ROB ROSE: Like it or not, SA lurches towards IMF
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Mteto Nyati, CEO of technology company Altron, has never shied away from speaking his mind.
Still, his declaration this weekend that “the ANC has gone past its sell-by date ... it is time for change” was brave, given how vindictive the governing party tends to be towards business leaders who speak their mind.
Nyati’s point was that the party hasn’t been able to meet the challenges SA faces; instead its leaders “have buried their heads in the sand,” he said on social media.
This is abundantly clear — not only in the ANC’s pusillanimous response to the swearing-in of corruption-accused Zandile Gumede in Kwazulu-Natal’s legislature last week, but in the fact that its leaders haven’t bothered to grapple with how broken the economy really is.
Speaking to the FM yesterday, Nyati said the country’s economic trajectory leads one way: to the door of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“We’re heading for a big problem — if you look at our tax collections, we’re spending way more than we’re collecting. So you have to find money somewhere, and that’s where the IMF will have to come in,” he says.
Last month SA was lent $4.3bn by the IMF as part of its “rapid financing instrument,” which came with a low 1.1% interest rate and just a few conditions.
But that’s not the bogeyman those in the left of the ANC are worried about: rather, it’s the IMF’s fully-fledged “structural adjustment programme” in which it lends a far larger sum of money to a country, provided that government agrees to specific austerity measures.
The ANC’s left and its alliance partners fear that accepting such a deal means SA would lose its “economic sovereignty” and be prevented from implementing policies in the way they wish — such as land expropriation, or nationalising the SA Reserve Bank. This is why, two weeks ago, SA Communist Party secretary-general Blade Nzimande described the IMF loan as a “grievous mistake” because, he said, it exposes the country to suffocation by imperialist interests.
Forget for a minute the emptiness of that phrase, or that Nzimande, as higher education minister, was part of the cabinet that agreed on the IMF loan; it illustrates starkly that Nzimande clearly doesn’t appreciate how SA was so out of options that it had little choice but to approach the IMF.
By contrast, Nyati sees no problem in SA approaching the IMF, as long ...
Still, his declaration this weekend that “the ANC has gone past its sell-by date ... it is time for change” was brave, given how vindictive the governing party tends to be towards business leaders who speak their mind.
Nyati’s point was that the party hasn’t been able to meet the challenges SA faces; instead its leaders “have buried their heads in the sand,” he said on social media.
This is abundantly clear — not only in the ANC’s pusillanimous response to the swearing-in of corruption-accused Zandile Gumede in Kwazulu-Natal’s legislature last week, but in the fact that its leaders haven’t bothered to grapple with how broken the economy really is.
Speaking to the FM yesterday, Nyati said the country’s economic trajectory leads one way: to the door of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“We’re heading for a big problem — if you look at our tax collections, we’re spending way more than we’re collecting. So you have to find money somewhere, and that’s where the IMF will have to come in,” he says.
Last month SA was lent $4.3bn by the IMF as part of its “rapid financing instrument,” which came with a low 1.1% interest rate and just a few conditions.
But that’s not the bogeyman those in the left of the ANC are worried about: rather, it’s the IMF’s fully-fledged “structural adjustment programme” in which it lends a far larger sum of money to a country, provided that government agrees to specific austerity measures.
The ANC’s left and its alliance partners fear that accepting such a deal means SA would lose its “economic sovereignty” and be prevented from implementing policies in the way they wish — such as land expropriation, or nationalising the SA Reserve Bank. This is why, two weeks ago, SA Communist Party secretary-general Blade Nzimande described the IMF loan as a “grievous mistake” because, he said, it exposes the country to suffocation by imperialist interests.
Forget for a minute the emptiness of that phrase, or that Nzimande, as higher education minister, was part of the cabinet that agreed on the IMF loan; it illustrates starkly that Nzimande clearly doesn’t appreciate how SA was so out of options that it had little choice but to approach the IMF.
By contrast, Nyati sees no problem in SA approaching the IMF, as long ...
