By late Wednesday, a day before he would deliver his state of the nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa had still not reshuffled his cabinet. Putting his lethargy, or indecision, on full display as the few foreign investors that still want to be here are gathered in Cape Town for the African Mining Indaba is as embarrassing as it is damaging.
So many questions can be answered (or start to be answered) by the cabinet choices he has to make. Mineral resources & energy, transport, police, health, tourism and home affairs have all been run into the ground, but Ramaphosa defiantly will not make the choices. It means that for investors there is no clarity and that means that for us there is no investment.
Don’t be fooled by the promises you may hear. Ramaphosa is unable to deliver almost anything because to do so he depends on a wide range of people who are themselves unable to deliver. Not always because they are incompetent, though many are, but because the environment in which they work is impossibly toxic.
Nothing Ramaphosa announces means anything until he has squeezed it through a million committees and individuals. Despite many promises of reform, of social compacts, of sunlit uplands, only one he has made stands out.
It is the fact that business is finally allowed to produce, for its own account, as much electricity as it wants to. In the space of a year the private sector has about 10,000MW of power generation projects on the go. That’s more than Medupi and Kusile, Eskom’s giant new but flawed and corrupted plants, combined.
And there’s a reason for it. The reform allows the private sector to get on with it on its own. No government. Ramaphosa’s reform problem is that he keeps appealing for business to “work with us”, but the truth is that no-one in his or her right mind wants to work with him.
He was at it again on Wednesday, at the indaba. “Faced with this type of crisis (he means the economic omnishambles we’ve become since his return to government in 2012/2013) we have seen that it is best to work with those who have a common interest with us,” he told delegates. “So in this case the private sector, the workers, community and government have a common interest to make this work and that is why we want to private sector not to feel shy, not to stand back.
It is typical of the Ramaphosa problem. He means it when he says it, but politics means he can’t keep his word
“But more importantly, not to stand on the roof tops and just criticise. We want them to get into the ring. So that we work together to solve our problems. And we are not saying you should not be critical, but we are saying stop moaning.”
This time last year the same president promised that within 100 days he would carve out a social compact between the very actors he mentions. It never happened. Why? Because politics meant he’d changed his mind almost before he’d sat down. By acknowledging in the same speech the centrality of the private sector in job creation, he realised from the frosty reception in his audience he had made a political mistake.
It is typical of the Ramaphosa problem. He means it when he says it, but politics means he can’t keep his word. Successive ANC governments, including Ramaphosa’s, have proven themselves lousy, lying and slippery partners. Once you stick so much as a toe into a “partnership” with these people you soon find you’re in bed with the whole appalling beast that is the ANC itself. There are no Chinese walls here.
This president took almost three years to appoint a board at Eskom. When he finally did, he intoned “we have a great deal of confidence in the new board and their job now is to take Eskom forward”.
Fast forward a few months and the new board, brimming with private sector experience, presents a carefully thought-out plan to stop load-shedding in two years. Barely a week passes before Ramaphosa’s ANC national executive committee essentially tells the board two years is too slow. They want it done this year, before the 2024 elections. So much for partnership.
Last year, in another “reform”, rapidly collapsing rail and ports operator Transnet generously offered to concession a handful of lines to private operators for two years. Who would accept such a ludicrous offer? Late last year the mining industry called for Transnet CEO Portia Derby’s dismissal. This week at the mining indaba Derby was telling reporters she and the mining industry were getting along famously.
So bad are things at Transnet though that it is now offering a 20-year concession on the entire Johannesburg to Durban freight line, the country’s most important economic artery. In a normal environment you could call this a privatisation. But given the inability of government to protect its partners from the ANC, the conditions attached to Transnet’s “offer” — sort out maintenance, don’t fire anyone and do your own security — may be just too onerous for even the most naive “partner”.
That’s Ramaphosa’s problem. What if no-one puts his or her hand up? If he wants the private sector to work its magic he’ll need to concession Durban port as well. Right up to the water. What he has to do is get out of the way.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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