respect you’
Sarah Ruden
Okay, okay – don’t forget the United States entirely. You need those tourists, and you need foreign direct investment. But the irony is that economic progress is not going to happen if the South African government is craven in following advice from abroad. Current American economic policy, even as applied in the US, is a dead end. It is future-free.
Maybe I’m the only American willing to admit it, but the US has a problem, an addiction to economic steroids. Authority-wielding people there tell you without a smirk that the thing that creates paradise is “growth”, or making more money. They also tell you that the richer a few people get, the better it is for everyone in the long run. The income gap in the US has gone from huge to surreal, and the middle class and everyone below it are experiencing the results of what I would call ultra-capitalism. These results are spreading around the planet.
n Ultra-Capitalist Equation No 1: If the logic of employment is purely economic, and US companies have no obligations but to make profits, then why provide job security, health insurance, a safe workplace and a living wage? Why not get rid of the demanding indigenous work force altogether, and send the jobs to Haiti? The really cool thing is that, though the living wage there is a 10th as much, you can pay even less than that. The work is done practically for free. It’s better than snorting cocaine until you bleed.
n Ultra-Capitalist Equation No 2: If a law- breaker is not a human being, but merely a substandard machine, one that will not function with only scanty inputs of parental care, food, medicine, education, outdoor recreation, and all the other frou-frou and fa-la-la associated with a humane society – well, then the law-breaker must be discarded, or efficiently exploited. He must go to a spiffy new for-profit prison, where drug rehabilitation and literacy programmes have been replaced by jobs handling airline reservations by telephone, for pay that is, shall we say, modest. For trouble-makers, there are isolation cells in which to go completely insane before being released into the unsuspecting public.
n Ultra-Capitalist Equation No 3: If the function of the rest of the world is to provide commodities, especially oil, then the country that gets in the way of this has to be made an example of, through genocide if necessary. The United Nations economic sanctions against Iraq, which the US has insisted on maintaining for nearly a decade, have caused 1,5-million deaths (mostly of children and the elderly), according to conservative estimates. Sorry, but for some reason I just can’t think up a snide crack to make here.
This is the ideology the people who are giving South Africa economic advice have enacted. But what they have instituted and are flogging to the rest of the world is not only brutal but self-defeating. A population without disposable income cannot consume enough goods to keep an economy going. A wide income gap causes crime – this is hardly news to South Africans – which frustrates investment.
Most importantly, as any businessman would testify, having cash in the bank is nothing compared to having friends. The USis losing its friends. It cultivates short-term “interests” worldwide, which prevent such basic human rights measures as renouncing the use of landmines and signing the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
I am an American myself, but I can’t understand why any other country would trust my government in this – manic? drunken? premenstrual? – stage in its history.
Rather than adopt the strictly pro-business policies the Americans are pushing, South Africa should do its own thing. The government could get really crazy and try some warm-and-fuzzy feel-good measures just for the fun of relieving suffering.
Banning landmines was great, but why not go for some major military cutbacks, with the savings diverted into health, housing, education and jobs programmes? Is Parliament afraid of an invasion from Lesotho, with those pointy hats being used as weapons?
The citizens of Costa Rica benefit every day from the impetuous decision, long ago, to disband its army. Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, by contrast, were “practical”, “realistic” and “responsible”: their economic development was on US terms and for US benefit (until Nicaragua got fed up). And take a look now. Being flaky is obviously better.
No matter what Americans claim, they don’t take seriously a country that sells out to foreign business interests. Don’t be a slut, Thabo. Make them respect you. A country that’s sincerely looking for a life partner doesn’t demand a quick screw.