Loving the mandies, as South Africa’s new currency is known colloquially. The new bank notes feature the head of Nelson Mandela and are named after the famous ‘white pipe” of the Western Cape, which is basically a mandrax tablet crushed on to some dagga and smoked through a broken bottleneck.
In the same way that the white mandrax makes the green majat more palatable, so does the white-friendly face of Madiba make our seedy South African currency more palatable to Western investment.
Simply put, we are running out of symbols of security and stability. Every time I see a rhino-headed R10 note, I wince. Not being able to save the rhino seems a sad indictment of our economic capabilities.
This pessimism is doubled for foreign investors, who are less interested in how good we are at building RDP houses and more interested in jolly animals and our ability to look after our natural resources.
But I do see a growth industry in selling the junked R10 notes to the Chinese. If you are stupid enough to believe that ground-up rhino horn is an aphrodisiac, I am sure you are stupid enough to believe that pulped rhino currency will do the same.
Of course, we will have to make sure that the rand does not go down against the dollar — that would be very poor advertising.
Mandies is a great name for a currency. The idiomatic accountability of ‘the buck stops here” seems to have lost its, uh, currency. Many of the decision-makers in our country see buck as just another antelope, and think that ‘the buck stops here” means ‘if you bribe me, I stay bought”. It will be a lot scarier when ‘the mandie stops here”. Because I have to believe that there is still a vestige of shame left in our corrupt officials and businesspeople and having the old man’s face staring up at them from the brown bag might give them pause to think.
It is a little sad that some of us actually believe that ‘the buck stops here” refers to the United States currency, given what that says about how we confuse money with responsibility and power. In reality the phrase is taken from poker, in which the buck was a marker used to indicate whose turn it was to deal.
And speaking of confusing money and responsibility, was it really necessary to make such a fuss about the secret announcement, thereby causing the markets to fall? It smacks a little of the PR debacle on Mandela’s health last year.
On the other hand, do we really have to pander to the paranoia of the leeches of finance? I know, I know, these mysterious people control the market and the market controls our lives. They make the mandies dance — and if some of them have two left feet, we will just up their shoe allowance.
Chris Roper is the editor of M&G Online