South Africa is such a strange place. There were five municipal by-elections held on Wednesday, two of which were necessitated because the previous public representative was violently killed. There is mass unemployment, load shedding, floods and the usual travails we read about every day. And in this past month of May, according to the monthly stats provided by the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa, 10 people bought themselves Lamborghinis.
What is surprising, at least for some of us, is that Lamborghinis are more popular than Ferraris, because only five of them were sold in May. Really, okes, get a grip. But SA does have some claim to dignity, since only two Bentleys were bought last month. Car sales are a fantastic measure of the real state of the economy. They are expensive enough to be meaningful, but not so expensive as to be arbitrary. They are also a measure of industrial capacity and performance, and, as it happens, SA’s export performance. SA’s vehicle export performance fell badly in May mainly because of the shutdown at the Toyota plant following the floods, as it happens.
In the typical nature of free trade agreements, total trade with the EU, both imports and exports, increased strongly during the period on a rand basis, and exports to the EU are now about 50% higher than they were in 2014. This has happened, even as SA’s trade with the EU as a percentage of its total exports and imports is more or less static. But overall, the EU remains SA’s largest trading partner, with about 22% of total trade, and that balance is now positive.
Eish this mlungu, neva heard of McLaren