South Africa’s liberal oppositional parties tend to argue that they’d carry out ANC policies more efficiently and less corruptly. That’s their selling point, but it’s not much of an alternative.
What they could do instead is run on a planned campaign of bombshell proposals they could take directly to the electorate. Together, these amount to radical demands for People’s Capitalism/true empowerment/let the people govern/real liberation.
Liberals should propose that power is turned on its head, and taken to each citizen in practical, understandable-at-a-glance ways.
- They must offer immediate and tangible rewards for every South African.
- They must offer the prospect of a shareholder democracy, confident in ordinary people.
- They must be difficult to argue against, and they should set the news agenda.
Liberals should come at opponents like bolts from the blue, because they have original ideas that catch competitors on the back foot.
STEP 1: R50 000 for every person!
The best form of uplift is to let people have money, not just services. This gives choice and expands horizons of opportunity.
Liberals should demand that government ownership of state-owned enterprises is handed over to the people, as happened in then-Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Every citizen would get a portfolio of shares in Eskom, SAA, ACSA, Transnet, and across all 715 state-owned utilities. This goes right down to the quasi-commercialised entities like Pikitup and Rand Water, and so on. The process will cost the fiscus very little, because you’re just converting one shareholder over to many: giving shares to every adult registered on the national Population Register.
Citizens can sell all, or some, of their shares as they wish; sit on them, buy others, use them as collateral for credit, or whatever. It’s their choice.
The distribution of share certificates is automated and delivered via the banks, post office, or SASSA payment services, which are already in place.
You can‘t know how much each portfolio will be worth on the day that the handover and trading begin, because the share prices of traded entities will immediately go up and down as per supply and demand. But we can intelligently estimate R55 000 per citizen initially.
Shareholder AGMs of a thing like Transnet won’t be held in a Sandton auditorium, but at an FNB Stadium. Woe unto the Board that fails to increase shareholder worth: fired and replaced in a dynamic People’s Capitalism.
This unleashes economic activity from the ground up.
Here, this shareholder democracy (or “democracy dividend”) was touted by the late Don Caldwell in about 1990, and I did a cover story for Finance Week in the late 90s, but, apart from a few mumblings every now and then, the idea has not really been heard of since, either by the public or the commentariat.
STEP 2: Everyone a landowner!
The next bombshell is to hand over all State-owned residential land to its occupants immediately, in freehold title deeds (working off the knowledge gained in the Free Market Foundation’s successful Khaya Lam project).
This includes all rented township land, all communally held land in former homelands, and all RDP housing that is tied up with restrictions on sale.
Now almost everyone has cash, plus property.
STEP 3: Freedom from elites!
Half of South African children leave school with only a Grade 10.
More than half of black Africans will not hold a formal-sector job in their twenties. Thereafter they’ve got little chance of formal-sector employment. It is an unprecedented generational crisis in SA: 36% of the formal sector workforce has no job, and a third of these have given up looking for work.
Attack the sweetheart deals that lock our people out of life’s opportunities. Thus, attack the cosy NEDLAC deals of both:
- Organised business
- Organised labour.
Abolish the requirements for a matric certificate to work anywhere in the civil service.
Abolish sector-wide wage agreements. Allow people to sell their labour for whatever price they can or want.
STEP 4: Tax free!
Provide amnesty for all people who, on election day, are not in compliance with SARS. This once-off settling of the books includes a write-off of all taxes owed by individuals, and the cancelling of their resultant bad credit ratings.
Former homeland areas should all become temporary tax-free havens for businesses and individuals.
Government sells off much of its enormous property portfolio to pay off state debt. Significant tax cuts should come along with all of this, further stimulating economic growth.
This, truly, is about realising “liberation”, “people’s capitalism”, “freedom”, and “real empowerment”.
It is a liberal alternative vision of empowerment that should be offered.
[Image: Vije Vijendranath on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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