What we think we may know, and what “things actually are”, are often worlds apart. Colombian Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells us that what also matters in life “is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it”.
As is often the case, elections also present an opportunity for a changing of the guard. And with it an opportunity for “remembering”. That moment, for the trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel, has come, closing the curtain on 15 years of service in the cabinet and the economic cluster.
Much of the reflections on his tenure and exit by my comrades in the commentariat has focused on Patel’s insecure fixation with detail, his alleged “veiled contempt” for the private sector and whether his exit will yield a more “pro-business” and less pedantic minister at Meintjies Street. While I confess no objectivity in the matter, having served as Patel’s adviser and now being at the helm of the trade regulator falling under his portfolio, it is worth relaying how concerningly little these reflections on his tenure have been an appraisal of Patel’s performance in ‘industrial policy’. In the interests of balance, what was his “actual job”?
Industrial policy
Rather than picking the winners in a “boetie-boetie” clubby fashion, industrial policy is about the correction of negative externalities arising from both market and government failures. “Externalities” are those outcomes that visit benefits and costs, like a stray bullet, on third parties unrelated to the actions of the economic actor who caused them. These arise in both production and consumption, visiting benefits at an individual and collective level. More importantly, industrial policy in response to these is an “active” rather than “watchdog” promotion of positive externalities that arise from learning and sharing knowledge. Allocating policy “rents” (authorisations, licencing, approvals and so on) alongside expectations of “performance” from those who stand to benefit, “performance” aimed at deepening the local productive base.
Absent such policy, the “price shocks” associated with “single source” supply chains become severe. As the US saw in the early 1970s, and as they realise now in the case of semiconductors and solar panels. SA policymakers over successive decades, navigating the task of economic diversification for varying reasons, have long recognised the role of “managing” prices to mitigate the misery that the “boom-bust” cycles of capitalism visits on those unable to respond.
Those boom-bust cycles explain, too, more than any subjective weaknesses or qualities of any minister or the bureaucracy they oversee, uneven market and social outcomes. Ministers are expected to be “public stewards” in the face of these complicated and at times contradictory “historical processes”. Exercising a degree of “embedded autonomy” from vested interests while maintaining an unquestionable commitment to the “public interest”, rather than being an imbongi or shop steward of industry, large or small.
Localisation
Representation on boards and ownership by workers in the firms they work in, arising from amendments to the Competition Act, is an area where Patel’s influence was seen. The localisation funds that underwrite industrial learning and market entry. The obligation in the textile rebates we administer for bargaining council compliance. The same traditions of “persuasion” and “compacting” built by the democratic traditions and legacy of organised labour in SA have also led to qualitative advances in key master plans as our oversight meetings over the past few weeks have shown. One need not have agreed with his politics to admit his unquestionable commitment to “collaborative” targets and commitment-making between social partners.
More importantly, Patel, to the chagrin of his antisocialist critics, remained, even if he may not say so himself, true to the character expected of all true representatives of the working and oppressed classes of our people. Whose visions of change in society place an expectation on us, as Karl Marx said in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, to “constantly criticise ourselves, constantly interrupt ourselves in our own course, returning to the apparently accomplished, to begin anew, deriding with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses and paltriness of our first attempts”.
Our lasting inheritance, from the time we have worked alongside Patel, is this insistence on “constantly interrupting ourselves” from the comfort of the “apparently accomplished” to begin anew. Committed to being thorough in whatever we attempt. It is a rigour that he expected of all of us because he knew that our people in places such as Lubala in Lusikisiki and elsewhere on whose behalf we exercise authority, expected the same.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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