The great and good have convened in the small Swiss mountain town of Davos this week to discuss the state of the world at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting. Its 2023 theme is “Co-operation in a fragmented world” at a time when the world has been fragmenting and going back on globalisation. The WEF’s founder and owner, 84-year-old Klaus Schwab, will be working hard to get as many leaders of government, business and civil society as possible to talk nicely to each other to solve the world’s problems and face up to its risks.
This is the first time since before the Covid-19 pandemic that the WEF has held a full in-person meeting in its usual January slot (last year a slimmed-down version of the forum was held in Davos in May). It undoubtedly still has convening power, not only in the plenaries and formal events but even more so in the meetings and events on the sidelines.
According to the organisers, 2,700 leaders from 130 countries are attending, including 52 heads of state of government. Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, addressed the opening plenary with the Swiss president.
The programme is packed with interesting and worthy topics, and luminaries from academia, the arts and activism, with government ministers and the senior executives from business who are the paying guests. They pay serious amounts to be there.
However, it’s hard not to wonder whether the WEF is a little past its sell-by date. The list of heads of state includes just one from the Group of Seven (Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz) and an underwhelming showing from Asia, the Americas and Africa. After Covid-19 showed just how much convening could be done online, many CEOs just don’t do nonessential business travel anymore, especially not at these prices.
More pertinent perhaps is that many CEOs no longer need the WEF to tell them if they want to do business they need to do it sustainably and in a way that engages with the world’s pressing issues, be they climate change or inequality. In 1971 they might still have thought the business of business was just business. Now, with the rise of ESG (environment, social and governance), and after the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, few business leaders are that narrow-minded.
Terrible optics
Yet, the WEF remains an important forum for business leaders at which to meet civil society and government leaders and for government leaders, including SA’s, to meet business. These will be not just the financial investors that the Treasury and other government officials typically meet on investor roadshows but the multinationals that matter for investment in the real economy.
Historically, Davos has played an important role for SA’s political leadership postapartheid and it has been a vital forum for SA to showcase its economy and to try befriending investors and potential investors. Evidently President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team believed, before Davos, that it was still worth the trip — even if it was hard to know what they thought they were going to sell to global investors. But the outcry at home made it clear that the optics of such a trip during load-shedding were terrible. Wisely, Ramaphosa cancelled, citing the need to deal with the energy crisis.
Our president now has to demonstrate that he has stayed home for good reason. This is the moment to demonstrate he will indeed deal with the energy crisis. But so far the signs are not so encouraging. He has held a meeting with business leaders. He is promising meetings with opposition and other leaders as well as a “family meeting” or two, in the style of his Covid-19 addresses.
But holding a meeting and presenting a bunch of PowerPoint presentations is not the same as doing something. Ramaphosa should explain, urgently, exactly what is fundamentally wrong at Eskom and what exactly he will do about the problem. And he needs, urgently, to go ahead and start doing whatever it takes to fix it.
Correction: January 18 2023
In an earlier version of this story we said WEF founder and owner Klaus Schwab was 54, he is 84.
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