Busa pulls out of UIF structures citing deep dysfunction and stalled governance issues, raising concerns about unemployment support for millions. (Illustrative image: Generated with Google Gemini Flash Image 2.5) The first time I realised such a thing as unemployment insurance existed was probably while watching the pretty awful film Superman III.
It was one of those movies that had been shown on the SABC during the 1980s that actually had a chance of being good. It featured a fight between an evil Superman and a good Clark Kent in a car-wrecking yard, the kind of thing that appealed to my pre-teen sensibilities at the time.
Looking back now the only good thing about it was Richard Pryor. He played a computer programmer who was good at breaking into systems allowing an evil businessman to control satellites, meaning that at some point the Colombian coffee crop becomes toast.
It’s amazing how many times this plot has been done, Die Hard 4 did it (the best line obviously came from Bruce Willis when asked: “What are we going to do now?” His answer: “We’re going to get Lucy and kill everyone else”). Obviously, that is exactly what happens.
James Bond, I think, has done it at least a couple of times, with probably more to come.
In the end, Pryor has to create a supercomputer that can defend itself. Which means, strangely, a crap movie from 1983 neatly foreshadowed the worries serious people have about AI.
It is a funny thing about our society but the Unemployment Insurance Fund takes money from your salary every month, yet you might have no intention of ever actually accessing that money.
I don’t think I know one middle-class person who has tried to get what would be rightfully theirs if they have found themselves to be unemployed.
This might be one of the reasons that before 2020 the fund was reporting a surplus of about R3.6-billion a year.
But for everyone else in our society the UIF is incredibly important.
One of my most disturbing memories from the pandemic is the sight of people queuing literally overnight for the R350-a-month grant. And on talk radio at the time, SAfm ran a feature asking people what problems they were having. So many gave up their precious airtime to call and cry for help to access such a small amount of money.
So, I was slightly disturbed this morning to read on []Moneyweb that the business group Business Unity South Africa (Busa) has decided to pull out of the UIF structures at Nedlac.
The problem, as you have already imagined, is governance. When you have so much money going into the UIF every month the potential for nonsense is sky high.
It’s one of those funds that should make us thank heaven for the existence of the Auditor-General.
Busa is pretty clear on how big the problem is. They say a process to sort it out has stalled for two years, allowing what they call its “deep dysfunction” to persist.
Unfortunately, the UIF has a bit of a history.
Just in February the UIF commissioner, Teboho Maruping, was fired after being on suspension for 18 months. Government being government and processes being processes, that meant he’d been paid nearly R2.5-million for sitting at home, doing nothing.
All of this after he tried to spend R5-billion of the fund’s money on buying about 19% of the Thuja Fund. His rationale appeared to be that it would help to create jobs for younger people and thus the UIF should invest in it to reduce its payments in the future.
If you have been paying attention to the latest set of goings-on at the Public Investment Corporation you will already know how powerful it is to have access to someone else’s money. So many of their problems come from their unlisted investments where they have the most terrible track record.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the same dynamic was at play with Maruping.
What is slightly amazing about all of this is how almost under the radar all of this has been.
The UIF is supposed to help millions of people. It has literally billions to play with, and yet it seems very few people reported on Maruping’s final removal.
Instead, like so many government offices, it seems to be declining slowly and in plain sight. In that way it’s a lot like Joburg, where we can all see the City has simply stolen money.
And, like Joburg, you can imagine the consequences of a UIF where the deep dysfunction is allowed to continue. Eventually it will run out of money. A group of people will not receive the money they were expecting.
I don’t want to think about the consequences of that. It could make the tensions ahead of this week’s protests look like a picnic.
In the end Clark Kent won that fight against the evil Green Kryptonite-infused Superman. He then went off to his high school reunion, beat the AI supercomputer and the world lived to turn another day.
We need a similar outcome for the UIF.
Or else the AI robots must just come and take us. DM