Bob van Dijk stepped down from the helm of Naspers this week — and the sky did not fall.
Naspers investors trust the succession planning and executive depth in the company, with chief investment officer Ervin Tu taking over as interim CEO.
Naspers is an interesting South African mainstay that has managed to extricate itself from its historical association with apartheid to become an international player with global start-ups, including Tencent.
If only our public sector would take a leaf from the innovation capabilities of our private sector.
Many other anchor companies, say in mining, are facing existential crises in South Africa due to failing public infrastructure and an uninviting investment climate. Creating an interlinked ecosystem for business to thrive in is not one of the government’s more obvious priorities, and has not been for a while.
It takes capacity and know-how to do that, and the state is increasingly bereft on these fronts.
With Naspers managing to have a seemingly bloodless change at the top, one wonders how the government will manage what is emerging at Transnet.
The writing is on the wall. We should expect serious bloodletting at the top levels of the parastatal if messages from Pretoria are anything to go by.
The shareholder representative, the public enterprises department, has been careful in communicating its support for Transnet. But, and this is the interesting point, it talks about the work the board has to do, never mentioning management in a supportive way.
You can actually hear the stimela winding up in the distance, under which CEO Portia Derby could be thrown. How Andre De Ruyter lost political cover at Eskom should be a lesson for Derby and other Transnet senior executives.
Their operational underperformance and the public pressure the shareholder faces could soon be untenable. It has taken nine months and Eskom has no permanent CEO. Finding a new Transnet CEO will also not be easy, as there’s no visible sign of bench depth or a succession strategy.
The ANC is too distracted to manage this in a way that does not create further turbulence for Transnet. Luthuli House is dragged all over the show, week in and out, by too many failures, including the delayed payments of social grants.
South Africa’s social welfare network is undoubtedly one of the ANC’s biggest successes since 1994. It is weird to see it fail to administer one of its successful projects, as in the past couple of weeks when scores of vulnerable beneficiaries were paid late.
South Africa pays about 18-million grants every month, and without these we would have untold poverty and social instability. Add in projects such as the Expanded Public Works Programme, and you realise that the government sees its core mandate as providing support to the poor rather than the more difficult task of creating an inclusive economy that creates sustainable jobs.
Trust the Eastern Cape to belt out a song, either happy or sad, for any occasion. Recently, I heard a song about how President Cyril Ramaphosa loves an unemployed person. He simply gives them R350. This is a reference to the Social Relief of Distress grant introduced at the height of the pandemic. The grant is now at the centre of the difficult fiscal policy balancing act the managers of the public purse have to do to sustain the National Treasury's credibility.
The government treats the grant as though it is not a “permanent” feature and fails to budget for it in a long term way. Yet, realistically, the grant cannot conceivably be taken away. So many people benefit from it, and it goes a long way towards putting food on the table, as limited as it is.
I have come across some beneficiaries of the R350 grant who are reluctant to take up menial jobs at the risk of losing the grant. When they get what is known as “piece jobs”, some demand cash payment so there is no official record of their income. Granted this is not a representative research sample, but anecdotes can illuminate serious policy questions as they play themselves out on our streets.
The welfare approach lacks policy imagination in avoiding lifelong dependence as our economy creaks along. Dependency on these grants and other forms of welfare support results in the zombification of many citizens, who are born with the same potential as you and I but who have been locked out of any chance of economic potential due to our myriad public policy problems.
Our problems are so deep, and often misdiagnosed, that they threaten to take decades to fix. Needless to say we don't have decades to fix them.
* Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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