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Sandy Johnston
Rivonia, Gauteng
I’m a regular follower of business and financial media, and it has become increasingly apparent that economists and businesspeople are totally at a loss to identify any vestiges of a coherent strategy or economic policy on the part of government.
In addition, government’s reaction to spectacular failures in essential services, such as provision of electricity, water and sanitation, is always completely off key and inappropriate.
Is it possible that President Jacob Zuma and his governing elite do not want the South African economy to do well because they prefer to have extremely low levels of employment and widespread poverty?
Come election time, this makes the electorate more pliable in terms of totally desperate souls giving away their vote for a “Christmas box”.
Zuma’s ANC also falsely strengthens benefactor status, in terms of the state’s subsistence-level grants to large numbers of disadvantaged/poverty-stricken people.
Conversely, it’s certainly true to say that a more economically uplifted electorate is far more likely to question the ongoing abject failures of government.
Over the past 20 years, government has spent hundreds of billions of rands on school education, which has produced an uneducated and uneducable generation.
In terms of tertiary education, which receives minuscule funding compared with schools, how ironic that our seat of government was barricaded by police to repel hordes of angry university students protesting against unaffordable and escalating fees.
In terms of a total absence of any form of coherent response, one cannot but question government’s motives.
