Over the next few days, South Africa’s new Minister of Finance, Malusi Gigaba, will meet with representatives of the IMF, the World Bank, international investors, and ratings agencies in the US. His aim is to restore confidence, to steer the South African ship through the troubled waters of junk status.
This was a tough task a week ago, but his appointment of Chris Malikane, associate professor of Economics at Wits University, as adviser, has made this almost impossible. Malikane penned an 8-page manifesto early in April, which will apparently form the basis of his policy advice to Treasury. The document is available here: Chris Malikane – Concerning the Current Situation 2017. (Brace yourself: the phrase ‘white monopoly capital’ appears 58 times. The words ‘science’ or ‘innovation’, not once.)
I read the document just before I had to teach a class on China’s Great Leap Forward yesterday, and the similarities were startling. Malikane calls for the expropriation of ‘banks, insurance companies, mines and other monopoly industries, to industrialise the economy’. He wants to establish a state bank, nationalise the Reserve Bank, and ‘expropriate all land without compensation to the ownership of the state’. Oh, and he also wants ‘free, quality and decolonised education, free and quality healthcare, improved quality housing, community infrastructure, etc., affordable and safe public transport, and affordable and reliable basic services such as water, sanitation and electricity’.
An excellent Business Day editorial summed it up perfectly:
Malikane’s ideas are rooted in Marxist voodoo economics. For a finance minister to be taking advice from one with such outmoded and unorthodox ideas puts SA on the path towards such economic disasters as Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Doing so is an act of grotesque irresponsibility.
Just as we all borrow from banks to pay home loans, so South Africa borrows from international lenders to pay our expenses (which are more than our income, i.e. our budget deficit). If international investors do not believe we will be able to repay, they will make our loans more expensive by raising interest rates. It is not that these international investors want to exploit us – just as banks do not exploit us when we voluntarily go to them for loans – it is just that they want to make sure they get their money back. How an academic macroeconomist at one of South Africa’s top universities do not understand this, I do not know. One has to wonder what he teaches his students at Wits?
I hope the IMF, World Bank, investor and ratings agency representatives ask Gigaba about the economics of his new adviser. I hope they ask him what exactly Malikane will do in his capacity as adviser. I hope they ask him to state his own views about the market economy, about the interplay of fiscal and monetary policy, and, just for fun, about the role of Marxist economic thought in understanding international capital flows. And I hope they ask him whether he’s heard of China’s Great Leap Forward, and its consequences for the Chinese economy.*
*Spoiler alert: 43 million people died.
