Opinion & Analysis

What irony that President Thabo Mbeki demands business leaders shape up, Mbeki urges business leaders to shape up (April 16).

Health; education; housing; trade and industry; safety and security; defence; finance; home affairs; foreign affairs; the provincial and municipal governments — every department of Mbeki’s presidential leadership is dysfunctional. The excuses are threadbare.

Black enrichment of the elite has unleashed corruption on a scale that has betrayed the triumph over apartheid. With corruption comes crime. Mbeki’s legacy is reflected in SA’s plummeting 35 places in the United Nations human development index.

The rich have become obscenely wealthy while the poor desperately scrabble even to survive. The International Monetary Fund and the financial markets may well, in the short term, applaud the misallocation of resources by banks complicit in the plunder of cronyism. The JSE reaches one record high after another.

Perhaps even Jacob Zuma could do no worse, but how long can our briefly celebrated constitutional democracy survive the “ugliest face of capitalism” that the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy and the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for SA have inflicted upon our society?

Massive public investment in health and education is an internationally proven prerequisite for the eradication of poverty.

Instead, Mbeki has deliberately destroyed both under the grotesque notion that sick and illiterate people make no contribution to wealth.

Even the apartheid regime was hardly as calculating, or as callous.

Terry Crawford-Browne
Milnerton, Cape Town

With acknowledgements to Terry Crawford-Browne and Business Day.