'False face must hide what false heart doth know.' (Macbeth Act 1 Sc 7)

Johannesburg — The rand was more than 3% weaker against the dollar in late trade on Wednesday after Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s budget speech in Parliament.

The rand weakened to a 16-month worst level of R7,9225 a dollar — after closing at R7,6625 on Tuesday — with traders predicting the local currency could break above the R8-a-dollar level overnight.

Traders said it was difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for the rand’s fall, but said it could be attributable to concerns over how the government plans to finance a widening current-account deficit.

That was the markets’ immediate response to our least inspirational budget in 14 years of demockracy. I am no economist and in fact have a missing gene sequence when it comes to matters of a financial nature. How I ended up heading communication divisions in two money-lending institutions can only be ascribed to God’s sense of humour.

On the other hand, it may be because what I lack in economic intellectual capital I make up for in understanding the role and nature of perceptions.

Our empirical, touch-it-feel-it-put-it-in-a-test-tube scientific mindset tells us perceptions are bunkum, all in the mind, out of touch with reality, and don’t deserve more than a cursory nod in the rarefied elitism of science.

If I had a rand for every time I heard this rarefied poppycock, I would own a bank or two. I’ve heard it said by some of the cleverest and some of the dumbest people I’ve met, and they have all been proved wrong, dismally wrong. The Star headlined a recent editorial comment: “Perception is reality”.

For as much as we would like to portray ourselves as sensible, calm, rational, analytical beings, in our heart of hearts the primal instincts still hold sway.

Scientists, both behavioural and biological, have given up the silly notion that metaphysical concepts such as love, attraction, malice, envy and lust are somehow ethereal, wishy-washy stuff and are now, more realistically, probing why these powerful forces exist, what the limits (if any) of their power are and whether we can “make” or “change” them.

Perception is one such force. We do judge books by their covers, people by their skin colour, truth by our beliefs and the world by what we are told about it, and we weigh up the future against our experience of the past. Whether this is morally right or wrong is the subject of a thousand other blogs.

Economists can give PowerPoint presentations until their laptops explode, or construct intricate flow charts and multidimensional models until even the paint gets bored, but the fact is that the way in which we perceive things is its own reality. As real as the realest real thing.

The budget deficit is a tangible manifestation that things have gone a bit iffy in South Africa. Add to that the tangible manifestation that it’s going to take R60-billion to restore faith (another troublesome perception) in our ability to meet energy needs, the perception that crime is out of control, the perception that the cops are so riddled with corruption that they’re effectively ineffective, the perception that the president of the ANC and de facto president-in-waiting is a crook, the perception that the war on poverty will not be over by Christmas, the perception that our best brains are packing for Perth or nailing for New York … et cetera, et cetera, et cetera (as the King of Siam would say).

These are the crayons that colour our paint-by-numbers Guernica. Until we take perceptions seriously instead of the infantile reactions in Parliament and in the ranks of the clown princes and princesses of the ANC and its anachronistic allies, this silly game of slip and slide will continue.

The next wave of shocks will be the budget debates and then the circus of ministerial budget allocations and reports. All the attempts by the government and its groupies to pish-pash perceptions have failed.

Keeping crime stats secret has only aggravated the perception that the government is losing the battle — if it hasn’t lost it already. Denigrating, denying and downplaying perceptions have — ironically — entrenched them as undeniable fact. Sure as sunrise.

We listened, mouths agape, to the bumbling denials and blatant lies of an ordained church minister, Frank Chikane, during his embarrassing interview with Feargal Keane, and the buffoonish machine-gun lover trying to breakdance his way out of the straight question: “Are you a crook?”

Showerhead’s response, for sheer idiocy, ranks alongside Jimmy Kruger’s infamous pooh-poohing of the death of Steve Biko: “It leaves me cold.” Another nadir in a growing litany of low points.

Can it improve? Shit, I hope so. But my perception is it’ll get worse, a lot worse, before it improves. Still, I hope to see you on the other side.