Li Ka-shing may have planned it all along. After all, at 97 years of age, seldom do earth-shattering moves occur by random fortuity.

For one, it took painstaking and genius planning to acquire 43 ports in 22 countries with 99 dockyards. After all, building a $36 billion (about R687.5bn) empire brick by brick must have taken a lot of proverbial bricks.

On March 4 of the year instant, he announced that he had entered into an agreement to sell all the port assets of CK Hutchison Holdings to Blackrock, the US investment behemoth, subject to an elaborate catalogue of terms, each of whose segments is independently exercisable at different times.

Leading up to this moment, he must have encountered a lot of powerful historic figures, the most prominent of which is Uncle Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese titans. The one leader that he did not like at first encounter was CCP Governor of Fujian province, Governor Xi Jinping, as he then was, whom he met at various stages of his political ascendancy in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

When Li tried to acquire an old part of Shanghai so he could demolish it and construct modern high-rise edifices, Xi demurred and, as a result, nixed the purchase. The encounter was so bruising, so much so that two years after Xi became president of the country, Li sold out all his investments in Shanghai.

The Chinese administration, considering the ambitions of the Belt and Road Initiative, had specific yet unspoken expectations. They were comforted in their belief that Chinese nationals, notwithstanding their adopted citizenship, owed their allegiance to the motherland. And whenever they were called upon, wherever they were, out of their sense of patriotism, the Chinese would subject their business interests to the greater national ideal.

Li, however, had other inclinations. By his avowed commitment to the administrative independence of the Hong Kong island and its islet Macau, he believed in the fundamental tenets of capitalism, an identity he preferred over and above that of a collectivist Chinese identity. At the height of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, he did not prevaricate in espousing his preference for the activists’ demands over the dictates of the Beijing-appointed administration.

With his company registered in the Cayman Islands, he took up Canadian citizenship, whence he developed so much of his business interests in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia, while gradually unburdening himself of the shackles of cultural and sentimental bondage both of Hong Kong and the mainland.

Besides, the port tycoon had a lot of incentive. The profit calculus of an outright sale for CK Hutchison Holdings, in a capital-intensive industry with marginal returns, seemed irresistibly inviting.

Their shares jumped as much as 25% on the news to 48.20 Hong Kong dollars per share. Year-to-year performance of all 43 ports brought in a revenue of $3.8bn, with only $600 million being operational profit.

With the threat of edict declaration or acquisition of port assets by military annexation, especially of the Panama Canal ports, $22.8bn represents a profit of a lifetime. It must be said somewhat with lingering bemusement that the mainland Chinese port operators were not offered equal opportunity to bid or match the BlackRock offer.

The investment world revered him so much that it became legendary to quip that in America, watch the Oracle of Omaha. In Asia, however, it is instructive to watch Li. For the retiring nonagenarian, there are no easy parallels. But for the developing world, critical lessons abound.

All critical infrastructure designed for convenient access and efficient utility by the general public must always be in the hands of the state. South Africa’s shared experience, embarrassing as it is, dictates otherwise. The ruling party is a piper. It waxes the tune of its player. And critical rail, port, and electricity infrastructure will be pawned for pennies.

Our collective alarm would be heralded by an announcement by Minister Barbara Creecy that the state’s control over rail infrastructure is gone and irretrievably lost. Whereto is veritably immaterial. Only the ruling party and its GNU partners would be deliriously excited about this outcome, either because it responds to their common sponsor’s main agenda.

Or in its macabre version, it is the psychological effect of fatalism that in four years, only so much loot can be amassed. First is rail. Next is ports.

Stealth is the country’s main strategy. Playing possum dead is their main tactic, both infantile machinations. The infrastructure is left to rot to a point of irredeemable dysfunctionality. When completely rendered inaccessible, and a state-owned enterprise has been asphyxiated lifeless in the process, the minister would be availed to weep crocodile tears on national television, begging for private investments.

When the spinmeisters of the ruling party have outmanoeuvred every other public option available, the denizens are left to a fatalism that the privatisation of their public assets is biblically foretold and therefore historically inevitable.

And while the concerned public can, they must vacate the fallacy that the mystical private sector, or humans in their employ, are imbued with inborn instincts of efficacy. Few people working for a few people to serve the interests of a select few could ever be compared to the task of serving everyone without discrimination or cause to do so. The state serves the public good. The private sector serves shareholder profit.

There was a time when the ANC was sponsored by the masses, to whatever measurable extent, which led to a healthy balance between the yearnings of the suffering masses and a manageable balance sheet of the ruling party.

Something snapped, and the tectonic cataclysms revealed massive chasms. The ruling party developed a taste for money, ignominious amounts of it, not unlike the moribund apartheid champions, the National Party, which developed a taste for blood, copious amounts of it. And in a fate that looked eerily similar, the National Party got alienated from its intellectuals and withered into oblivion, just the same way the ANC got emasculated from a four hundred-year-old dream of millions of people.

Zugzwang in chess does not connote a checkmate. It does, however, represent the ultimate shifting of the power leverage from one adversary to another. It gives them power to create conditions for the other contender to have one kind of move only. And whatever that move is, it will be regrettably and unavoidably stupid.

Trump or Xi could move first, no matter. However, whatever the dramatic outcome of the forced move, Li’s manoeuvre could easily be billed as the Schadenfreude of the Irredentist!

* Ambssador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law. The views expressed here are his own.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.

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Panama Canal, the billionaire and the dilemmas of patriotism