Sven Persson asserted in a letter entitled ‘iGoli project will be costly to citizens, humiliating for ANC’ (published in The Star on 23 May) that:
To some, these views may seem like self-evident truths. Others will think them utter baloney. Such naive belief in the good intentions and competence of public sector employees was perhaps forgivable ‘once upon a time’, before governments started getting involved in anything and everything a century ago. Thereafter the world saw the rise and failure of socialism and big government bureaucracies, followed by two decades (so far) of globally successful privatisation and deregulation.
It hardly needs explaining that the discipline of competition has always been the missing ingredient for government. Managers in state departments and parastatal enterprises always have more incentive to grow their empires than to control costs and improve quality. It is observable that they can never survive without cast-iron protection in the form monopoly rights, subsidy streams and other mechanisms. Only when faced with open competition might they adapt and manage to retain some honest market-share, or ‘wither away’ in Marx’s phrase but perhaps not as he might have wished.
Certainly South Africa has been a late starter and has not travelled far along the road to freedom yet. But that is all the more reason for Mr Persson and the SA Municipal Workers Union to stick to reality. Derailing a hesitant liberalisation project which has hardly got started is not going to help its millions of historically-disadvantaged potential beneficiaries. But Sven may not care much about them. He seems to have it in for ‘corporations ….. (which) are not societies of custodians: they are commercial entities that act in the pursuit of profit, not ethical considerations.’ This is obviously true – this is how the free market works, and by gum, doesn’t it just work! – but he evidently thinks this truth is disgraceful, rather than simply factual or even wonderful with its unintended consequences of satisfying and enriching us all in our combined roles as producers and consumers.
Sven, one suspects, would like all corporations nationalised so that councils and government could run them so much cheaper and better to serve the people. What can one say? That real socialism has never yet been tried, and South Africans will get it right? Come on!
Doctrinaire anti-privatisers tend to misquote and misinterpret one or two examples where privatisation has supposedly backfired, rather like those who love to complain about what bad products and services Bill Gates and Richard Branson provide. Sven might instead consider quoting a couple of historical examples to show where nationalisation worked and government did a better job than civil society? He seems attracted to lost causes.
Source: Dr Jim Harris, a freelance researcher and writer based in Johanesburg. This article appeared in The Star on 28 May 2001.
