To the ANC, everything is a fire pool now. Its leaders, when seconded to the government and exposed as failing, thump their chests in victimhood, lurching for the lexicon of excuses, reframing it all as “out of context” or a “political witch-hunt”.
Asked last week on radio about the backlog in mining licence applications, South Africa’s avuncular mining minister Gwede Mantashe rounded on the Daily Maverick, which had simply reported what his own department had told IFP MP Themba Msimang in parliament. Msimang had asked how many applications had been approved this year, and Mantashe’s officials replied that of the 2,525 applications received since April, “nil” had been processed.
Actually, Mantashe later told 702’s Clement Manyathela, 674 mining rights applications had been approved, before adding sagely: “674 is not nil.” He grumbled that Daily Maverick reported this because it is “making me a project” and “tends to distort facts”.
Perhaps Mantashe should confront the awkward truth that if any facts were distorted, this came from his own department. If his officials had, as they later claimed, actually processed hundreds of applications from the previous year (which still leaves a backlog of 3,000 applications, mind), maybe it should have reported that context to parliament too.
Yet victimhood is a much more snug fit than accountability.
It’s the same instinct we saw when ANC secretary-general Fikile “Fixfokol” Mbalula bombastically talked himself into a corner, whining how Jacob Zuma had double-crossed the ANC by starting his new Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party. Why would he do this, Mbalula bleated, when ANC officials had gone to parliament and “said a swimming pool is a fire pool … this was a lie [and] it is difficult to explain lies”.
Inevitably, this blew up. So Mbalula complained that his words had been “deliberately twisted” to make it seem as if the ANC had lied about the fire pool. This was actually taken out of context, said Mbalula. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for …
Delightfully, no-one bought it — not even Mantashe, his predecessor as secretary-general. Mantashe said Mbalula had “said things he should not have said”, pointing out that “when you lead, you count every word you say”.
And Mantashe should know, being an expert in counting and the difference between nil and 674.
Anyway, his picture of a slick bureaucracy pumping out licences faster than Joburg buildings are burning down contrasts with stories from insiders about what’s actually happening at his department of mineral resources & energy — a critical arm of the government when it comes to securing foreign investment.
Piles of unprocessed mining licence applications stacked up to the roof and sly requests for backhanders are the order of the day
Lawyers forced to interact with that department have been complaining for years. And this week, Rapport newspaper wrote that nothing has changed: piles of unprocessed mining licence applications stacked up to the roof, offices that “look like a crèche” and sly requests for backhanders — fuel, lunch or even school fees — are the order of the day.
As one consultant told the newspaper: “When the tank is full and the lunch has been bought, the guy will walk to a small office, take out the stepladder and try to find your application among a pile of papers. Sometimes we don’t even succeed.”
Two of his clients died before they received a response to their applications.
That’s hardly the sort of publicity you need during the week that the government’s business arm is blowing millions on charming investors at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.
There, finance minister Enoch Godongwana did as well as could be expected, spinning South Africa’s “potential”. But even he was moved to warn that next month’s budget would be “difficult”.
It was refreshing to see that unlike many in the government, such as the proponents of the budget-busting National Health Insurance (NHI), Godongwana is well aware of the precipice South Africa finds itself at, conceding in an interview at the WEF that “our growth levels are insufficient to be able to cope with higher levels of debt”.
It’s an inconvenient message when the priority for any investor is capital growth. Godongwana claimed the country isn’t “hiding” these problems, but that the message still holds that South Africa “is an investment destination”.
Which it is, if you can look past the backlog in Mantashe’s mining department, the hostility to the private sector within the department of health and the lacklustre efforts to revive state companies such as Transnet.
But then Godongwana has little choice: the only route to the sort of growth that could meaningfully tame our debt is to lure investment to South Africa, based on a gamble that these pockets of ineptitude will, sooner or later, be subordinated to the greater economic reform project.
Right now, though, it creates a situation where “we are operating in a fairly constrained fiscal space”, said Godongwana, which means the choices in February’s budget will be ugly.
It’s a message ratings agency Fitch made no bones about last Friday. In its ratings announcement — in which it kept South Africa’s rating stable at below investment grade — it cited the country’s “serious economic challenges” of high debt, slow growth, inequality and power shortages.
What South Africa needs, Fitch said, is a more ambitious fiscal plan that deals with the real issues hurting competitiveness.
The problem is, the definition of “ambition” differs vastly within the government. For some, it’s pushing through NHI; for others, it’s simply winning political office and staying there. For Mantashe, “ambition” needs to take the form of slashing the backlog of mining licence applications, and axing the deadwood soliciting school fees in return for doing their job.
Mantashe, commendably, has pledged that the 3,000 applications backlog will have reduced to nil within a year. “By the end of 2024, there must be no backlog,” he said.
If he can pull that off, it would be no mean feat — even adjusted for the numerical gulf between the figures he cites, and what his department is reporting elsewhere.
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