I’m reliably informed President Cyril Ramaphosa will address the nation this week, though I’m not sure when. It’s about time. He had established himself as a regular TV presence; his sudden absence after the decision to allow tobacco sales for level 4 lockdown was reversed has attracted a fair amount of unfriendly comment.
We still need that explained. Why did he announce that the ban on tobacco sales would be lifted in the first place? Who did he show his announcement to before making it? Did his office clear the speech with the top brass of the national command council (NCC)? And then what happened? The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that there was a furious row at the NCC when ministers challenged him on his announcement that the ban would be lifted.
You have to feel a bit sorry for Ramaphosa. He has three doctors in his cabinet – Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, Zweli Mkhize and Aaron Motsoaledi. Most of the people in his cabinet don’t drink or smoke. Then after work he goes home to another doctor – his wife, Tshepo Motsepe, has a medical degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a master’s in public health from Harvard.
So he has medical advice bursting out the top of his head by the time he finally hits the pillow at night. It partly explains why the immediate health issues around the Covid-19 pandemic are taking centre stage under Ramaphosa.
The other part of the explanation is that no-one is making the case for opening the economy with any force or authority, and the reasons for that go back a little.
Normally it would fall to the finance minister to speak for the economy as, say, it would the chancellor of the exchequer in the UK. But in SA the finance minister is shorn of much influence over policy. He (they have to date all been men) is a banker to his colleagues rather than a leader. And with the Reserve Bank guaranteed its independence in the constitution there’s not a lot for the current minister, Tito Mboweni, to do.
When Ramaphosa first won the ANC leadership in 2017 that was just fine. Mboweni was safely tucked up at his farm in the Magoebaskloof in Limpopo, retired, though restless on social media. But it was a heady time for Ramaphosa and two other men in particular – public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and trade & industry minister Ebrahim Patel.
Between the three of them they conjured up a vision of a new SA. New cities and high-speed rail lines would spark a construction boom of unimaginable proportions. The issue of the expropriation of land without compensation could be finessed and even play into the broader, coming, economic boom.
Patel dreamt of using competition policy as a weapon to control the way companies in the economy behaved. Gordhan, a firm believer in an overarching role for the state in the economy, had cast about in the wreckage of a decade of Jacob Zuma’s state in the economy and found a new muse in the form of an Italian American, Mariana Mazzucato, a professor in economics at University College London, who argues for what she calls an “entrepreneurial state”. You can watch her here. As Anthony Butler noted in a recent column, the people backing the creation of an entrepreneurial state after Covid-19 are the same people who pounced happily onto the notion that we were a “developmental” state when Alec Erwin first started to speak about it during Thabo Mbeki’s first term as president.
Gordhan was so taken with Mazzucato’s arguments for a greater, not lesser, role in the state – despite what Zuma had done – that he had her appointed to a seat on the board of economic advisers to the President last year. Recently appointed a special economic adviser to the prime minister of Italy, she is a hyperactive and intellectually vibrant leftish academic with a compelling story to tell about how to reframe our capitalist economy in which the market leads into one where the state leads, or at least leads with the market.
Sadly, along with the constant internal ANC battles that have held Ramaphosa back from pursuing his vision (which, by the way, is not implausible – if the private sector were incentivised to build 50 new hospitals, two cities and high-speed rail links from Johannesburg to Cape Town and Durban, they would, if they could build and operate them for 20 years before handing over to the state) something profound happened when Nhlanhla Nene resigned in October 2018 after revealing he had met with the once powerful Gupta family.
Ramaphosa, Patel and Gordhan liked Nene because he stayed in his lane. His successor, hastily roped back into public life by Ramaphosa, was Mboweni.
He does not stay in his lane. He has ideas of his own and he has caused all sorts of problems for the trio. So much so, I calculate, that their dreams of new sunlit uplands for this economy have been indefinitely deferred.
Ramaphosa has talked of using the Covid-19 economic disaster to reshape the economy, but he cannot yet have even the vaguest outline of the wasteland that awaits him if he does not get more economic activity safely going. While he has behaved a lot better as a leader than, say, Boris Johnson in the UK, Johnson has a robust manufacturing economy to fall back on. Ramaphosa has some financial services and that’s about it.
Mboweni is a problem. He picks fights on Twitter with his party and then tries to make up for them by tweeting almost incoherent attacks on leaders of the opposition. It is sometimes hard to believe that he is the finance minister of a G20 nation, a country that is a member of the UN Security Council and the AU chair. He seems miserable. Appreciating the need for actual revenue as the Covid-19 battle rages, he had supported Ramaphosa’s initial intention to lift the ban on cigarette sales.
It is hard to measure Mboweni’s current political position or strength. What seems certain is that neither Patel nor Gordhan pays him much heed. Indeed, Gordhan, in pursuing a resurrection of SAA from the ruins into which he and successive finance ministers have cast it, is openly defying the economic reforms Mboweni has become associated with since an old National Treasury research paper found its way into the public domain last year.
