The Visible Hand

Hey, Cyril - MET - Chapter 70

I’ve just sat down after watching Cyril Ramaphosa’s very gracious, very charming and very well-judged speech to the nation a few minutes after the final results of the general election confirmed that the ANC had failed to win an outright majority for the first time since the apartheid-ending vote of 1994.

How dignified he was; how inclusive, how smooth, and how inconsequential.

But you’ve got to hand it to him. He is impeccably groomed. 

Which got me wondering how such a gracious, charming and well-judged speech could be applauded so enthusiastically by citizens of the world’s most unequal country. Unless, of course, those applauding citizens happened to be the beneficiaries of precisely that. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

I’m not going to pretend to know enough about macroeconomics to explain how South Africa ended up with the very worst Gini ratio among all the  countries on the planet. Worse than Albania, Algeria, Angola and every other nation in the world from Afghanistan to Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Exacerbating the shameful disgrace of it, in the ranking of countries by size of GDP from the United States (at number one), all the way down to Tuvalu (stone-last at 188), South Africa is placed at a very commendable and relatively lucrative 40th position.  

Vaguely remembering Economics (1) at the University of Natal, PMB, of 1972, and in the absence of any explanations I could call my own, I turned quite naturally to Adam Smith, the father of trickle-down economics:

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.

• Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in Part IV, Chapter 1

By rights, according to Smith’s logic, South Africa’s poorest people should be better off than the poorest people living in the 148 countries lower on the wealth list. But without access to universal healthcare and a well-funded education, and with only very limited career opportunities for the unemployed 45,5% of individuals aged 15-34 years, this is clearly not the case. 

The 2020 multidimensional poverty report estimated 62 per cent of children being multiple deprived in SA, with this estimate rising to almost 9 out of 10 children in rural areas. The highest rate was in Limpopo province (83 per cent) whereas the lowest rate was recorded in Gauteng province (37 per cent).

• https://www.unicef.org/media/136796/file/South-Africa-2022-COAR.pdf

My despairing italics.

Providence doesn’t seem particularly interested in South Africa’s plight. More like we were “forgotten and abandoned”. 

Which brings me back to Cyril, who was a socialist firebrand and the head of the National Union of Mineworkers when I cohabited with him in that house in Westdene back in 1978, and - like a caterpillar turned to butterfly - how beautifully groomed he subsequently was to run the country in the interests of white capital. 

I’ll leave it to the occasionally impartial BBC to tell the story:

As white businessmen tried to accommodate him, Mr Ramaphosa acquired a stake in nearly every key sector - from telecoms and the media to beverages and fast food (he owned the South African franchise of the US chain, McDonalds) to mining.

His ventures were wildly lucrative - by 2015 he had become one of South Africa's wealthiest politicians with a net worth of about $450m (£340m).

But Mr Ramaphosa's reputation was tainted after police killed 34 workers in August 2012 at the Marikana platinum mine - the most deadly police action since white-minority rule ended.

With Mr Ramaphosa then a director in Lonmin - the multinational that owns the mine - he was accused of betraying the workers he once fought for, especially after emails emerged showing he had called for action against the miners for engaging in "dastardly criminal acts" - an apparent reference to their wildcat and violent strike.

A judge-led inquiry cleared him of involvement in the killings, but failed to totally scrub the stain from his legacy.

• BBC -  May 9th, 2024

Forget the results of the election. As long as Cyril is there you can rest assured that money will prevail - white money and black money - but mostly, inevitably, white.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand is all too visible in Cyril’s every move.

The free market is never free. Someone always has to pay. In South Africa it’s everyone who isn’t invited to the thieves’ banquet.

Read the following, and weep the beloved country:

https://africanewsglobal.co.za/ramaphosa-and-mantashe-groomed-for-decades-by-white-monopoly-capital/

I can forgive him for fucking my girlfriend.

I won’t forgive him for fucking the nation. 

Written in less hope than haste.

02/06/2024