South Africa: the World Bank's fattened lamb for slaughter

IOL News

8 hours ago

The hubris of dividing Africa along borders drawn on lunch break napkins, for no other reason than to cannibalise it, seemed eerily similar to the ways of the World Bank and the IMF today.
Image: Yuri Gripas/Reuters/File
LEE Camp of the programme Unredacted makes incisive observations about the dark manoeuvres of the 1884 Berlin Conference. The hubris of dividing Africa along borders drawn on lunch break napkins, for no other reason than to cannibalise it, seemed eerily similar to the ways of the World Bank and the IMF today.
From the same actors, continuing with the same insidious plans of plundering the vast mineral resources of the African continent, these Bretton Woods contraptions, with innocuously sounding names, became the latter-day agents of the Berlin Conference conspirators. If wild hogs, for whatever sinister reason, were to conference on the neighbour's corn yard, Lee calls it the Orgy of Pillaging.
In the Mandela and Mbeki successive administrations, the clarity of the vision and the determination of the resolve were unequivocal. It was to square the apartheid debts, grow the economy and bolster the fiscus, a strategy that yielded an average of 4.2% growth year on year.
The way to trivialise the success of this strategy, notwithstanding its weaknesses in reducing joblessness, was to claim that the prices of commodities were favourably high. Were this trivialisation rooted in political sentiment only, it would be understandable. But it has no bearing on scientific fact or economic reality. And the Zuma administration was heralded into office with a bountiful surplus.
And for purposes of context, commodity prices have been way higher since 2009, or at least the prices of those commodities on which the 'favourably high' claim is predicated. Yet to the collective shock of all citizens, they have helplessly witnessed a diminishing economic growth, recording a few recessions along the way.
To date, the country has borrowed oodles of money, eye-watering and mouth-dropping amounts! The gross loan debt has increased from R2.5 trillion in 2017 to R4.3trln in 2021. This means the government has borrowed an additional R1.8trln from both domestic and international investors.
The debt has been so heavy on the country's purse, so much so that the Treasury honchos have to borrow an estimated R2 billion every day to service the interest on capital borrowed and to keep the failing heart of their ICU patient ticking.
The Government of National Unity (GNU) is determined to borrow as much money as it can possibly sustain their mind-numbing vaudeville. It would have been entertaining if it were not so tragic.
The chronology of events is disturbing. First, the exchequer announced that the taxman had over-collected taxes in 2025, to great applause. Then the sequence of events and their timelines get blurred and indistinguishable.
Either before that announcement or contemporaneous to it, the geniuses at the Treasury went to Washington DC to apply for a loan of R26bn. Or how does the Minister account for the speed of approval of this amount shortly after the Constitutional Court ruled against a planned VAT increase?
But someone or something had to keep the masses entertained. And the famous stage is our Tower of Babel, the parliament of the people. And the captivating showdown of all, between the two main endearing partners of the GNU, is guaranteed front row television viewership.
The masses were entertained with a VAT increase imbroglio. It was rejected. And the World Bank approved the loan, all in great effort to avoid imposing the beneficiation tax on a sliding scale.
John Perkins, renowned author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, has an insider articulation acuity. The World Bank and the IMF are frontline agents in the early stages of a regime change strategy. Beyond that stage, the creditors will take over the decision-making capabilities of the country or some government will be couped or someone will be swiftly murdered.
For a country that boasts of the best constitution in the world, how does it account for the fact that its eminent provisions determining the powers of different branches of government are silent about the most egregious executive abuse of power? This is when the executive branch contracts into foreign debt on behalf of the state secretly, pledging the entire sovereignty of the people as collateral?
It is not even helped by the fact that the preeminent conditionality for loans with the World Bank and the IMF is secrecy. Not even the representatives of the people convened in Parliament can know. It is very secret, they say. According to the late Minister of Public Enterprises, parliamentarians have to sign non-disclosure agreements. So much for voting.
At least we now know what the term 'ruling elite' means. It refers to those people who have been given privileged sight of the loan terms of the World Bank and the IMF.
Thomas Jefferson, from the vantage of his political heights, addressing his countrymen and countrywomen, once observed that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
And for a country led by the ANC, a political party with a long and profound history, spanning over a century of various political and economic stages of the forging of this country's nationhood, its incumbent leaders are determined not to learn anything about money or debt or even the mastery of their predecessors.
It is a fairly documented epic of South Africa's complex historic narrative that the straw that broke the apartheid camel's back wasn't a straw. It was a crushing debt, and an irate mob of creditors beating at Darius Fourie's and Chris Stals' doors, Finance Minister and Reserve Bank Governor, respectively, who were at the service of the apartheid ignominy.