Last week President Cyril Ramaphosa cancelled his trip to the annual World Economic Forum jamboree in Davos. He gave up the chance to hobnob with the rich and powerful to “urgently” deal with the electricity crisis at home. The rest of the South African delegation, which included finance minister Enoch Godongwana, made its way to Switzerland to convince the world that we are “open for business”.
I am not quite sure how anyone in that delegation could stand in front of a serious audience and say, with a straight face, that South Africa is indeed open for business while households and businesses were experiencing upwards of 12 hours a day of electricity cuts. Sowetan published a heart-wrenching front page, listing some of the many small businesses that are buckling because of the blackouts.
There was a time when South Africa’s delegates to Davos would have argued — as they did in the late 2000s — that the cuts are a “good” problem because electricity supply could apparently not keep up with rampant economic growth. Not now. The idea that a serious foreign investor would rush to put their money in South Africa while a fast-food behemoth such as KFC closes some of its outlets because of power cuts is laughable. What South Africa should be doing is making sure KFC owner Yum Brands stays here and is happy to invest in the country. That will lure many others, because nothing says “invest here” as powerfully as the sight of others already profiting in a region.
Ramaphosa’s decision to cancel his trip and yet allow Godongwana and company to travel to Davos illustrates how schizophrenic and out of touch our leadership is with the real problems facing South Africa. Eskom is not our crisis. It is a mere symptom (a gargantuan one) of the generalised malaise we suffer from.
Eskom is in crisis because the country is in a major, continuing, generalised crisis of misgovernance. That crisis started in December 2007, when Jacob Zuma and his kleptocratic cronies took over the ANC, and is now in full flood. It has manifested in extraordinarily high levels of unemployment, poverty, inequality and misgovernance. Our troubles have reached pandemic levels.
Eskom is not our crisis. It is a mere symptom of the generalised malaise we suffer from
No-one should have boarded that flight to Davos. If our leaders truly understood what a crisis is, they would have grasped the fact that the president could not do a thing about the stage 6 load-shedding that gripped the country last week. Indeed, Ramaphosa stayed home, the days passed and by Sunday not a single aspect of the crisis had been resolved. Instead, tens of meaningless meetings had been held.
Tellingly, Ramaphosa did not say a single word in all that time. There was nothing to say. He cannot solve this problem in the near or medium term.
South Africa had nothing to contribute to the discourse in Davos, either.
If we want to send a message to the world right now, we should knuckle down and do the obvious. Godongwana should be giving updates about what successes the government is racking up in boosting policy certainty and pumping up domestic business confidence. Ramaphosa should be showing local businesses that July 2021 will not happen again. The trains should be running. Fixing the economy should be priority No 1.
That, you see, is the real crisis of South Africa: too many things that should be running smoothly without any political interference are not running at all. There is just too much generalised chaos in state-owned enterprises, in law enforcement, in municipal governance, in education, in state administration. The sense of a rudderless country is palpable. Load-shedding is just a public display of this rudderlessness.
We used to characterise the Zuma years as an omnishambles — chaos everywhere. Ramaphosa was supposed to be the antidote to that. Sadly, he is proving to be incapable of subduing the crisis those Zuma years left us in. There are bright spots here and there, with the prosecutorial services the most visible, but in large measure the ANC’s dysfunction reigns supreme.
That has consequences. First, Eskom will not be solved in a year. Second, the problem cannot be isolated to Eskom. We are in a major, ongoing, generalised crisis with many mini-explosions. We must treat this crisis holistically.
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