You lose! Good day, sir!”

The headline and the opening sentence are attributable to Willy Wonka, taken from the title role of the 1971 film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. You might well be more familiar with the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Towards the end of the film, Charlie’s grandfather, Joe, approached Willy Wonka, reminding him about a promised lifetime supply of chocolate, which Wonka denies, as Charlie and Joe had, in a previous scene, stolen fizzy lifting drinks and got his ceiling dirty. Wonka offers a three-sentence retort: “You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!”

It might have been probable, but the odds have now increased to ‘possible’ that these three sentences will soon be targeted at South Africa on the international stage. As my grandmother used to say, “in life, there is nothing for nothing”. Economists have long known that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”. Seemingly, South Africa has been slow on the take or might have believed that, as Sally Field said in her 1984 Oscar ‘best actress’ acceptance speech: “You like me. You really like me.” Well, truth be told, she was widely misquoted; this is what people remember her to have said. What she actually said was: “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me.” Why do people remember the ‘really’?

Matthew D Lieberman states in his article in Social Psychology, ‘The Science of You Like Me! You Really Like Me!’: “We all have a need to belong. Signs that others like, admire and love us are central to our wellbeing.” South Africa wants to be loved, to be loved by everyone – the whole world. We are that special, or so we believe. Maybe the fast-fading Mandela euphoria instilled the false belief in South Africans that we are universally loved.

Truth be told, the rest of the world is not longer in love with South Africa; the emotion has changed to pity, I contend. But it is not the same pity that you feel for those less fortunate than you and whom you tend to offer limited financial salvation should you pass them on the street. You might well counter that some countries do offer some financial pittance out of pity. Well, yes, the UK still does so to South Africa. The reason might be related to the UK’s own guilt.

But the government of the Land of the Free, the US, seems to have a different inclination. On April 30, the US hinted (some would say ‘threatened’) that it would cut funding to South Africa. ‘Funding’ is a polite word for a financial handout or a gift. If this is too upsetting, you have the choice of either reading ‘aid’ or ‘assistance’. In 2016, the US, through USAid, provided South Africa with foreign assistance amounting to $459.7-million. Simply multiply this figure by 12.5 to get the rand equivalent.

So, why such drastic action? Quite simple: it has emerged that South Africa is among the countries likely to vote against the US at the United Nations, with the others being Bolivia, Burundi, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. My mother’s words reverberate in my mind: “Birds of a feather flock together.” You are defined by the company that you keep.

Last week, when I wrote this article, also marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. Again, some ‘marked’ it and some ‘celebrated’ it. Thinking of Marx reminded of Vladimir Lenin, of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, who shared my mother’s sentiment, “Show me who your friends are, and I will tell you what you are.”