If there’s another certainty besides death and taxes it’s that the ANC-led government will just not listen to pragmatic, common-sense advice or pleas from those who do actually know better when it comes to running businesses and a modern economy.
At the risk of adding to an already voluminous number of editorials and commentary pieces criticising the state’s handling of the anarchy in KwaZulu-Natal and a few sites in Gauteng, the nakedness of our ruling party was laid bare for all to see this month — and it was an ugly sight.
Not only in the abject failures of crime intelligence and proactive policing, but also the subsequent fallout as police, defence and intelligence ministers try to throw each other and President Cyril Ramaphosa under the bus to avoid any blame.
The incontrovertible fact is that the government failed the country miserably, much like it has done for a decade or more, certainly since Jacob Zuma and his slippery grasp of morals, ethics and clean governance was imposed on the country by the ANC. The net result of his nine-year presidency was flourishing corruption, a government that will not be held to account as it oversees a deepening economic and a social crisis that was avoidable.
Imagine being Ramaphosa and talking a big game about attracting R1-trillion of investment, creating jobs and freeing the economy from the dead hands of Eskom and Transnet, to name but two of the biggest state-owned bottlenecks on economic activity.
And then you have ministers working against you.
Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe’s concession that Ramaphosa had to “twist his arm” to allow business to build 100MW of embedded renewable energy generation, 10 times more than Mantashe had bullheadedly wanted to impose despite howls of outrage from across the economy.
And then defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula openly rubbishing Ramaphosa’s stony-faced assertion that the weeklong anarchy in KwaZulu-Natal was an insurrection, only to issue a mealy-mouthed, almost churlish, retraction of her comments.
How on earth does Ramaphosa push through his structural reforms to urgently make SA investor-friendly when he has these kinds of people around him in the cabinet? It speaks to his difficulties within his own party to drive his agenda.
Commentators from across the spectrum are demanding he purge his cabinet of useless ministers and realise the critical need to bring in ministers who know their elbows from their nether regions, but it’s very easy to urge action like this from one man swimming in a sea of sharks and fighting for his life. For Ramaphosa to make it happen is another story entirely.
The warning lights from big business and investors have now ramped up to blaring claxons about the state of the economy since the meltdown in KwaZulu-Natal, which has cost that province an estimated R20bn and put 150,000 jobs at risk.
Big international companies like Toyota, with a large factory in Durban, issued the starkest of warnings: protect us from this nonsense, don’t let it happen again or we’re moving. I’m paraphrasing, but the message was clear.
Business has warned the government for years that it is tough to motivate their boards and shareholders to invest in SA. Apart from Eskom and inadequate rail and port services, there are dozens of municipalities that are quagmires of corruption, incompetence, failed services and crumbling infrastructure, all feeding into increasingly angry and desperate communities.
The state insists on putting its hands on everything, meddling and prescribing from its pulpit of outdated ideology it clings to as a dogma that gives it a perceived moral high ground when, in fact, it just annoys everyone and stands in the way of creating a modern economy and unlocking investment that will unleash the pent-up potential to create an African superpower.
Look at the Mining Charter. In the four iterations, including the deeply damaging version that former minister of mineral resources Mosebenzi Zwane foisted on the industry in 2017, it has become increasingly prescriptive, detailed, demanding and with levels of ministerial discretion that make investors nervous.
The version introduced by Mantashe in 2018 is being challenged in court by the Minerals Council SA, and any number of CEOs point to this charter as the antithesis of sensible policy.
But Mantashe will self-righteously point to the document and tell the industry: you wanted policy certainty, there it is! Stop moaning. We consulted broadly with communities, labour and the industry. You have your wish! Now invest.
But having policy certainty that is bad is just inexplicable when industry has tried for nearly three years to persuade Mantashe and his department to make investor-friendly changes to the charter and are now relying on the courts to remove the bits it regards as damaging.
Want more evidence of this government not listening? The mineral rights system has been a disaster for more than a decade and the industry has spoken and spoken about it, begging for any number of internationally proved digital systems to be implemented that would resolve the problem at a stroke.
So far, all we’ve had is fine talk from Mantashe and his director-general, Thabo Mokoena, about their sudden realisation that the clunky and bad Samrad digital system must be changed and that it will be done urgently. Their interpretation of urgency and that of the rest of the world are apparently two different things.
The government has been warned repeatedly that bad regulations, policies, an inability to implement good ones, corruption and incompetence come with consequences. Did the ANC listen? No. Instead it lashed out at its critics and pursued its narrow ideological objectives. The consequences are now with us and threaten an entire country.
One in three adults is unemployed, we have a weak education system, crippling inaction on digital policies, investors and potential investors seriously frightened by the week of uncontrolled looting in KwaZulu-Natal, glacial movement in trying to implement structural reforms, an ANC at war with itself and rampant corruption.
Anyone who thinks events in KwaZulu-Natal won’t happen again is naive. The seeds the ANC has sown are deep and germinating. It’s going to take something extraordinary to change SA’s trajectory and a fractured, bickering ANC is not it.
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