Dear Sirs,
I’ve listened in the past 48 hours to interviews by your Chief Economist, Mr Goolam Ballim, about the prospects of election 2019 speaking in the name of Standard Bank.
As a loyal customer of Standard Bank, I am really quite disgusted. Mr Ballim has used media platforms to campaign for a certain electoral outcome, in the name of Standard Bank. He has not, as an economist speaking to media should, laid out a variety of scenarios, but has instead picked one scenario which he has championed as being “best” – that advances his comments from analysis to lobbying.
He has specifically advanced a quite determinate electoral outcome for the ANC, calling for an increased vote percentage for the government of Cyril Ramaphosa, and what is worse, is that he has actively discouraged the growth in votes for the DA – saying this would lead to an ANC/EFF alliance in order to hold onto power. Essentially, this is fearmongering because the worst case is put forward as the only possible case, to listening voters. This is a false dichotomy, and a false equivalence.
Summarizing Ballim’s lobbying:
- Cyril Ramaphosa is better than Jacob Zuma (with no proof-points for this),
- Cyril Ramaphosa needs a larger electoral mandate to get more good things done (again with no proof-points of why 60% is needed rather than a lower percentage),
- If the ANC loses support, to under 50%, it is unquestionable that they will form an alliance with the EFF,
- An ANC alliance with the EFF will be bad for the Country,
- Alliances and coalitions are unstable and undesirable for citizens,
- Voting for the DA could bring about an ANC/EFF alliance and coalition.
By advancing only one set of preferred outcomes, he is not giving an analysis which listeners can use to make up their own minds, but is instead advancing a version where only one outcome could be in the interests of the South African economy. That is both biased and wades into influencing political results.
Surely an equally logical analysis for a bank’s Chief Economist would be to say that it would be good for the economy to have the government kept on its toes, by the governing party being punished at the polls for its failures and sins, so that it must do better next time to avoid losing power entirely? Surely its economically preferable to not reward a history and litany of failures by the ANC, with more votes in 2019?
Likewise, instead of dismissing coalitions, surely Ballim should acknowledge that in just 2.5 years coalition governments have achieved more in the new non-ANC big Metros than the ANC achieved with large majorities there, over much longer time periods. I can see no reason why both of these theories should not have been advanced by Ballim.
I would ask that Mr Ballim retracts this dangerous rhetoric in public. In fact, without being overzealous, I’d like to demand it. I think his lobbying is completely inappropriate, when it comes from one of the largest banks, especially where so much political capture of private sector entities is revealing itself as we speak.
I would not like, going forward, to be associated with or to do business with a bank that wanders into politics without retracting and apologizing where it errs. Leave the politics to politicians, and rather concentrate on your core business, which in the case of an economist would be to plan for multiple scenarios, not to offer preferences of his own.
I await your reply, which I’d appreciate this week still.
Yours sincerely,
Lorna Najaar
