Don’t try to redress racial imbalances right now

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. And the man is Cyril Ramaphosa.

That is the general tenor of reaction to the lockdown. It’s a remarkably generous response, given the inert nature of Ramaphosa’s presidency so far.

The adulatory reaction was summed up in a Business Day editorial. The lockdown proved CR’s mettle, the paper said. “When the country needed leadership at a time of crisis, it had a president ready to provide it.”

The plaudits are premature. Public support for Ramaphosa has at least two other factors.

There’s palpable relief nationally that former president Jacob Zuma’s feckless kleptocracy is not overseeing things. There is also at work the universal tendency to rally around the nation’s leader, how ever shite he or she may be at everyday governance, the moment that there is an existential crisis.

Covid-19 may give Ramaphosa another popularity boost, but those predicting that the president will now act because this immunises him against the internal foes are likely to be disappointed. Ramaphosa’s inertia is not about a lack of power. Its about an excess of caution because he is terrified of splitting the ANC.

Covid-19 will cause massive upheaval. And while Ramaphosa had no real option to the gamble of imposing the lockdown, even if it succeeds in containing the virus, it is a cure that could kill an economy already reeling.

The parlous nature of our situation is captured in a single statistic in Ramaphosa’s address: R150 million. That is all government could scrape together to contribute towards its national disaster vehicle, the Solidarity Fund.

That’s pocket change. Compare it to the trillion rand estimated to have been looted by the Zupta forces of state capture. It speaks tellingly of a fiscus bled dry.

It was left to routinely excoriated White Monopoly Capital in the form of SA’s two wealthiest families, the Ruperts and the Oppenheimers, to kick in a billion rand each. There was not a word from black economic empowerment’s own instant billionaires of any contribution.

As is always the case in SA, our new-found national solidarity was quickly challenged. There was an uproar when the Small Business Development ministry’s guidelines for emergency financial assistance to small businesses specified 51% black ownership as one of the criteria.

Although denounced as “fake news”, Afriforum produced a snapshot of the SBD website showing the offending guidelines. The ministry then explained a “rogue official” had mistakenly released what was only an “early draft”.

There was another twist in the tail. SBD Minister Khumbuzo Ntshavheni reassured eNCA that not only black-majority businesses would be aided, “though we will make sure there is a geographic spread and a demographic spread that is representative”. In other words, race and provincial quotas, not need, would be the criteria.

When it came to xenophobia there was even less embarrassment. Spaza shops would be allowed to remain open, said Ntshavheni. But “those spaza shops that will be open are strictly those that are owned by South Africans, managed and run by South Africans.”

It is one thing for a country, in normal times, to try to redress historical racial imbalances or to favour its nationals against competing foreigners. It is quite another to do so during a state of national disaster.

Sounds so much like the old apartheid government. Cyril will be shocked…

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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