The tragedy and destiny of South Africa

"Stop the murder, stop the lies, out, out, you nest of spies!" So chanted the crowd outside South Africa House on Trafalgar Square in the autumnal mists of London circa 1988. The anti-apartheid struggle was the moral compass of my generation, from the Soweto riots to Steve Biko's murder to the horrific "necklacings in the townships and killing fields of the Limpopo to Madiba's release and the birth of a multiracial, democratic South Africa in 1994. If there was ever an anthem for humanity, it would have to be the haunting and exquisite Nikoksi sikellei Africa. Gold bless Africa. Nkosi sike lela. God bless us all - the ultimate, existential plea.
So it pains me to see the state whose birth so inspired me degenerate into political and economic disaster. The South African rand has plunged 50 per cent against the US dollar, Pretoria's debt will soon be sovereign junk (below BBB minus), global investors have lost faith in the integrity and even competence of Jacob Zuma's African National Congress (ANC) governments. Things fall apart. Cry the beloved country. The looting machine. Nkosi sike lela.
Jacob Zuma must resign as he has run a corrupt and incompetent ANC government, as the Gupta family's political intrigues attest. I always wondered about the fondness of African Big Men for Indian money lenders (Indian masseuses in the fatal case of General Sani Abache in 1998. The Swiss just returned $380 million of the money that the late Nigerian military dictator looted from the continent's most populous nation). When the secretary general of the ANC warns that South Africa risks becoming a "Mafia state", all bets are off. If private predatory capitalists seize power in Africa's most industrialised economy, albeit one without a viable power grid, the investment case for continent evaporates.
ANC has squandered the moral authority Nelson Mandela and the dead of Soweto bequeathed to it. As the Black Death plagues the mining industry, its economy faces a grim future and Zuma's U-turn on Finance Minister Nene has gutted his credibility with the world financial markets. Short Azania (aka the South African rand) was a macro trade de jour since early 2014. Not even Pravin Gordhan can now prevent a sovereign downgrade, exodus of global investors, painful risk premium on South African debt in the Euromarkets. It is a pity that the ANC is a de facto one party state, with 60 per cent of the popular vote since 1994 despite its awful governance track record and Jacob Zuma's misrule since 2009. The ANC has made a fatal mistake in once again white washing the embattled Zuma just so party cronies can continue to loote the state. This is not just post-apartheid South Africa's loss but the loss of the entire continent. Did the murdered souls of Sharpeville, Robben Island, Soweto and the Johann Vorster prison in Pretoria really die for nothing?
The ANC "recalled" President Thabo Mbeki for far less. Zuma leads a corrupt state where rent seekers squeeze the entrepreneurial spirit of the people. The current account deficit, capital flight, the secular plunge in state revenues due to the commodities crash are in economic ill omen. Twenty years after the fall of apartheid, the jobless rate is 35 per cent, the education system is broken. Yet South Africa is also a $600 billion GDP state that has created world class companies, banks listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange - despite and not because of the ANC government that has failed the poor and the rising number of unemployed men and women in the shanty towns and townships of the veldt.
It is a pity that even in 2016 proven failures like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe or petrocurrency kleptocracies like Angola and Equatorial Guinea continue to exist in Africa. Even South Sudan, the world's next state born out of a horrific civil war that claimed two million plus lives over three decades, born amid such high hopes once John Garang realised his dream in death, has degenerated into inter-tribal civil war and ethnic massacres.
So many African economies and societies were destroyed by the regimes and ideas of the continent's Big Men - Mugabe, Milton Obote, Emperor Bokassa, Mengistu, Mobuto Sese Seko, Jomo Kenyatta, Generals Abacha/Babangida, Julius Nyerere, Samora Machel, Gaddafi, Banda, Kutu Acheampong and the Dos Santos clan. Almost sixty years after Harold MacMillan's "winds of change" speech ended British colonialism in Africa, the world needs to rethink the continent's models of political governance. Lenin said the Tsar's soldiers voted with their feet. Professional investors like me vote on a country with our Bloomberg screens and the "best and brightest" of South Africa just leave Madiba's broken rainbow nation forever in the quest for a green card. Nkosi sike lela!
Researched and compiled by Matein Khalid. Mr Khalid is a global equities strategist and fund manager. He can be contacted at: matein@emirates.net.ae