After the big announcements on energy reform and the effective privatisation of SAA, the question that still lingers is whether this is a mark of new momentum in the reform agenda or a false dawn. The answers will be clear soon enough.
It’s hard to be optimistic when the minister of mineral resources & energy, who is supposed to drive President Cyril Ramaphosa’s potentially transformative plan to allow companies to generate more of their own electricity, admitted he wasn’t keen on it. His arm had to be twisted, Gwede Mantashe told the media, immediately raising questions about whether his department can be trusted to push it through.
One of the things I do remember from studying development more than two decades ago is that there can often be a huge disconnect between what the leader says and what gets carried out by people further down the chain. The layers of authority and responsibility between Ramaphosa and the bureaucrats who will eventually be entrusted to deliver the necessary approvals mean implementation risk isn’t insignificant.
So if you have a reluctant minister and the officials down the chain are well aware of this, what is their incentive to deliver? Who’s to say they won’t take advantage of their ability to frustrate the whole process by merely folding their arms and letting forms pile up for years on end, like they have done with mineral rights applications for the mining industry?
Speaking of promises and trust, Ramaphosa attended the meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) industrialised countries as a guest, where he sought support for a proposed waiver of intellectual property rights on Covid-19 vaccines. Led by India and SA, a group of countries want the waivers in the hope that this would increase the number of companies that can manufacture the jabs.
The hope is that this will boost production and supplies to poorer countries. How quickly this can be done, and translated into broader access, was always debatable. The IMF and the World Bank have emphasised the need to fund access and for rich countries to donate extra vaccines as soon as possible, as something that can help now, while also delivering outsize benefits to the global economy.
Covax, the body set up to provide vaccines to poor and middle-income countries, has been badly let down by its main supplier, India’s Serum Institute. Getting vaccines to poorer countries now, with just 2% of Africans having received jabs, should probably be a priority rather than talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) that may take years and not reach consensus.
Ramaphosa’s waiver plan also faced opposition from European countries, among them the UK, the host of the G7 meeting that ended on Sunday. Other nations that aren’t part of the club but play host to pharmaceutical giants, such as Switzerland, are also against waivers, citing the morally dubious grounds that they would discourage companies from investing in the research and production of life-saving innovations in the future.
So while officials such as Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, were happy go on Twitter and post pictures with their “friend” Ramaphosa and make vague commitments to co-operate in fighting Covid-19, their words should be taken with a pinch of salt. In his media conference on Sunday, Ramaphosa said they have shifted and taken a more “reasonable” stance but had agreed to nothing more than talks at the WTO.
As it turned out, I happened to be in the UK at the same time as Ramaphosa, though not anywhere near Cornwall. What was noticeable about the coverage in the UK press was that the potential Covid-19 vaccines waivers weren’t exactly dominating the conversation.
Instead, attention was on an old controversy: Brexit. One of the more interesting criticisms I’ve heard of our industry is that news is boring, and it can seem that journalists are writing the same story all over again. It’s hard to disagree sometimes. It was, after all, more than a decade ago that the press was full of headlines about whether then president Jacob Zuma would get his day in court over the arms deal of the 1990s. He’s not president any more but we are still writing the same story.
At least SA is not alone on this particular score. It’s almost five years since the Brexit vote to leave the EU and almost 17 months since the UK actually left. One of the more difficult questions was about how to prevent a border between Northern Ireland and the republic in the south. And they are still having the same argument, despite having signed a legally binding treaty.
To get Brexit done, Boris Johnson capitulated and did what it was assumed no British prime minister would ever do. He agreed a deal that effectively kept the north in the EU customs union so that there could be unrestricted movement of goods and people with the Irish republic.
The flip side was customs checks on goods going from the rest of the UK to Northern Ireland, before they potentially enter the European single market through the open border with the republic. Treating Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK has always irked unionists, who see it as the start of a process that can eventually lead to a united Ireland.
The EU is insisting on the implementation of the Irish protocol that Britain signed, which will — among other things — see sausages being prevented from crossing the Irish Sea from Great Britain. So the dominant theme in the G7 meeting wasn’t Covid-19 or even climate change but whether the host, “global Britain”, could be trusted to keep its word and respect the rule of law. The UK press’s obsession with Biden’s Irish heritage didn’t help matters, taking what is an obscure thing for the rest of the world to the centre stage.
It's just as well that the UK isn’t a supporter of Ramaphosa on the Covid-19 waivers as Johnson was unlikely to be a dependable partner. Back home, the same might be true of Mantashe.
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