PETER BRUCE: The good choices Cyril Ramaphosa is making
'It was fascinating to watch President Cyril Ramaphosa outline his stimulus package on Friday. He was making choices, mostly very good ones'
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His finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, is going to make some even harder ones as he finds R50bn in the government's empty piggy bank to spend on "reprioritised" projects and targets.
That R50bn is imminent. In all, Ramaphosa wants a R400bn infrastructure fund, a blend of (private) equity, bonds and debt, run out of his office.
He is also going to run a sword through Malusi Gigaba's and Naledi Pandor's preposterous visa regime (she designed it, he implemented it). They set back our highest-margin export - tourism, in which people bring their hard currency to you - by a decade. It's also labour intensive.
In life you have to make choices. The All Blacks lost against the Springboks because they made poor choices. Victory was on for about three minutes as they camped on the South African try-line, determined to win by pushing over for a try rather than do anything so namby-pamby as kick a drop goal. On a more mundane level, we all make choices all the time. Most of us. One creature that never has to make choices is the ANC. It always manages to combine everything it wants into one choice. Come the next election, I guarantee you it will dream up a new list of Five Priorities, whatever they are. It never makes any progress on these because it cannot prioritise one ill over another. It's too hard. Do you make education a priority over health? How callous would you have to be to deliberately underfund the health of your citizens? But a priority is the thing at the top of your list, not a list at the top of your priorities. Or how about the three ills almost every politician of the Left lum...
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