PETER BRUCE: Let’s talk about the economy and not race in the months ahead

There are two big things to watch in SA between now and next April. The first is quite how finance minister Tito Mboweni assembles the R50bn spending cuts he has just promised to find for the next budget, in February. He is targeting the public sector wage bill but it is going to be as hard to get any money out of the public service as it is to get any service out of it.

The other thing to watch is the race for the leadership of the DA after the return to the senior ranks of former leader Helen Zille and the consequent departure of party leader Mmusi Maimane. It is going to be a thriller.

Early moves appear to point to former chief whip John Steenhuisen as a front-runner for the leadership. He lost the whip when Maimane resigned. But he then quickly stood for election as leader in parliament and won hands down. People like and respect Steenhuisen. He is straight, tough and very quick on his feet.

But with the immediate rush after Maimane’s departure now dissipated, the leadership race is beginning to take a shape of sorts. Zille, typically, started something when she told the Cape Town Press Club the other day that race simply shouldn’t come into DA thinking at all.

This invited a firm response from a black DA MP, Hlanganani Gumbi, in correspondence he headlined “Race matters, Helen!”.

“If we want to stay the course of building a nonracial party in the centre of SA which brings people together, then we must reconsider our offer,” he wrote this week. “The debate on whether race is a proxy or not for disadvantage in the DA is sadly back. Nevertheless it must be addressed. The simple answer is YES, of course race is a proxy for disadvantage.”

As much as I like and admire both Helen Zille and John Steehuisen, Gumbi is right. Why, in the DA, can it not be said?

But while Gumbi may be right, he may also be standing in the way of a good result in the leadership race for the DA. A good outcome would be that someone emerges as leader after a loud and transparent debate about economic policy. If the ensuing debate is just about race, or colour, and not the actual economic policies required to fix race disadvantage, it will all have been for nothing.

The opportunity for fresh debate about the economy is huge, and the DA totally owns it. It mustn’t waste it. Sadly, the signs are a bit iffy.

Steenhuisen is striking a slight variation in the official line that the DA will build an “opportunity” economy — in other words, everyone should have the same opportunities. Steenhuisen has begun to speak of an “enterprise economy” where “opportunity” reigns. It is an extension of the way Zille and Tony Leon before her couched DA economic thinking. It doesn’t move me much.

Then I heard radio host Eusebius McKaiser ask the party’s new interim chair, Magashule Gana, how he would couch economic policy as a black DA leader. He had nothing to say, which is not surprising because there isn’t a black or white version of economic policy and if the DA could only figure that out it could save itself.

Both Gana and Steenhuisen are leadership candidates, or should be. But it would be a tragedy if they campaigned on the place of race on DA policy rather than on an economic alternative designed to raise the poor (and black) majority of this country to some new level of prosperity. Once you have an economic and not a sociological answer to that question you can leave race behind for a greater thing: safety, security, dignity, for poor people.

The answer lies in getting the basics right. How do we create wealth and how do we distribute it? It is surely logical that the greater the inclusion of all South Africans in the former the better the chances are of getting the latter right. If we can tweak our capitalism to match our problems we can actually fix the problems.

There are a million ways to cut this and most start in the private sector, where our wealth is created. CEOs spend too much time working their incentive schemes and not enough on implementing strategy. So? So tax short-term incentive schemes harshly and reward longer-term schemes. Tax speculative share trading and reward long-term investing. Reward companies that grow jobs. Reward diversity.

Worker representatives on company boards? What’s not to like? Once workers are directors they’ll know everything in real time rather than feed destructively on rumours and conspiracies. Ensure the main creditor in any business, listed or not, chairs the board. Managers can attend board meetings, obviously, but merely to update on the growth strategies they have presented for the year.

By making business behave better and concentrate on the job and not the money you have a better outcome. Of course, whatever the DA decides it will have to live with, and these are random ideas I have long held dear.

But let’s talk, please, about the economy and not race in the months ahead. It is the only way to settle race.

• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.