After calls from various quarters — your correspondent included — for business to set the pace for SA’s recovery, the sight of CEOs sitting around the table with the president and his cabinet is a welcome first step. But it is hard to be sanguine about its prospects given the platitudinous press release that accompanied the announcement.
Only the most naive of blinkered optimists would ignore that recent history is littered with grand promises of partnership matched by false starts, pulling up lame (remember the Public-Private Growth Initiative?) and the runners failing to reach the first water station, let alone the finish line, together.
That is not to say we can’t draw on the wellspring of determination and camaraderie witnessed in abundance in the Comrades Marathon at the weekend, but the public relations and photo ops must give way to confronting some hard, inalienable truths.
The narrow focus of the partnership, a key part of one of the few recent successful public private partnership initiatives launched during Covid-19, on three critical areas of energy, transport and logistics and crime and corruption, offers some hope.
But that must be tempered by whether business, in the form of Business Unity SA and Business For SA, has the courage to pull at the rotten thread that weaves the dysfunctional SA state together and binds our fate to it either way: cadre deployment.
I don’t need to repeat the conclusions arrived at by judge Raymond Zondo here; suffice to say cadre deployment lies at the heart of SA’s polycrisis. To be successful and sustainable any partnership between business and the ANC-led government requires a dismantling of this system of deploying party lackeys to key roles, in favour of a bureaucracy built around meritocracy.
Toxic patronage
But when a political strategy has revolved around this fulcrum of patronage — rather than demonstrating an ability to grow the economy and improve services and provide the prospects of a better future for all — it is understandable why this option is resisted.
But there is a card the president might be persuaded to play, one that could cause the ANC under his leadership to sever this toxic umbilical cord of patronage once and for all by delivering on the one, and indeed only, thing that could possibly ensure his party’s long-term survival: growth.
Speaking to the ever-astute Hendrik du Toit this week on my Business Talk platform, the Ninety One CEO wasn’t mincing his words. “I am hopeful that an ANC government that is under pressure at the ballot box now, not for ideological reasons but for delivery to people, is going to become more action orientated,” Du Toit said when I asked him his view on SA’s prospects.
“The president has opened the batting by resisting lots of these bad ways of the Zuma era but not quite completing the job. I sense a very decisive deputy president who understands that he is going to become president in an essentially ungovernable country if he doesn’t start acting.
“That gives me hope. And we’ve seen a private sector that has moved away from criticising, standing on the sideline, sort of waiting for an accommodative government, to now just start doing,” Du Toit said.
But where will that growth come from given that Ann Bernstein of the Centre for Development & Enterprise has just released a comprehensive paper detailing how government’s policies are effectively antigrowth?
Remarkable transformation
Du Toit believes President Cyril Ramaphosa should look east. The Middle East, to be exact, towards a country that might find favour with a leadership determined not to embrace anything the West has to offer: Saudi Arabia.
His research analysts have returned from recent visits to Riyadh as converts to Mohammed Bin Salman’s Vision 2030, he says, adding it feels like Shanghai 1997. By unleashing the participation of women in the labour market, modernising the economy and making strategic investments, Saudi Arabia has experienced a remarkable transformation.
The Saudis are reshaping their environment, betting their considerable oil resources on diversifying away from fossil fuels, building new cities and driving standards. The result? A 10% growth economy that attracts foreign capital and sparks regional development.
Fresh from securing MBS’s greatest soft power victory yet in the merger of LIV Golf with the PGA, Chinese entrepreneurs and investors are attending the 10th Arab-China Business Conference in Riyadh to explore expansion and fundraising opportunities. Capital is flocking in.
SA can draw inspiration from such examples and replicate their success. First though, trust must be rebuilt. Own goals such as insisting on racial targets for water rights and social engineering via employment targets cannot overshadow the collective goal of national economic growth.
That the president sees a private investigation into corruption at Eskom as the root cause of damaged trust between business and his administration indicates how deluded he his. He just needs to pick up the phone to André de Ruyter, or read his book, to realise why the latter felt compelled to bypass the police.
The simple, politically difficult, truth to hear is that trust was damaged by the breakdown of the social contract when this government chose to turn a blind eye to the comrades who assumed it was acceptable to use their ascent to power as a time to eat. Until business insists on this changing, any new partnership is pure PR.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s Business Watch. Contact him at badger@businesslive.co.za.
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