, etc, or more towards equity theme (growth funds), or even if it is more exposed to offshore investments.

In addition to this immediate and dramatic effect as experienced several times during the last couple of years of JZ’s tenure, the president also managed to build up the highest government debt liabilities South Africa has ever had through reckless government over spending and total lack of government financial discipline, which resulted in the recent recurring threats of downgrading the investment status of South Africa to that of junk (rubbish) status.

This again culminated in the ordinary South African to earn no real investment growth (over the local CPI/inflation rate) on their hard-earned retirement savings during the past two years. Each such regular Joe has therefore irrevocably lost an average of 12% in the value of their retirement savings through these irresponsible and negligent actions of JZ – a growth lost that can never be made up again and that will become an even bigger loss over time through the effect of compounded deficit.

JZ doesn’t realise this, in my opinion. The average voter possibly doesn’t know this too.

Don’t wonder what direct effect these reckless actions will bear on you as an average South African. Know that you have already lost a small fortune and will continue to do so for as long as the ANC lack the will power and representative responsibility to vividly and unapologetically oppose and isolate JZ.

Also, all our children and grandchildren will in the future still bear hardship by paying unnecessarily high taxes in order to work off the unimaginably high debt of South Africa created by the reckless actions of the JZ era and which there is nothing to show for – it is simply money down the drain.

How terribly we now miss real leaders like the respected former president Thabo Mbeki and former minister Trevor Manuel.

Frans Viljoen,
A seriously concerned citizen

Disclaimer: All letters and comments published in Fin24 have been independently written by members of the Fin24 community. The views are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent those of Fin24.