If you listened to Pravin Gordhan’s mini-budget speech this week, you probably didn’t notice it.
And, possibly, if you read the speech it would not necessarily be that obvious. But if you spent time delving deep into the code embedded in what he said, there is an idea as revolutionary as it is profound.
When the spooks realise this, they will be running fancy algorithms and doing cyber inceptions and the kinds of things spooks do, to be able to fully decipher this code.
All you have to do, dear reader, to get the code for yourself is to read to the bottom, but before we disclose all, it is well to understand where we are at present.
We want jobs and lots of them.
For this, the wise counsel across the country who fret about these things, want growth paths. They want a weaker rand and cheaper money. They also want low inflation and green jobs, more skills, cheap financing from state institutions, more savings, increased competition, better prices and industrial policy.
They may think that we have all this, or at least want it, in the existing growth path. If we don’t, no matter, a new one, we are told, is coming.
But this is where Gordhan reveals his truly diabolical self, a notion that is so challenging that in another age he surely would have been burned at the stake for thinking this way. He wants to do what we already do, but better.
He wants to stop the shirking, the laying about and the pretending to work. He — wait for it — wants the public service to WORK for its money. He wants to cut the administrators in government and replace them with people who actually deliver services. Think teachers rather than back-end administrators. Think cops rather than people paying the rent for expensive buildings.
But as unorthodox as this view might be, he gets even more calculating. He wants to set new procedures in place to stop corruption before it starts, make it easy to see whether it is happening and to fine the participants at levels which will make them think twice before they steal Lear jets from poor people.
This is the stuff of legend. Think about this one. He wants to reform the health system so that monies voted for healthcare are actually spent on health by the provinces. Wow. Sick people will get the medicines that Parliament said they ought to get.
And he wants this to happen BEFORE we impose a new national health insurance scheme on a dysfunctional public health system.
Truly, the mind boggles. Where do these thoughts come from? Surely his colleagues have taken him aside and told him about growth paths? Why are their growth paths not good enough for him?
It is hard to know what to make of this.
One solution could be to construct one of those medieval dunking machines and hold him underwater until he comes to his senses and puts us on what we really want: a nice new growth path that leads us right past the transparent good sense directly in front of us.