WASH. Rinse. Repeat. And now, spin. President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced the government’s umpteenth economic stimulus and recovery plan of the past decade.
There will be “growth enhancing” reforms, public spending will be “reprioritised” to create jobs, infrastructure will be funded and there will be investments in municipal “social infrastructure”, as well as improvements to health and education.
If it all sounds familiar, it should. It’s the National Development Plan (NDP). It dates from 2009, when it was first mooted, to be finalised in 2012, supposedly to deliver a new South Africa by no later than 2030. Coincidentally, the deputy chairperson of the NDP commission was one Cyril Ramaphosa.
While there appear to be no limits to the gullibility of voters, that’s not true of the markets. Despite the slick promises of economic reform and fiscal rectitude, there is international scepticism.
Currency weakness continues, the country has slid into recession and employers are continuing to shed jobs.
The flipside to the government’s inability to implement good ideas has been its inability to correct what are patently stupid ideas.
An example is the decision this week by Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba to ease visa regulations to encourage tourism and stimulate economic growth.
The key regulation to be thrown out of the window is the extensive documentation that was required for a minor to travel.
Introduced with the best of intentions, to prevent child trafficking, the regulation was so onerous - requiring unabridged birth certificates and affidavits of parental permission - that it seriously damaged tourism when it was introduced in 2014.
Although there has been some recovery, airline ticketing dropped by 20% in a year, while travel from India and China dropped by more than 50% and shed R7billion in revenue.
Flustered, the government promised late in 2014 an inter-ministerial task force to sort out the matter. In the face of Gigaba’s intransigence, it was never convened.
The promise was reiterated in Jacob Zuma’s 2015 State of the Nation Address. Gigaba simply refused to budge and nothing happened.
Jeff Radebe, then minister in the Presidency, promised at the World Economic Forum meeting in Cape Town in 2015 that the regulations would be revised “as a matter of urgency” because of the disastrous “unintended consequences”. Gigaba sneered his defiance.
Now, after almost five years of paralysis, this reckless and destructive set of regulations has at last been dumped. Yet Gigaba, the person who caused the chaos, is an important part of Ramaphosa’s “new dawn” team.
This is the challenge facing Ramaphosa. There is widespread consensus regarding the direction he claims to want to take SA, if for no other reason than after drifting aimlessly for a decade almost any course is better than none.
Yet the ship of state is still crewed by largely the same mutinous buffoons that sailed it into the doldrums in the first place.
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