President Cyril Ramaphosa held a two-day meeting with some of the most impressive local and international economic brains around last week.
In the room, as part of Ramaphosa’s economic advisory panel, was Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. She is a former No 2 at the World Bank and two-time Nigerian finance minister (her first term under the focused and decisive Olusegun Obasanjo was glittering, her second under the hapless Goodluck Jonathan was a disaster). Also present was superstar economist Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Entrepreneurial State and a professor at University College London. Local names included innovative, independent, original and challenging thinkers such as Thabi Leoka, Kenneth Creamer, Wandile Sihlobo, Imraan Valodia, Alan Hirsch and many others.
Accompanying Ramaphosa to the meeting were economic cluster ministers Ebrahim Patel, Tito Mboweni, Thoko Didiza and Pravin Gordhan.
It was a meeting that could help change our fortunes as a country. It could turn us from a loser to a winner.
There was an elephant in the room. Ramaphosa identified it in his opening remarks. He told the group that when he first started as president in 2018 he regarded the hollowed-out state and its capacity to execute his reforms as his sixth priority. He has now changed his mind. He said he should have prioritised it as No 1. He regards this one issue, the incapability of the state, as "our Achilles heel".
He is right. Our country is falling apart, only being held together by duct tape. The state bureaucracy is characterised by sloth, inefficiency, incapacity and corruption. Every so often there is a flash of brilliance but these are few and far between.
Ramaphosa dreams of smart cities yet our municipalities have collapsed and are incapable of fixing themselves
The state is incapable of delivering the plans and dreams Ramaphosa has. I have written elsewhere about how our national police commissioner cancelled 10 consecutive scheduled meetings with the distressed construction industry — all in four months. If he can’t stick to attending just one meeting, no wonder his subordinates cannot even master the basic skill of marching in tandem, as they demonstrated at Richard Maponya’s funeral. That is why our crime problem is so huge and getting worse.
It’s the same across the board. Ramaphosa dreams of smart cities, yet our municipalities have collapsed and are incapable of fixing themselves. Over the past week horror stories of municipalities which cannot provide water have emerged even as the government encourages people to wash hands to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Auditor-general Kimi Makwetu told us three months ago that of the 257 audited municipalities, the outcomes of 63 regressed while those of 22 improved. Only 8% received a clean audit. The positive outcomes are "dwarfed by the pervasive control and monitoring failures evident at a significant number of other municipalities", Makwetu said. "The impact is that the fiscal resources placed at their disposal are either misused or not properly accounted for."
Public health services are strained to the point of collapse. Municipalities can’t patch up potholes. Home affairs officials don’t know basic migration regulations or updates to some of our visa regulations.
A major reason for the incapability of the state is the ruthless and rampant application of the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment. People were appointed merely because they were ANC members or relatives of ANC leaders. Ramaphosa knows and understands this, saying in January: "A capable state starts with the people who work in it. Officials and managers must possess the right financial and technical skills and other expertise. We are committed to end the practice of poorly qualified individuals being parachuted into positions of authority through political patronage."
This is the sort of thing that flourished under Jacob Zuma, leading to the appointment of bumbling incompetents such as Tom Moyane to the position of SA Revenue Service commissioner or Berning Ntlemeza to head the Hawks. Such Zuma-embedded incompetents are still in place in the ministries, departments, state enterprises, provinces, municipalities, diplomatic services and other parts of the state.
The SA that Ramaphosa dreams about will not be born for as long as they are in place.
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