He still, though, seems to have Ramaphosa’s ear. But then you could say that about most of the cabinet. Like Zuma before him, Ramaphosa is charming and agreeable. You want to save SAA? Ramaphosa will agree that’s an excellent idea but leave it you to figure out just how.
Certainly, the Treasury, while Mboweni is there, is unlikely to stand up for a new SAA. And would any SA commercial bank lend it money? The ones I’ve been able to speak to say absolutely not, but Gordhan is persistent beyond measure. They had better be ready when the phone rings.
(A personal observation here. I think both Gordhan on SAA and Patel on the inexplicable lockdown release rules he makes are both dead wrong on policy. Gordhan should leave SAA to its fate – someone will either pick it up or replace it – and Patel should have the courage to walk away from his instinct to command and control in detail. He should stop telling South Africans what they’re allowed to do and replace all the rules with a simple set of commands about what is not allowed. That said, these are two people you’d want in your trench in a battle. They have nerves of steel. Gordhan has had abuse from Zuma and from Julius Malema. And it’s been personal and nasty. And when my home in Johannesburg was picketed and defaced by members of Black First Land First a few years ago, one of the first people to call – apart from Karima Brown and Tim Cohen actually arriving and being physically abused – was Patel. So I criticise with a heavy heart).
It has become difficult in the past few weeks to find a safe place to stand on the virus and its passage through SA. I find for myself that I support the lockdown even though it has probably lost its effectiveness in delaying the spread of the virus. I understand that it cannot be lifted overnight. All I hear from the experts is that nothing can stop it. The elderly are vulnerable but there are people in their 80s getting through it unscathed. Or so it seems.
As I understand it, if you favour loosening the lockdown rules and opening up the economy then you’re right-wing and a fascist capitalist tool. If you favour sustained lockdowns because you believe they are the only way to ensure we will not have to bury our compatriots in mass graves then you’re a left-wing bleeding-heart “libtard” and a fool. Trying to find a safe place in the middle is difficult.
I don’t support the tobacco and alcohol bans. I don’t smoke and I have enough to drink and I believe that in the main it is the lockdown that is keeping hospitals empty, not the absence of alcohol. But there is a strong prohibitionist strain in SA society.
I don’t get the petty rules about e-commerce not being allowed to do its thing unhindered. When I walked in to a Woolworths store the other day the “home” section seemed to be cordoned off. So you couldn’t buy a towel or a plate. Why?
I do get the government’s fears about what will happen to infection numbers as further easing goes ahead, and I do get its concerns about masses of people on the move every day and of infection “hot spots” in big cities that might need to be subject to harsher rules than areas where there is very little infection.
Listen, they say, to the science. Well, when you do that you get this from Quarraisha and Salim Abdool Karim, both professors who sit on the committee advising the government on how to respond to the coronavirus. He leads it. You can find a very good presentation here.
“As the lockdown comes to an end,” Karim tells the Bhekisisa webinar, “we can expect that cases will begin to rise and we will start see many more outbreaks [of infection]. We are going to see flames everywhere. It is just how this virus continues to spread. The key thing is not to get worked up about it. It is going to happen whether we like it or not, no matter what we do. We are going to see outbreaks in schools, we are going to see outbreaks in shopping malls, we are going to see outbreaks in workplaces.”
And in a super interview with Mark Heywood on Daily Maverick, Prof Shabir Madhi, a former head of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and now professor of vaccinology at Wits University, basically argues that the continued lockdown does more harm than good as people are battling to get tested for tuberculosis, SA’s biggest killer. Neither the current lockdown nor any future intervention will do anything to reduce the number of people who will be infected.
“A surge of cases is coming,” Madhi tells Heywood. “The only thing that will help is for the citizens of SA to take responsibility. The government can come with every policy in the world … I am talking about nontherapeutic interventions: wearing a nonsurgical mask, personal distancing and hand hygiene. It won’t protect people completely but it will help us reduce the rate of infection.” Here’s the interview – it is worth every minute.
Given that, if we believe Madhi, our testing is pretty pointless if it is going to take up to two weeks to get results back (thus allowing contacts time to infect many others) what can we do other than wait, wear a mask, keep our hands as clean as possible and keep a good distance from other people? Perhaps we are asking people the wrong questions when we screen them.
When you screen someone in SA the official questions are along the lines of “Do you have a fever?” and “Do you have a respiratory tract infection?”. Perhaps more have been added. But I remember Karim announcing that answering yes to both of those was the only way you were going to get a test. I enjoyed this from The Times in London because it asks simple but crucial questions. In this piece, Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, says the UK authorities are missing two-thirds of cases in the country by refusing to ask the right questions. I’ve mentioned before than the loss of smell and taste is increasingly regarded as a sure sign you are positive. But no-one asks those questions. Not in the UK and not here.
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