MICHAEL MORRIS: ‘Getting real’ means working for the common interest - Business Day

Michael Morris
It almost seems, now, an event that happened a while ago, but I feel sure that in the intervening days most South Africans have succeeded in mentally shrugging off the absurdity of Washington’s recent idiotic mischaracterisation of our problems.

Nevertheless, I do wonder whether enough people know that while in 2001 there were 313 South Africans employed for every 100 grant recipients, two decades later, in 2023, that first number had plunged from 313 to 62.

If you think about that for a second or two, it’s obvious that whatever the merits of this or that minority ethnic complaint, our real problems are of an order of magnitude that dwarfs it.

Which brings into sharper relief the potential significance of last week’s budget postponement, a first for democratic SA.

In a WhatsApp exchange with colleagues, I suggested the postponement was “actually a good sign”, as it “shows our politics are getting real, for once”. I added: “Maybe first time since PW’s spat with FW in July 1989, which marked the beginning of the end for the NP (and, to his credit, the triumph of FW)”.

This referred to then state president PW Botha’s astonished fury at not being consulted by newly elected National Party leader FW de Klerk on his decision to jet off to Livingstone for a sit-down with Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda. Within weeks, a petulant and self-pitying Botha resigned prematurely ... and the possibility of a post-apartheid SA became imaginable.

In this context — of getting real — I was struck last week by the irony of a post-“Afrikaner refugee” social media comment that read: “Kan ons mense nie net een maal saamstaan nie? Ons gaan nêrens kom nie. Ons is reeds so ’n minderheid.” (Can our people not stand together for once? We’re not going to get anywhere. We are already a tiny minority.”)

Inescapably, this sentiment calls attention to itself as a cry from the heart of a small section of society helplessly identifying itself as the disarmed remnant of the once-feared vaderland state that people of my age knew all too intimately as brutal, intrusive, unyielding, backward and doomed.

In truth, though — if we are thinking about getting real − “ons mense” is a sum of citizens whose interests are indivisible and are bound up not in a hostile and inhospitable past we no longer live in, but a future we are fated to share.

If we hope to “get anywhere”, our common condition can be the only basis of it. From afar, Donald Trump can afford to get this wrong; we can’t. Thinking back to the late 1980s, De Klerk knew this to be true and so did Nelson Mandela.

Unfortunately, the common interest has often been a novel, and usually secondary, consideration in SA politics. If the budget postponement is to be a meaningful reflection of our politics getting real, the outcome will have to reflect that irresistible common interest.

As my senior colleague John Endres told the Institute of Economic Affairs in London last week: “If the budget impasse lets the DA rediscover some of its gumption, and shows the ANC that it must proceed more circumspectly while placing greater emphasis on economic growth, then good things could materialise in the years ahead.”

The Treasury might consult colleague Gabriel Crouse’s just-published “Cut VAT & BEE” report on cutting VAT from 15% to 11.5%, and potentially saving R100bn by following judge Raymond Zondo’s plea for value for money — rather than race-based — procurement.

That would immeasurably benefit all “ons mense”.

Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-02-24-michael-morris-getting-real-means-working-for-the-common-interest/