I RECEIVED one of those envelopes in the mail on Friday. I'm sure most of you know what they look like - name and address in the middle of the translucent window with the words "acc #" peering out of the top right hand corner. Another letter from my friend, the bank manager.
I've taken to throwing these away without opening them for the past six months using a theory very similar to that of the peril-sensitive sunglasses made famous by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you were confronted with a situation that was dangerous, the sunglasses would go dark so that you would not be frightened by whatever was about to attack you or devour you or ship you off to a proctologist.
This time around, I relented. My bank manager is, after all, a perfectly reasonable person. Once a month, he calls me and tells me "Mr Pillay, your account is once again overdrawn", and I say "Oops, let me get to that asap". And I sell more of my body parts for medical experiments to raise the money, and we don't talk to each other for another month.
So I rip open the envelope and get to the part that says that interest rates have been reduced again and so instead of paying an arm and a leg, I will now be able to keep five fingers and an elbow, blah blah blah...
Wait a second! When did interest rates drop back to around 18%?
With a whimper rather than a bang, interest rates have steadily slid down to levels comparable to where they were at the start of the Asian meltdown last year. Currency speculators have come and gone. The economy was battered and bruised and after two successive quarters of negative growth, we began to talk of a recession. Many of us began to consider the possibility of facing a worldwide depression, 1930s style.
Now, we're facing a possible precursor to a world war in the Balkans, an escalation of nuclear insanity between India and Pakistan, civil wars in the Congo and Angola that don't want to go away, kids celebrating Hitler's birthday in the US, runaway inflation and a crackdown on press freedom in Zimbabwe, yet another coup in the Comores...
But South Africa has been slowly and steadily working on rebuilding the damaged caused by the Asian crisis. Fiscal discipline has been maintained, inflation has been held to single digits, and interest rates have been dropping. Even the rand has been stable for some months now.
How many of us have actually noticed any of this?
There's some merit to what Philip Krawitz, Cape Times Business Personality of the Year 1998, has said to me in the past: The difference between a new South African and a Boeing is that the Boeing eventually stops whining.
Shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange have been steadily climbing as investors look away from potentially volatile technology stocks to the traditional safe havens of resources. Economists expect interest rates to drop to 16% by year end with at least one more cut before the elections.
What this means is that we now have breathing space. Job creation is the single most important issue in the minds of most South Africans. Lower interest rates means more affordable capital which means more money to be poured into new businesses which usually means more jobs.
We are sitting on a time bomb. No amount of growth in the economy can sustain the country if there is no corresponding increase in the number of people who actively contribute towards that growth.
Watch our politicians closely over the next 30 days and listen to what they have to say about job creation. Do they have plans to tackle joblessness head on? Can they deliver on those plans? What happens if they fail? You have a month to decide whether they deserve your vote..
In the meanwhile, there's a couple of things I need to do. Firstly, I've got to tell my friendly bank manager to reduce my payments so that they're no longer at the 25% level. Secondly, I need to start buying back some of those body parts sacrificed in the interest hike bloodletting. (Yes, "some". The taxman can keep my appendix.)