Chasing my tail trying to get the bills paid.
But two important things not to lose sight of:
Firstly, Julius is back.
The weekend National General Council of the ANC Youth League was a personal triumph for him and he emerges from Gallagher Estate with his star, once again, steadily on the rise.
In the bitterly divided Ruling Alliance Julius Malema can come clean and stand tall – as a Breitling wearing anti-communists, anti-Cosatuite, who is unashamed of using his political connections to make as much money as possible.
He has invested his transformation credentials with the Youth League’s call for the nationalisation of mines (to which has been added the removal of the willing-seller/willing-buying principle with regards to land distribution) as well as with his overtly populist appeals to a form of ethnic solidarity to “African children” and “those who look like us”.
It my opinion he is now this puts him in the leading cadre of the “nationalist” faction of the ANC that is in the process of confirming itself as the dominant faction – a process that will be reflected in the tone and tenor of the ANC’s NGC later this month.
More than ever I am of the view that Julius is the coming man (as I argue in the piece that continues to get the biggest traffic on my website here) and he has now overcome the setback associated with the dramatic revealing of his business interests as well as the disciplinary action taken against him by the ANC – both earlier this year. He’s got 30 years to emerge as a central ANC leadership person – I can’t think of anyone better placed.
SACP wants to spend your money
Secondly, for those interested in underlying political risk for financial markets, you have got to read the SACP’s latest Umsebenzi Online (Volume 9, number 17) – The long and the short of it is they hope to continue “directing both our public and private financial sector resources towards investing their funds towards this new growth path.”
It is important to understand what the SACP thinks it is doing. The organisation wants to get the “banks, insurance companies, investment and asset managers” to use the money they are tasked with investing to finance a number of goals that government (and presumably therefore, the Ruling Alliance) specify.
Where does the money they are talking about come from? It is the savings and nest-eggs of every South African that the SACP is proposing be put at its and the ANC’s disposal. I am all for encouraging socially conscious investment, but this idea is classically Stalinist as well as being stupid – the money would find a safe place to hide if the ANC and the SACP tried to get their hands on it; except for the money belonging to the weak and vulnerable, who are always the true victims of policies like these.
The article is called “Funding the National Democratic Revolution” so they make no bones about what they want to do with the savings of teachers, workers and old people and … well everybody who has saved and invested money in South Africa.
The Umsebenzi is more specific about forcing a change in the investment criteria of the Public Investment Commission so that it “promote(s) the five priority areas of government’s development programme.” Again, be clear what is being proposed here. The PIC essentially invests the R740 billion worth of pensions of public sector employees. This is whose money the SACP wants to spend – after the probity of government and public sector spending we have seen over the last few years, who would countenance this?
Whoever wrote this document clearly believes this money belongs to government – when, in fact, it represents most of the life savings of government employees. The interests of the owners of that money is that they get the maximum return, while the supremely grandiose SACP decides that the “real” interests of those people is that their money gets deployed in “government programmes”.
The suggestion is so puerile and undemocratic that I am tempted into hyperbole – and all the more dispiriting because the SACP is all that is standing against the rise of the Zuma/Gupta/Malema imperative. You can catch the full article here.
Nic Borain 