COMMENT , by Pete Bower
GAUTENG
MAGAZINE
HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLOT PROFITABLE
Vol 17 No 9 September 2016 PUBLISHED BY Bowford Publications ( Pty ) Ltd Established 1985
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FRONT COVER
A bank of colourful clivias in full bloom . The Joburg Clivia Club is holding its annual show this month . Full details on Page 16
COMMENT , by Pete Bower
A strange world , indeed
Last year I found myself in the happy position of possessing a little spare cash and I decided to do something with it that I ' d wanted to do for a long time . I would invest in some shares . Play the stock market a bit . So I did my research , chose my portfolio carefully and found an online trading platform that would allow me to buy and sell at will , with very reasonable fees . All went well for a few months . Some days I ' d be ahead of the All Share Index , some days a little behind , but by and large my share portfolio did quite nicely . I allowed myself a little self-congratulation . Then in December my wife and I took our annual holiday , an extensive road trip through the Cape . One day , as we were barrelling along an endless stretch of shimmering tar between Stofdorp and Crappyville in the Karoo the car ' s radio delivered the news that Jacob Zuma had replaced his finance minister with Minister-for-the- Weekend Des van Rooyen . My wife and I stared at each other , gaping in disbelief . What on earth was going on ? On my return home I found out soon enough : I , like every other investor in the country , was now considerably impoverished . We didn ' t know then why Zuma had done what he did , and what he told the nation at the time we now know to have been a fat lie . What he wanted , we now know , was to get his hands on the key to the cookie jar . To wrest control of the country ' s finances away from an honest and ethical ministry to allow him and his tenderpreneur cronies to plunder at will . He wasn ' t able to , in December , and over a weekend of high drama we saw him quickly replace van Rooyen with the tried and trusted Pravin Gordhan , who in turn has worked tirelessly to convince all and sundry that the South African ship of state is stable , seaworthy and on course . Now , nine months later , things are starting to unravel . Firstly , the ANC got a bloody nose in the local election , the nett effect being that it has lost access to over R100 billion of municipal revenue in the big metros it no longer controls ; revenue that it has hitherto dished out to the party faithful in the form of rigged tenders and overpriced expenditure , thus buying a lot of patronage . But at national level Zuma is having to run some hard yards , too . For at the back of his mind is the looming threat of 700-odd fraud charges lying in abeyance against him and which , he fears , may be reinstated when he leaves office at the end of his term as president in 2019 . Thus , he needs to ensure that his successor is a Zuma-acolyte who will let the charges lie . And to do that he needs to build up a team around him of people so indebted to his largesse that they simply cannot afford to change allegiances when he goes . And the ever-steady Gordhan isn ' t playing ball . He ' s not happy with some of the deals done by arms manufacturer Denel , and he won ' t give SA Airways the R5 billion guarantee it needs to enable it to appear solvent enough to publish a set of accounts that show it to be solvent , rather than bankrupt . This is now becoming urgent . Parliament wants to see a set of accounts and the Hong Kong airport authority is threatening to cancel the airline ' s landing rights unless it sees a set of financials by early September . So Zuma has become more brazen . He needs access to cash , and lots of it , to buy off his friends and supporters . So , with no love lost , apparently , between himself and his finance minister , and sidelining his deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa who was supposed to be looking after certain state businesses , he ' s set up a commission to take direct control over all state-owned enterprises , which will give him access to lots and lots of riggable tenders . As this edition went to press Zuma had persuaded his friends the Hawks to turn up the heat on Gordhan and former SARS colleagues over the “ rogue ” spy unit established by SARS when Gordhan was its commissioner ( ignoring the fact that the unit was set up with the full knowledge of the then finance minister Trevor Manuel ), presumably in the hope that Gordhan will throw in the towel under all the pressure , which will enable Zuma to install a pliant finance minister , thus giving him free access to the the Treasury . In 1968 a South African band named Four Jacks & aJillsangasongthefirstlineof which went “ It ' s a strange , strange world we live in , Master Jack .” Maybe it ' s due for a re-release .
SAY YOU SAW IT IN THE GAUTENG SMALLHOLDER