Stimulate this — Ramaphosa and business get cozy over R1-million canapés

Not-so-wiseguys

The climax of Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, Goodfellas, is among the most perfect stretches of cinema ever produced. It unfolds in a coked-out, paranoid haze: above, a helicopter surveilling Mafia bagman Henry Hill on his daily chores: sell a bag of guns; duct-tape cocaine to a drug mule; sauté veal for dinner. Below, a network of gangsters and narcs steadily closing in on his floundering operations. We know that Henry’s triple-act is unsustainable, but we’re never certain whether it’s going to end in a) an arrest, b) a bullet to the head or, c) an escape to an unpronounceable Canadian prairie town. The film’s principal act of legerdemain is making us care about Hill, a two-bit scumbag rat who has been faithless to everyone in his life, very much including his mistresses.



The corollary here should be obvious. The ANC is in the final act of its own epic underworld caper, and the bad juju helicopter is circling relentlessly. In a country driven half-insane by four centuries of supremacist shenanigans, the lunacy now unfolding seems a lot like ... business as usual.

Two things in particular have become clear in the months since the garishly entertaining Zondo State Capture Commission horror show began proceedings.

First, over the last decade the ANC has devolved into a gangster’s playground so perverse and larcenous that senior leaders would think nothing of mass murdering each other for political appointments, or shaking down banks in order to secure finances for the capo’s benefactors. (This part is actually a bit fucked up: the ANC’s secretary-general at the time, Gwede Mantashe, nudged financial execs to reconsider unbanking the unbankable Guptas. The Mining Minister at the time, Mosebenzi Zwane, threatened to unbank the banks. Mantashe is now Mining Minister. Zwane remains a Member of Parliament. And South Africa remains the only place on Earth that makes bankers look like saints).

Second, and very much related: the country is broke. Not broke as in, Shit, I can’t afford a new pair of work shoes and I may miss rent this month. But catastrophically, existentially, how-did-we-get-here? busted.

Amazingly, while the aforementioned problems are mutually reinforcing, they are both entirely self-inflicted. The Zondo Commission, along with the Nugent Commission on SARS and, to a lesser extent, the recent and more sweeping People’s Tribune on Economic Crime, lays bare the scale and trajectory of our national meltdown. It is now a matter of historical record that colonial-era looting was followed by the thievery of the apartheid years, which morphed into the crookedness of the arms deal, and then the nightmare of the Zuma regime. Given apartheid’s manifold deprivations, the ANC’s job was never going to be easy. But they peddled to voters a booklet called Ready to Govern, promising that in exchange for power they would break the centuries-long cycle of robbery and shame.

Instead, they’ve extended it into perpetuity.

Now, a new don wants to govern. No, he really really does. Cyril Ramaphosa and his small team of like-minded reformers are serious about their attempts to turn this country around. The problem is that many of them actively and willfully got us into this problem in the first place. (Howzit Gwede! G’day Gigaba!) More significantly, they’ve left it far too late. South Africa is of course mired in a recession, one that Deputy President David Mabuza recently described as nothing more than a state of mind, but one that isn’t the worst part of the economic picture. That honour goes to the fact that we’re shackled to the debt accrued by our State-Owned Enterprises, which constitute a nightmarish 11% of our GDP, a yoke that is dragging us off the cliff to eternal penury.

The International Monetary Fund is coming. At this point, almost nothing can stave them off. But what if we designed our own stimulus package, jazzing up the fiscus by erecting bridges, and bridges over the bridges, a Keynesian orgy of concrete and farming co-ops stretching as far as the DRC?