What's new in South Africa

This is for Anton & Liezel, tannie Laura & oom Jannie, and for GB & Jenny, Susan, Koos & Mary and everyone else in America.

I thought that I would tell you the essential South African news. I know you can read it on other places on the Internet anyway, but they tell you everything, not just the main things.

Scandals

Do you want me to tell you the good news or the bad news first? OK, here is the good news AND the bad news: Winnie is going to jail. Here's a pretty good article about it.

Socio-political

It's become increasingly centred around AIDS issues, thanks largely to the Treatment Action Campaign, who (amongst other things) are wanting the Minister of Health to be tried for culpable homicide. They are a well-organised group of committed people, and are gaining a lot of support.

Lifestyle

The government passed a law compelling shops to make people pay for plastic shopping bags. The theory behind this is that if people no longer get them for free, they won't waste them, and there will be less polution. So now you can either buy them at the prescribed minimum fee, or bring your own, or shop with big carry-all type bags, or carry your goods out of the shop without a bag.

Financial

Anton, you sent an e-mail asking what people say about the rand. Here's what they have said on Moneyweb, a radio programme on FMR which I enjoy. I wish I could tell you who said each of these things, but every time I switched on just too late to find out who was being interviewed. These opinions came from three different experts.

When the rand lost out so badly a year ago, it was due particulalry to foreign reaction against things like the Zimbabwe crisis. In the eyes of the world, Zimbabwe is in Southern Africa, so if it is falling down, the whole of Southern Africa is collapsing. (And of course President Mbeki's fraternising with President Mugabe didn't exactly help.) So now, the rand is back to where it was before all that, which is actually its natural position.
The rand is expected to continue increasing in value, but people don't want to speculate too much about where exactly it is going, except that some experts are pretty confident that it should break through the $7 barrier.
One of the reasons for the increase in the value of the rand which one should bear in mind, though, is that it is not just the rand which is increasing in value, but also the dollar which is declining. The dollar is declining against the Euro too, so it is not entirely a matter of the rand climbing. The rand's value has grown less against other currencies than against the dollar.
Some exporters are having a tougher time now, though. They relied on the fact that the weak rand made them competitive, and now the rand isn't as weak as they would have wanted it anymore! I saw a front page of the financial section of a newspaper recently in which one of the mine bosses (of Harmony Mines, I think) was announcing a crisis as a result of the strong rand.
On an indirectly related note: As a result of an error in thinking on the part of the people who decide what the lending rate for property loans should be, the entire country's inflation rate has been pushed 2% higher than it should have been for about 2 years. What happened was, they based their rates on the 1999 figures from the Department of Statistics, and 1999 was an outlier year. Someone from Investec figured this out the mistake and wrote a report on this, and things have now been adjusted, but in the meanwhile, the entire economy went through a speed wobble.

So if the experts are right, then you can hold onto your rands for a bit longer.