On Saturday morning, a professional entertainer wrote off his supercar on a Cape Town suburban street, thanked God for saving his life, and then blamed the high-speed crash on a homeless person. Sometimes the political metaphors write themselves.
Of course, the courts will decide whether the “beggar” Prince Daniel Obioma claimed he swerved to avoid was real or metaphysical, but there’s no denying that it was a miraculous escape for the pop singer who goes by 3gar Baby, presumably because 1gar Baby and 2gar Baby filed their papers first. When you watch the CCTV footage of the crash you realise it could have been much, much worse: five minutes earlier or later and he might have driven into the E coli, sorry, I mean the Atlantic.
Also, to be fair, our politicians aren’t quite as explicit when it comes to blaming homeless people for their inability to keep sophisticated machinery going in a straight line.
Still, it’s been interesting to see how much of the debate around the budget crunch has focused on the poor’s inability to cope with a VAT increase and how little has been about the ANC’s inability to buy a garage pie without dropping a quarter-of-a-million.
(“Honourable member, we reject the accusations of profligacy levelled against this department … R50,000 was an entirely reasonable amount to pay for the feasibility study to determine whether we wanted pepper steak or plain steak, while R100,000 for mouth-burn insurance is by no means excessive.
Rather, the ANC understands, perhaps better than any other party, that an entire economy has sprung up around the money that spills out of the state like water out of a broken Johannesburg pipe.
“The balance was spent on sanitation of state transport assets after an unscheduled ejection of meat-like substances occurred shortly after initial mastication and Comrade [name redacted] screamed ‘Holy Panyaza, it’s lava!’ and sought to redeploy his pie out of the transport asset’s passenger window.”)
Of course, the ANC’s reluctance to curb runaway spending is neither new nor mysterious. We know, through years of experience, that the party sees it is as something to be tried only as a last resort, and not just because, as Smuts Ngonyama so eloquently put it, nobody joined the struggle to be poor.
Rather, the ANC understands, perhaps better than any other party, that an entire economy has sprung up around the money that spills out of the state like water out of a broken Johannesburg pipe.
It probably knows that some of the most successful members of this economy are cadres whose contribution both to the state and to the national economy is theoretical at best, and it might even admit, in private, that should any of those cadres ever be asked to find a real job, their interviews would be fascinating. (“When you say you expect ‘deliverables’ from me, are we talking Checkers Sixty60 or Mr D?”)
But the ANC also knows that not all that spillage is being spent on pointy shoes, porcelain whippets, and down payments to car dealers so cadres can pretend to be Nigerian pop stars by bouncing their McLaren off a wall in Sea Point. It knows that, should the taps be tightened, many people will start struggling to pay bonds, or rent, or school fees; and an even greater number who rely on the first group’s proximity to money will start struggling to pay for food, transport and medicine.
I don’t think anybody is arguing that the money pipes shouldn’t be fixed. But when you consider the political, social and economic upheaval triggered by Elon Musk’s slashing and burning of the civil service in the US — the richest country on Earth, in which a family of four is defined as living in poverty if their income is less than R490,000 a year — I can imagine scores of SA politicians lying awake in bed at night, staring anxiously at the ceiling, listening to whale songs and wishing there was another way.
Admittedly, if the GNU does eventually start cutting spending it’s very unlikely to take the Musk approach, not least because a great deal of what Musk has done so far seems to have been illegal and may be reversed. But the fact remains that it is a terrifying prospect for any government, and especially for the ANC, used as it is to seeing tax revenue as rain; something that falls from heaven every year, regardless of how useless you are at running the place.
No wonder, then, that we read claims at the weekend that the ANC is sticking with the VAT idea and is trying to scare the DA into going along with it by threatening to enlist the EFF to rubber-stamp the plan.
If these claims are true, it certainly marks a bold departure by the ANC brains trust. Certainly, nothing broadcasts to the markets that you’re serious about economic stability like giving the finger to the probusiness crowd and roping in a party whose election manifesto demanded that foreign ships park in international waters and have their cargos delivered to them, mid-ocean, by local vessels presumably equipped with some sort of enormous foefie slide.
Unfortunately for the ANC, such an approach is surely doomed to fail. The EFF might be shrinking faster than candyfloss in a hot tub, but Julius Malema knows that if sells out and joins Cyril Ramaphosa to increase taxes, he might as well give his party a kiss, help it into the passenger seat of a McLaren, and hand the keys to 3gar Baby.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.