Marching to euphoria

With marches and demands to the Reserve Bank and the JSE, the EFF’s radical Leninism is slowly coming into focus. Ugh.

At the recent Top 100 Companies event, I happened to bump into multifaceted businessman Roy Andersen, who was once head of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. We discussed briefly the EFF march on the JSE, and he mentioned that during his term, two petitions were delivered to him as head of the exchange during the transition years.

One march was led by Trevor Manuel, who eventually became finance minister, and the other was led by Jay Naidoo, who was later communications minister. We joked that on this basis, EFF commander-in-chief Julius Malema would end up as either a neo-liberal finance minister or a short-lived communications minister (no communications minister seems to last longer than a few months).

Jokes aside, the EFF march to the JSE last week is significant in one respect; it demarcates a portion of the political spectrum and assigns it more clearly to the extreme Left. When the EFF entered the political fray, at least half the votes it attracted were, I suspect, really protest votes against the ANC. Its actual programme is now coming into focus, and it is a programme rooted in populist Leninism that would result in a Zimbabweanesque disaster for SA.

The first of its demands is for all companies “in the JSE” to “move towards socialisation of their ownership”, meaning that employees should get shares. “A minimum of 51% of all JSE companies should be owned and controlled by workers,” the demand states.

But the list is not without its ironies. The EFF has taken over the ANC’s habit of trying to make companies responsible for social policy that actually belongs with the state. A whole section of the EFF’s demands requires that companies “adopt” schools and colleges. In a way, this is a back-handed compliment — no doubt unintended — to the corporate sector, suggesting that it might be better equipped to manage these schools than the state is. Like the EFF, I have no doubt that is true.

The other inheritance from the ANC is the chant “white monopoly capitalism”. I understand, of course, that the phrase’s origin lies in the benighted apartheid-era exclusion of black South Africans from meaningful involvement in business. But I always find it so ironic, because almost all the true corporate monopolies in SA are now owned by the state.

Another irony is the demand that JSE companies should sponsor at least 100 students through tertiary education. I asked Anglo how many bursaries the five Anglo-linked companies dish out annually, and they said they had allocated 1 623 over the past three years. This is over and above the R50m given to universities directly every year and the R18m that Anglo dished out to establish the Namaqualand FET college.

In other words, Anglo is way ahead of the demands made by the EFF, which, presumably, the organisation considered to be pushing the outer boundaries of the possible. At a quick glance, there are a whole bunch of other demands on the list that I strongly suspect many companies are doing already.

It underlines the simple fact that South Africans don’t have the slightest clue about how much good corporates do. Of course, where you have money, you have malfeasance. But the basic nature of market economies is to bind citizens and institutions in an intricate web of mutual co-dependence where each element, in seeking its own advancement, unwittingly reinforces mutual reliance on the whole.

The EFF can make outrageous demands because there is no danger yet that it might have to implement them.

If it does approach power, it will be subjected to the same cold shower of reality that was endured by the ANC radicals of yesteryear.

And if that happens, who knows? One day, Malema too may be welcomed into that bastion of elite capitalism, the Rothschild banking group.