The words in the headline were uttered by Agent H with an appropriate pause and desperate sigh. Agent H is one of the two main characters in Men in Black: International, the latest and fourth instalment of the MIB franchise. It is a line that encapsulates the sentiment that one develops when studying President Cyril Ramaphosa’s latest State of the Nation Address (SoNA). Reading the speech is like watching a movie – the first time around, you miss things that a second, or even a third, reading will expose.

Despite having a new President at the helm, the cast and the location remain largely the same. It is very much a case of same old, same old, or, in movie jargon, simply a reboot.

One gets the impression that the SoNA serves to tick all the boxes of supposed economic imperatives rather than to have at its heart a singular objective. As I walk, in 38 ºC, around the streets of Pompeii, the Roman city, in places still buried under 4 m to 6 m of volcanic ash and pumice from an eruption on Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, I ponder the economic policy of the Roman Empire.

You might be surprised to know that the Roman Empire had a singular economic objective. Yes, one – full employment. No more, no less. South Africa also once held such an aspiration. Well, truth be told, it held two, but poverty and unemployment go hand in glove.

If you need a bit of reminding, cast your mind back to 2006. Government released its Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA). Commenting on AsgiSA, the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory states: “The South African government was mandated in 2004 to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014. These objectives are feasible; indeed, we would hope to surpass them, because of steady improvement in the economy’s performance and job-creating capacity.” It continues: “Yet, the goal of reducing unemployment to below 15% and halving the poverty rate to less than one-sixth of households will not be achieved without sustained and strategic economic leadership from government, and effective partnerships between government and stakeholders such as labour and business.” Unfortunately, these lofty economic aspirations never came to fruition.

The aspiration to slash unemployment significantly may not have been realised, but does that imply it should no longer be pursued as the sole economic objective? Or should it be abandoned, as Pompeii once was?

My concern lies with the pursuit of any economic target without a focused, defined and specific objective. This reminds me of the game of pool, where, if a player has no clear shot to sink a ball, he or she will use the cue ball to crash into all the other balls, at great speed. The strategy, if one can all it that, is to fulfil an expectation that any other ball would fall into a pocket. This is commonly referred to as ‘calling all pockets’.

There is another economic aspect of the Roman Empire worthy considering. Mary Beard’s Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town states: “Trade was only a very thin icing on the economic cake, small-scale and not particularly respectable.” It further states that, “by and large, trade was vulgar and traders untrustworthy” and that “the high echelons of Roman society . . . were expressly forbidden from owning ‘ocean-going ships.”

It is an embarrassing question to ask, but how can anyone even think that increased imports and the associated increased trade balance deficits could positively impact on unemployment? Quite the contrary. Before responding that South Africa does in fact return monthly trade balance surpluses, consider the trade statistics without the South African Customs Union member States of Botswana, eSwatini, Lesotho and Namibia.

As per the sentiment of Agent H, “let’s try this again, shall we?” The word ‘unemployment’ features five times in the SoNA. In one instance, the President said: “We adopted the National Development Plan in 2012 to guide our national effort to defeat poverty, unemployment and inequality.” If the consistency of the eight-year interval is maintained, then we are due for another plan for ‘unemployment’ in 2020. But then, please articulate how we will tackle unemployment.