A response to Stanley Uys: Functional decay and its consequencies.
"The outgoing administration left in its wake escalating fiscal deficits, extraordinarily high levels of domestic indebtedness by the public sector, and an escalating share of the budget being directed to service interest expense" (Cyrus Rustomjee, 2006).
You will be forgiven if you think that this outgoing administration Rustomjee is talking about is that of Nelson Mandela as Dr du Plessis would like us to believe when he says that South Africa was already showing a state of decay when Thabo Mbeki took over as President of the Republic.
In truth, Rustomjee is talking about the apartheid government of FW de Klerk. During 1989-1993, South Africa's real GDP declined by 0.5 percent, 1 percent and 2 percent respectively (NB: these are not calendar years). South Africa's Debt to GDP was hovering around 50 percent by 1993. As if this is not enough, the Reserve Bank of South Africa recklessly taken a forward position on the US Dollar that resulted in a Net Open Forward Position (NOFP) of $16 billion (in today's money this amount is about $62 billion or R557 billion or about half of SA budget assuming 7 percent risk free).
In Rustomjee's words, "the new government inherited a country suffering enormous social and physical degradation that spanned every facet of social development, including the education system, housing, health provision and infrastructure, access to basic sanitation, access to clean water, and electrification". Of course, I don't expect Stanley Uys and Dr du Plessis to appreciate this because this degradation was only true to black life.
Perhaps, contrary to Dr du Plessis's views that the exodus of whites from the public sector post 1994 represented a brain drain, the exodus of whites from the public sector was a self-correction of the system to rid of the incompetent cohort that presided over the apartheid government that produced the results mentioned above. We must remember that to be white was enough to get a job in government pre-1994. To date, government and public entities are sitting with a cohort that still calls itself engineers, accountants despite not even having a Diploma thanks to apartheid government recruitment policy.
The decay in governance that supposedly started post 1994 in South Africa is not supported by any facts. In contrast, South Africa has recorded unprecedented economic growth, low sovereign debt, improved access to education and health care, and high levels of transparency in the affairs of government post 1994. The latter is particularly important because apartheid apologists, black and white, are quick to use corruption to rubbish the ANC government. While these apologist would claim ignorance of the extent of the atrocities that apartheid government committed, they certainly know that the apartheid government was not corrupt. Disingenuous indeed.
Perhaps the biggest failure committed by the ANC post 1994 is to maintain a political, social and economic system that is against blacks in general. Marikana massacre is a living proof of this failure. On the other hand, we have the likes of Stanley Uys and Dr du Plessis, in defense of their apartheid dividends, dare to tell us that the social ills that we witness today in South Africa started post 1994. Maybe Juju is right after all. Those who continue to enjoy apartheid dividends show no regard for the victims of apartheid.
Linda Nobaza is a PhD candidate in the school of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at UWC. He writes in his personal capacity.
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
