[imagesource: Adam Craker / Twitter]

If you were hoping for a day of overwhelming positivity, sorry, but we’re not off to a great start.

On the plus side, reports suggest that the ban on the sale of alcohol and tobacco products could soon be lifted, so small mercies.

The latest dire report on South Africa’s financial and socio-economic outlook comes via Bloomberg, with a rather jarring headline – ‘South Africa nears the point of no return’.

They use the case of DCD Wind Towers, a wind energy business that opened in the Eastern Cape in 2013 but shut down this year, to illustrate the plight.

Having provided valuable jobs to an impoverished community, an abrupt change of heart by the national government regarding our promising wind and solar energy program meant the end of the road, and it’s a situation South Africans are all too familiar with:

With debt surging and the coronavirus pandemic threatening the deepest economic contraction in almost 90 years, business leaders are warning that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government can no longer procrastinate. With the situation deteriorating rapidly, they say, South Africa faces a choice between loosening the grip of vested interests to embrace radical — and likely painful — reform, or risking a sovereign debt crisis and more permanent scars.

“We are looking at a wasteland,” said Martin Kingston, chairman of Rothschild & Co.’s South African unit and deputy president of Business Unity South Africa, the country’s main business organisation. “The ramifications of not taking the necessary action in the near future are catastrophic.”

Words like “wasteland” and “catastrophic” are far from ideal, but it’s the cold, hard numbers that are the most worrying.

Bloomberg reports that, unless drastic changes are immediately implemented, the national debt could exceed 140% of gross domestic product by the end of the decade.

As a point of comparison, that number was only around 26% before the start of the 2008 global recession.

When our lockdown started back in March, unemployment was already hovering around the 30% mark, which was a 17-year high, and that number would have swelled as the months have gone on.

Whilst the blame for our country’s plight cannot be laid at the feet of one individual, it’s also near impossible to overestimate the damage done during the Zuma years, the effects of which this country will suffer through for decades to come.

Meanwhile, he kicks back and relaxes at Nkandla, with his day of reckoning in court seemingly always a few months away.

[source:bloomberg]