TONY LEON: Has anyone else noticed Cyril Ramaphosa's jump to the left?
'Ramaphosa might be a multibillionaire but the idea that he is “business friendly” is about as certain as the phrase is meaningless'
EXTRACT
The incontestable truth was spoken by Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan: our weak economy – with population increases outstripping GDP growth, spiralling government debt, dismal retail and manufacturing performances, a cratering currency and petrol price surge – would go from critical to endangered if load shedding persists.
However there is another more inconvenient truth Gordhan did not utter: he cut the ground from under the feet of new Eskom CEO Phakamani Hadebe’s proposal to zero-rate all current salary increase demands made by unions on behalf of its 47,000 employees. Hadebe announced this (non) proposal to meet the unions’ extraordinary demands for a 15% salary hike was “off the table”. Simply put, at the first sign of grapeshot being fired by the trade unions the government ran for cover.
The opening weekend of the Fifa World Cup produced no end of surprises, if Eskom load shedding allowed you to view the spectacle. The country of my second allegiance, Argentina (given Bafana’s dismal non-qualification, my home team as it were), was held to an improbable draw by tiny Iceland, which in population terms (337,000 versus 43.85 million) is around 100 times smaller than the South American football-rich country. And Iceland’s coach has a day job as a dentist. So a country with Randburg’s population holds off the land of Messi and Maradona! On Sunday evening Mexico not only beat Germany but also managed to upend the conventional wisdom of decades, pithily captured in England great Gary Lineker’s definition: “Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans always win.”Not in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow where Germany’s opening effort to repeat its 2014 tournament win took a severe, though not fatal, knock. But here on the freezing ho...
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