It takes a special kind of courage to admit that you need help. It is, after all, an implicit admission of failure. Not so for Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration.
Last week, the president met with top business leaders after they offered to winch South Africa out of an abyss of the government’s own making.
Channelling all the finesse of Gwede Mantashe at a climate change convention, the president reportedly made a careful distinction between business “working together” with the government, and business “assisting” government. The latter, he pointed out, would imply incompetence on the part of his administration.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but funny that.
By all accounts, this exercise in hubris was followed by a swipe at business for backing former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter’s probe into corruption at the utility. A clumsy — and unseemly — deflection of culpability if ever there was one, indicative of the level of buck-passing that could be patented by the ANC. (Business, the FM is told by one attendee, showed more grace by roundly ignoring the president’s point.)
Still, it’s ironic, since one of the three workstreams in which business and government will “work together” is focusing on crime and corruption. The other two involve an audacious act of necromancy to revive Eskom’s power grid, and plugging the hole left by Transnet’s abdication of responsibility for logistics.
The plan is for the government and business to collaborate, as they did on the Covid vaccine programme where, to be fair, the government did step up. But as for these three “new” garden variety emergencies, it has acted with all the alacrity of continental drift.
This is what business finds itself up against: the dead hand of bureaucracy. Committees. Task teams. Talkshops
Not that you’d think that there was any paucity of momentum if you read Ramaphosa’s paean to progress on Monday. Digging deep in the politicsplaining drawer, he wrote in his newsletter of how reforms in “network” industries such as electricity, telecoms, water and logistics require “sustainable and transformative” solutions rather than “temporary solutions that won’t last”. Be patient, in other words.
What followed was a parsed version of the most recent update on structural reform programme Operation Vulindlela, launched in October 2020. It was an exercise in obfuscation.
While it’s undeniable that progress has been made in small areas, claiming victory for “milestones” that have all but died in the labyrinthine state belies the fact that the very ANC governing the country has sat on its hands for decades.
Consider this “milestone”: the switch-off date for digital migration “will soon be gazetted”. Only 12 years late. And Eskom’s unbundling — first mooted in 2018 — depends on an amendment to the law that has yet to wend its way to parliament.
This is what business finds itself up against: the dead hand of bureaucracy. Committees. Task teams. Talkshops. And a government that has broken trust by reneging on virtually every promise it has made to fix the business environment.
It’s no wonder that the same business leader tells the FM the biggest concern is implementation. Giving Ramaphosa perhaps too much credit, he claims the president seems energised, but worries (rightly) that this enthusiasm won’t drip down to those tasked with making his plans a reality.
In the meantime, Ramaphosa will jet off to Russia to fix a war he has no part in, rather than stay and fix the country his party has broken. Perhaps he’s hoping business will undo the sins of successive ANC governments. It does, after all, have a better shot at this than he, as president, does.
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