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Money Market FundsSouth Africa has lived through different epochs in its short 31-year democracy. The Mandela epoch was a special period that brought enormous hope and generated tremendous interest in SA’s economy. Although it was a short epoch, it was a powerful way to launch SA’s economy into a new era of prosperity. Many vested interests desperately wanted SA to succeed, and for a while, it seemed like SA could do little wrong.
Mbeki’s epoch was built on Mandela’s foundations and leveraged strongly on the goodwill he had generated. With solid institutional capacity, SA entered its golden period and achieved some of its most impressive GDP growth rates. SA was deep in investment grade, was running a budget surplus, had impressively low debt/GDP ratios, and investment levels were soaring towards the targeted 25% mark. Optimism in the Rainbow Nation was at an all-time high.
Enter the Zuma epoch, which was immediately saddled with the global financial crisis of 2009, which stole some of that momentum. However, what followed will go down as a dark period in SA politics, giving birth to state capture, corruption, maladministration, malfeasance, and, worst of all, the destruction of the institutional integrity of SA’s law-enforcement agencies, SAPS, the NPA, and SIU. Sentiment steadily eroded, the Mandela goodwill squandered, and the bailout culture ensured that what funds may have been available for alleviating poverty were now redirected towards keeping defunct SOEs and those running them funded, but without the requisite output.
Thankfully, SA survived that epoch and entered the Ramaphosa era. There was a lot to fix, and the rot left by the Zuma administration took a painfully long time to unravel and dismantle. SA has lost the better part of a decade as a result of it, and justifiably, the ANC paid dearly for its support of such morally bankrupt leadership. It culminated in the GNU, which also ushered in a new era of accountability, and the results are now clearly evident. Ramaphosa’s comment that SA has turned the corner holds merit, and while there are still many problems to fix, including significant infrastructural decay and the unemployment crisis, at least the indicators are moving in a more constructive direction.
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