The comrades who drives cabriolets

At the height of the protests in Egypt, in Cairo, with hundreds of thousands of people filling Tahrir Square, the BBC presented a map to make sense of the place.  It was surprisingly ordered for a chaotic and leaderless mass.

At the northern end of the square, on Meret Basha Road, was a business district selling everything from food, to clothing and flags.  The striking image of the protests was ordinary people waving millions of Egyptian flags; this is where they bought them.  On the north-eastern Talat Harb Road approach was a clinic where doctors had set up a rudimentary surgery.  A rival clinic was doing great work at a commandeered KFC.  At the southern end of the square was a pharmacy.

In between, a newspaper wall had been set up, a public gallery exhibited protest art.  Another “Wall of Martyrs” commemorated those killed.  There was even a kindergarten and garbage collection service.

A thriving and successful little town materialised spontaneously offering a vision of a robust urban economy.

Not a bit of it required government or regulatory oversight.  Since Egypt ranks 84 out of 183 economies in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index, this little oasis may well have been the most pleasant place in the whole of the Middle East to do business during that 18-day period.

The conditions which have led to one Middle Eastern tyranny after another going up in flames are almost identical.  Over 50% of their populations live in urban centres, unemployment is well over 15% and tertiary graduates make up around 6% to 10% of the population.  All fuel to a volatile cocktail of poverty, unemployment and frustration sitting cheek-by-jowl with the opulence and excess of their ruling elite.

A mix which isn’t very different to that in South Africa.  Moeletsi Mbeki, writing in Business Day, suggests that South Africa’s “Tunisia moment” will happen when the ANC government runs out of money “which it uses to placate the black poor and to get their votes.”

Here’s the thing.  None of these Middle East countries has stopped paying benefits.  Egypt spends $3 billion a year on food subsidies for the poor.  Iran goes even further, subsidising everything in their economy at a cost of $100 billion a year.

Mbeki’s assumption is that tyrannies cement their rule by buying off dissent.  That works, up to a point.  But a subsidised population fills up with under-employed people who have little to do but bear children.  The real tinder in these countries is the scale of the population under the age of 25; up to 40% of their populations.

These youngsters mature in a world in which the only people they see making any money are those either in the ruling party, or related to people in the ruling party.  Most have none of these connections.

The on-going and vicious factional fighting within the ANC attests to a near universal belief that the only way to get rich is through the ruling party. It is not surprising then that riots erupted in Ermelo amongst unemployed young men demanding jobs on government projects. 

And so people riot to demand jobs, or scheme and manipulate to get higher up the ANC party lists.  High profile business deals like the vacuous son of the president, Duduzane Zuma’s, potentially R500 billion rail scheme only prove the point.

In these struggles the protestors and schemers demand the greening of the desert while ripping out the hardy plants growing in the lee of a brutal soil.

Julius Malema and Fikile Mbalula want to burn down private enterprise through nationalisation.  The protestors in Ermelo did burn down private enterprise as they looted shops and destroyed livelihoods.

It doesn’t take tyranny to destroy jobs and investment, merely the expectation that wealth derives from political power rather than from support for entrepreneurs and businesses, and lots of hard work.