SA is a constant education. I spent a day last week in the vast Eastern Cape township of Mdantsane, between East London and King William’s Town. I came away strangely cheerful, happy that the society I count myself a part of is, at its heart, good, hopeful and modest.
Without spoiling a column I want to write another day, I visited schools in the township and spent a few hours in a tent with about 300 people listening to speeches and salutations and congratulations. Our society has so many layers, and the ANC is so deeply woven into all of them it is hard to imagine how the governing party can be unstitched from it all.
The schools were dilapidated. Their teachers and pupils were anything but. In one classroom were about 30 tiny tots, as cute as could be, all uniformed and quiet, working at functioning laptops supplied by an impressive NGO. They were learning English. The car or washing machine on their screen, once they clicked to identify the right word from a shortlist, is pronounced into their headphones. You have never seen more engaged children in your life.
The main speech was from the provincial MEC for education, Fundile Gade. He was thoughtful and frank. “We have been producing people who are simply unemployable,” he said, or something close to that. “Why?” He didn’t venture a full answer, as if to let the profundity of his stark question hang in the windblown tent. Unspoken was that black township schools like the one I was at were failing their pupils. Possibly by not teaching them English. Or perhaps other things.
I was struck by the question. Perhaps the answer is simply something an ambitious ANC politician cannot say, because it is obvious that the reason youth unemployment is at 56% and, according to left-wing journalist/economist and fellow Business Day columnist Duma Gqubule, 476,000 people aged 15-34 have lost their jobs since Cyril Ramaphosa became president, is a spectacular failure of policy.
In November 2017, before he beat Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma for the ANC leadership, Ramaphosa addressed the ANC Johannesburg Region Colloquium in Soweto. There he laid out his manifesto, a 10-point plan, a New Deal channelling Franklin D Roosevelt’s in the wake of the Great Depression.
The aim, as he put it, was to “turn the economy around and build a more equal society. This New Deal will and must bring together government, business, labour and civil society in a meaningful and effective social compact to construct a prosperous, just society founded on opportunities for all. It will be the product of a shared commitment by all stakeholders.
“This new approach must be defined by a renewed unity of purpose and action,” Ramaphosa said, “an effective and committed leadership team that promotes the interests of the people above all other interests, an unrelenting commitment to the implementation of decisions and policies and the laws of the republic, an unwavering commitment to strengthening the structures of the state and reasserting the independence of institutions supporting democracy, basing everything we do on innovation and excellence, massification of initiatives to promote inclusive growth, a focus on the empowerment of youth and women, and an uncompromising rejection of corruption, patronage, cronyism and wastage.
“To those with vested interests in ineffective governance, deliberate misgovernance, hidden deals, the concentration of economic control and unfair labour practices, we say: no more!”
Looking back, the policies, strategies and tactics required to make Ramaphosa’s New Deal happen were failing long before Covid-19 slammed into the global economy. He signed off on the allocation of known state capture leaders to vital parliamentary committees and even appointed some to his own cabinet.
The “massification” of initiatives for the youth have been ineffective. A commitment to import substitution has backfired wildly, annoying trading partners and lighting inflationary fires under once-affordable products vital to the poor. Black industrialists remain thin on the ground 10 years after Jacob Zuma willed them into being, Ramaphosa nodding by his side.
We have recently witnessed the fragility of our foreign policies at work, in an amateurish peace initiative to Russia and Ukraine. Under Ramaphosa, unemployment has risen relentlessly and Eskom’s ability to produce electricity withered under the fist of “those with vested interests”, and he lets them be, still.
Strategy matters, and sticking to a good one matters even more. But Ramaphosa was always driven harder by politics, or transformation, than by the real economy, or growth, and wherever he has found real economy choices uncomfortable he has closed his eyes, distracted, and walked away.
That “unrelenting commitment to the implementation of decisions” is simply hot air. He made a big thing of green energy in his 10-point plan and then appointed an energy minister, Gwede Mantashe, who is openly hostile to the greening of energy and has not added a single watt of renewable energy to the grid to date.
I wanted to tell the MEC in that tent in Mdantsane that the answer to his question is in his hands — sensible policy, diligently applied, works. It creates jobs where there are none. It invites investment and grows wealth from nothing. There was once a hope that the ANC had in Ramaphosa a leader who would answer the final question in that tent. But he hasn’t. The ANC is on its own again.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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