Vitually all my adult life I’ve lived by the motto that “only the paranoid survive”, an old saying that also happened to be the title of a best-selling book by Andy Grove, one of the co-founders of the Intel Group, more than 20 years ago.
I didn’t trust my teachers at school, nor the dominee, nor my corporals in the army, nor a series of less-than-brilliant bosses when I had the misfortune of being formally employed.
Fortunately, I have been my own boss for more than 25 years now and my paranoia, by and large, has served me well. My successes have been my own while I have taken full responsibility for my mistakes — and often paid the price.
I don’t trust politicians or any bureaucrat who has the inclination and the power to want to control my freedom of movement, freedom of financial decisions and more importantly – ownership of my personal assets.
I’ve also met far too many ex-Zimbabweans, mostly ex-farmers or business people, who’ve told me their personal stories of survival (or not) after they were forced to flee their former prosperous farms with only the possessions they could get into the back of an old Land Rover or Humber.
It is therefore understandable that I am following the latest and rather urgent developments surrounding “expropriation without compensation” (EWC) and the stated intention of the ANC/EFF coalition to change Section 25 of the SA Constitution, the clause that deals primarily with ownership of property — not only land as some people seem to think. The issue of EWC has been bubbling under the radar for many years, but bubbling nevertheless.
It seems as if the mainstream media is so sucked up in the euphoria surrounding the ascension to the presidency by Cyril Ramaphosa, that few are daring to question this renewed haste for EWC. Even normally lucid commentators have abandoned all sense of realism, instead praising EWC as something that is needed to redress the sins of the past. At least Peter Bruce, columnist at Business Day, had the courage to state in one of his regular columns that it’s ‘Time to Panic’, one of the few to speak truth to the facts.
What has been noteworthy is that the business and investment community has been particularly silent on this issue. I could not find one article or comment from the investment community about what ordinary, middle-of-the-road investors should be doing. Either they are too petrified to speak or under strict instructions from higher up not to breathe a word about this issue, lest it become a career-ending commentary.
My advice, dear reader, is not to trust any politician, banker, financial institution, spokesman for organised agriculture, media personality or whomever about the end result of what the ANC/EFF is trying to achieve: a complete and total confiscation and transfer of ALL property rights and ownership entitlements to government, without compensating anyone for this, as it is merely the custodian of all private assets in perpetuity.
Government did this with mineral rights in 2004 and now it is trying — and probably will succeed — to do it with ownership of private property.
In short: SA will become the first modern country in the world to try and take such a regressive step, something that has not worked anywhere in the developed world, and then to try and pretend it can do it without (a) affecting agricultural output and, (b) damaging investor confidence. The ANC furthermore thinks it will not have an impact on its credit rating nor the willingness of foreigner investors to put down money in SA. On all these counts it is wrong. You cannot ever get a scrambled egg back into its shell in one piece again.
