Warren Gatland, the coach of the Welsh rugby team that has just demolished Australia at the Rugby World Cup in France, gave the whole world great advice a few years ago when he revealed the core of his coaching approach. Wales had produced many famous players before Gatland started coaching in 2007, but it had never been the threat as a team that it is now.
He told an audience he would tell his team to “be the best at everything that requires no talent. There are lots of things in the game that require no talent. Getting up off the ground quickly, chasing a kick, getting back on defence. That doesn’t require talent, it just requires effort.”
This is rare wisdom. In rugby, it flattens clever strategies and in life it is precious. Interestingly, business encourages the basics. Whether you’re CEO or running a corner store you cannot be a distant boss and hope to succeed. You need to care about the people who work for you. You need to care about your customers and you need to protect the money your shareholders invest in you.
What is difficult is to apply Gatland’s advice to areas of life that do require talent. How far do the basics get you then? Take our government. It is almost completely crippled, and the party from which it springs, the ANC, is divided, fractious, morally exhausted, ignorant, greedy, entitled, incoherent and dishonest.
But it is also legitimate and democratic. Thabo Mbeki, former president, addressed a conference of the SA Association of Public Administration & Management this week, using remarks by the CEO of the Institute of Race Relations, John Endres, in the US earlier this year, to lament that the ANC government of President Cyril Ramaphosa is collapsing the state.
State bypassed
“Instead of political currents,” Endres had told his audience, “a different trend will shape SA’s outcomes over the medium term. This is the receding power of the state — its loss of authority and credibility, its inability to translate plans into action ...
“As the state becomes less and less capable, it is being increasingly bypassed by private actors. This process has been under way for a considerable time already. Those who can afford it rely on private healthcare and schooling, of a quality far higher than that provided by the state. In the absence of reliable electricity from the state-owned utility, those who can afford it install solar power on their rooftops.
“Such replacements of state services by private entities are taking place all over SA. In urban areas, residents’ associations are fixing potholes, while in rural areas farmers do the same. Civil society organisations like Solidarity are building technical schools and universities. Trash recyclers control traffic intersections when the lights are out. Large corporations provide security along freight rail corridors, while mining companies build clinics and provide housing and water near mines ... farmers help repair the water infrastructure where state neglect has left it derelict.”
And this, said Endres, which hits Mbeki like an electric charge, “is where SA’s greatest opportunity for the future is to be found: in its innovative and resilient private sector and civil society, which are solving problems in the growing absence of the state, and doing so successfully.”
Mbeki, though, says this is counterrevolution, “a direct threat to the democratic state and the welfare and wellbeing of millions of our people”. It is too late for him to ride to the rescue of the ANC, but there is a case to be made that the core job of the party, for which no talent is required, is to protect our democracy. It’s no small task, and it is only when you load on top of it the requirement to produce electricity or run the railways or small municipalities that nationalist weaknesses become grotesquely apparent.
Ferocious flood
Those things really do take talent and experience, and they are not to be found in one political party, or one racial group. We cannot, surely, be at the point where civil society, or business, are seriously considered a threat to the democratic state, as Mbeki seems to imply (even though his criticisms here are of the Ramaphosa party and state).
We are not failed, not even close. I have just witnessed a ferocious flood in Stanford, where I live. Seemingly out of nowhere the National Sea Rescue Institute was on the water, speeding around helping people off the tops of their homes. Broken roads were being fixed. Electricity restored. Sure, it might be the Western Cape, but it is also proof that if the state is collapsing, the country isn’t.
This is not failure. This is partnership and it works, and there has to be a way for a struggling ANC — which as Endres says is unlikely to lose power in the elections next year — to step away from the things it cannot do and invite the private sector or civil society in to help.
The ANC can control the streets and the villages. It has authority. It needs to concentrate on the things that require no talent. Do no harm. Don’t litter. Drive carefully. Getting the basics done still requires great leadership. For the rest there’s a wealth of talent still available here to make this a winning place to be.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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