President Cyril Ramaphosa may have dealt himself a really bad hand in deciding to appoint a minister of electricity in the presidency, but he now has little choice but to make the arrangement work. To achieve that he will need two things.
The first relates to the character of the person he appoints as the new minister. The second relates to the kind of president that is required to make such an arrangement work.
Ramaphosa said in his state of the nation address last week that the new minister will oversee “all aspects of the electricity crisis response”. The minister will also work with the Eskom board and management “on ending load-shedding” and implementing the energy action plan announced by Ramaphosa last July.
The new ministry has raised questions about the new minister’s role versus that of the ministers of mineral resources & energy and public enterprises, specifically whether it will set the three ministers on a policy collision course.
That is why Ramaphosa needs to think carefully about who he appoints as the new minister as well as his role as president. The new minister needs to combine the characters of two US officials during World War 2. One was a treasury man, Harry White, and the other, Harry Hopkins, who worked without an official title for then US president Franklin Roosevelt.
Described as a brash and dogged but little-known US technocrat, White ran rings around world-renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes during the negotiations for the establishment of the World Bank and IMF. The talks were held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
Keynes came to the negotiations with a reputation to uphold and was the star of the media, only for White to cut him down to size during the talks. According to economist Benn Steil, Keynes had come to the US to save “what he could of bankrupt Britain’s historic imperial prerogatives”, but had little room for manoeuvre because of a significant global shift towards a dollar-dominated postwar world. Steil is the author of The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the making of the new world order.
He writes that White was grudgingly respected by colleagues at home and his counterparts in other countries for “his gritty intelligence, attention to detail, relentless drive, and knack for framing policy”. He told Keynes during one encounter: “We will try to produce something which Your Highness can understand.” No wonder Keynes would complain that White “has not the faintest conception how to behave or observe the rules of civilised intercourse”.
Hopkins, on the other hand, was a linear thinker who understood what Roosevelt had in mind and could translate that vision into concrete action. But “Hopkins relied on Roosevelt to provide him with access to information and the levers of government, which in turn satisfied his ambition: having the power to influence important people and events”, according to Hopkins’ biographer, David Roll.
“As a consequence, during the war years Hopkins would become the only person in the US government other than the president to thoroughly understand the interrelationships of war, diplomacy, politics, economics and logistics,” Roll wrote in The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler.
Roosevelt reportedly said of Hopkins: “He doesn’t even know the meaning of ‘protocol’. When he sees a piece of red tape he just pulls out those old garden shears and snips it.” There was a chemistry between Roosevelt and Hopkins that made their partnership so effective that British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin understood that Hopkins spoke for Roosevelt. This enabled Hopkins to advise both his boss and Churchill how to engage each other. For example, on Hopkins’ advice Churchill couched his remarks in meetings with Roosevelt to accommodate his concerns about his domestic US political constraints.
Ramaphosa’s new minister of electricity will need a good dose of brashness and doggedness to deal with bruised egos in the cabinet, as well as the other people they will encounter when carrying out their duties. They will need relentless drive, gritty intelligence and attention to detail. But the new minister will also need a dose of Hopkins’ light touch if the minister is to help Ramaphosa achieve his objective.
Ramaphosa will have to re-evaluate how he runs his cabinet, as well as the governing party, to ensure he provides political cover for the new minister, who will need to be clear at all times on precisely what the president has in mind.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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