EDITORIAL: One year on, SA’s risk premium keeps climbing

Investors appear to be demanding a far greater danger premium for operating in a country which, one year after riots made headlines across the world, still reeks of lawlessness. 

A year ago, Investec CEO Fani Titi told the FM that among the bank’s clients, “there was an air of disbelief that this could even happen, and that the response was as slow and as feeble as it was”.

People need to feel the country is “investable”, he said.  

The first step towards this would be to “create the belief that this kind of thing won’t happen again any time soon”.

So, how has SA done on this score?

Well, it says much that Titi’s own bank has now decided to pay an extra R2.2m a year for the “enhanced security” of its executives, in light of the “concerns around the personal security of senior businesspeople in SA”.

As the FM details on page 20, there are some awkward questions to be asked about Investec’s proposal.

But there’s no cloaking the reality that Titi’s wish of a sharp restoration of order has manifestly failed to happen. 

If Investec’s well-heeled directors feel “concerned” about SA’s crime levels, imagine how exposed most South Africans feel who don’t have the benefit of neighbourhood security patrols, electric fences or high walls.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet presumably wouldn’t know this — least of all his pointless police minister Bheki Cele — but, on the ground, reports mount every day of construction firms budgeting extra amounts to pay off local thugs for “protection”.

Our policing system, as was illustrated in the township of Kagiso near Krugersdorp this past week, is mostly performative. On this score, it mirrors the character of its minister: ineffective, focused on appeasing populists and reliable only if there’s a camera pointed in its direction.

In Kagiso, the gang rape of eight women shooting a music video two weeks ago sparked outrage. Cele and the police then arrived en masse and arrested 100 illegal miners — many of whom were netted simply because they were “foreigners”, rather than because of any evidentiary link to the crime.

No surprise that despite all the hot air, nobody has yet been charged for those rapes.

It has left the Kagiso community fuming. One resident told Cele: “We don’t have faith in you. Your guys come out here every day — they escort the zama zamas and take money from them.”

It’s hard to disagree. By July, the backlog of DNA tests exceeded 180,000 — despite Cele’s promise in March that it would be cleared “within six months”.

But then, this is the minister who described one hapless victim of the Krugersdorp rape as “lucky”, as she had only one assailant.

A year ago, Titi said that with any fire, you must attack it early: “If you allow it to run instead, you’re going to need 10 times the resources to contain it.”

Instead, Ramaphosa has allowed it to run — and has left the clowns in charge of watching the circus burn. 

Is it any wonder we’re witnessing increasingly anarchic behaviour by ordinary South Africans? Is it any wonder that companies see the risk of doing business in SA increasing?