It’s a brave new world, yet shrinking state capacity looks a tad medieval

TRamaphosa he pawning’of s flinging SAA and Cyril of Gwede Mantashe under a 100MW bus have both been hailed as important steps, in the way adults applaud a toddler for staggering forward without falling on its face.

Then again, perhaps this is an unfair comparison. Toddlers only take a year or two to learn to walk, while the ANC has spent the past decade deciding that walking is counterrevolutionary and that it’s much more sensible to saw off your own legs at the knee and then blame the media for the ensuing blood loss.

The delay in flogging SAA has been particularly strange. A national carrier, after all, is nothing but a conceptual codpiece. At best it is an attempt to associate the modern state with the long-lost glamour of prewar air travel, an era when passengers bumped along below the clouds, clutching their hatboxes as they watched stewards in immaculate naval uniforms squirt seltzer water at the fire eating through the canvass of the starboard wing.

The ANC’s determination to cling on to SAA as a national symbol shows how little time any of its big shots actually spend in economy class on commercial airliners. If they did, they’d know that it’s an endless ordeal in which demoralised people are squashed together for hours as nameless officials promise that, if they can just be patient a little longer, they’ll get where they want to go.

Then again, that’s basically an ANC rally. So maybe it’ sa perfect fit after all.

Last week’s other major step, in which Ramaphosa took a high-pressure hose to the economic fatberg that is energy minister Mantashe, seems more progressive.

Until now, South Africans have only been allowed to generate their own electricity by rubbing a cat against a pair of polyester tracksuit pants (as long as the cat and/or the pants are BEE complaint), and the news that large businesses can now build their own 100MW plants has been met with cautious, slightly exhausted, enthusiasm by captains of industry.

Indeed, I suspect we’re about to see a small boom in renewable energy as cadres pivot away from Covid-19 profiteering and start googling: “What is electricity?”

Even now I imagine that the good folk at Digital Vibes are hastily changing their name to Solar Vibes and putting together a prospectus in which they offer corporates a thousand-acre plot on the surface of the sun for only R85bn a pop.

Yes, in some ways it’ sa brave new world. In others, however, it’s starting to look a little medieval out there as the capacity of the modern state in SA shrivels away, its place taken by lords in pinstripe suits offering us protection inside the walls of nascent city states.

For the wealthiest South Africans, this shift isn’t new. Their contact with the state has dwindled to almost nothing as their homes are protected by private police, their children educated in private schools accessed by private transportation, their ailments treated by private doctors and their evenings spent watching broadcasts by private streaming services.

Beyond these bubbles, minibus taxis ferry threequarters of SA’s workforce to and from work every day, reinforcing the fact that in this country public transport has been private for many years.

So what gets privatised next? Honestly, there’s not a lot left.

One obvious candidate is the railways, which, I assume, will be scooped up for pocket change once privately generated power and privately run security make them a feasible prospect, or else when taxi bosses decide to become railway barons and we will all be able to travel on the Golden Banana express between Cape Town and Johannesburg, as long as we pass the correct fare, in cash, up through 15 carriages to the driver.

The other, which is much less of a joke, is water, but I don’t want to ruin your week by peeping into that Pandora’s box before we have to.

The sale of SAA and the unshackling of private power generation are encouraging steps. But they are also an admission by the ANC that it doesn’t have the will or the capacity to run even the most fundamental systems required in a modern state.

Yes, it is good that it is allowing capable people to do what it can’t or won’t, and for those of us who live inside the invisible walls of the new city states, things may look slightly more encouraging.

But a state is judged by how it looks after the people outside the walls. And right now those outsiders — the vast majority of our compatriots — seem more in peril than ever as our ruling cabal of scoundrels shrugs apologetically and promises to wave to them from the ramparts above the city gates.

I SUSPECT WE’RE ABOUT TO SEE A BOOM IN RENEWABLE ENERGY AS CADRES GOOGLE: ‘WHAT IS ELECTRICITY?’