CAIPHUS KGOSANA: Forget all the plans, let's just do the job

I was collecting a race pack at the Nelson Mandela Foundation on Thursday afternoon. No, I have not taken up marathons as a hobby; the better half is into those torturous things.

Anyway, outside on Central Street in Houghton, I counted at least 15 able-bodied men acting as temporary parking assistants. This is not a unique sight. These makeshift parking attendants turn up at every popular event around the city.

These are strong and fit lads in their 20s and 30s hustling for the meagre coins grumpy motorists throw at them as they drive off. Some don’t even bother. And though it shouldn’t matter, they were almost all South African — victims of the k*k economy Africa’s “most industrialised” country has created.

Most industrialised? We are a country that has been deindustrialising for decades. How many industrial policies has the department of trade, industry & competition produced under successive ministers?

Most of these IPAPs are as pap as the paper they were written on

I asked Grok, Elon Musk’s temperamental generative AI chatbot.

“It’s tough to pin down an exact number of industrial policies South Africa has produced, as the term 'industrial policy' can be interpreted broadly, encompassing strategies, action plans and sector-specific initiatives over time,” Grok responded. Then it listed at least 10 Industrial Policy Action Plans (IPAPs) and numerous master plans drawn up for all sectors — from retail, textile and sugar to automotive and poultry.

Most of these IPAPs are as pap as the paper they were written on. They have failed spectacularly to revive South Africa's industries despite the billions of rand and political rhetoric thrown at the problem.

Take the black industrialists programme, run by the same department and its fairly decent entities, the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) and the National Empowerment Fund (NEF).

It has invested more than R100bn in about 1,700 black-owned companies over the past 13 years. Ask the department how many of the 1,700 actually got off the ground and are operational today, and you are sure to be met with either silence or diplomatic obfuscation.

Don’t get me wrong, the programme has achieved pockets of excellence, assisting determined black entrepreneurs to kick-start manufacturing and related businesses from the ground up. Our paper has occasionally profiled successful entrepreneurs, such as Nhlanhla Dlamini, who received a R13.5m cash injection (a mix of grants and loans) to start Maneli Pets — a pet food manufacturing firm now supplying Checkers and Woolworths. At one point, it employed close to 200 people.

A programme of this magnitude should have produced a thousand other Maneli Pets, and even bigger ones. These could have easily created a million new jobs. That’s the only way to get those able-bodied men off the side street in Houghton and into manufacturing plants, putting in a hard day’s work and making a decent living.

But that’s not what we are doing. Coalition partners in the government of national unity bicker over petty little things. Who cares that the DA’s Andrew Whitfield was fired as deputy minister of trade, industry & competition for an unsanctioned trip?

What did he do in the 12 months he was in the job to advance industrial development? If you tell me deputy ministers can’t do much because they have no executive power, then why don’t we abolish the whole layer since it’s useless? Otherwise, the DA should just nominate someone else to take over Whitfield’s blue lights and ministerial perks so they can also twiddle their thumbs without executive power.

If they are not at each other’s throats, they are squabbling over the national dialogue — the president's planned talkshop. It’s former president Thabo Mbeki’s baby, and he penned one of his long missives yelling at the DA for threatening to pull out of the thing.

There are iconic figures in the eminent persons group Ramaphosa has selected to lead the national dialogue: Dr Brigalia Bam, Edwin Cameron, Thabo Makgoba, Imtiaz Sooliman, Siya Kolisi, Gloria Serobe, Bobby Godsell, Barnabas Lekganyane, Nomboniso Gasa and Desiree Ellis. Our heroes and heroines. I felt a sense of warm pride just typing their names.

But what will another dialogue honestly achieve? Are we going to hold hands at its conclusion and — to paraphrase the late Eusebius McKaiser — sing Kumbaya and wish our problems away?

If only it were that easy. The only way to turn this k*k economy around is for everyone — from corporate bosses to the government and all players concerned — to do their actual jobs. We need implementable industrial policies, political and corporate will to fire up the machines so we can get people like those hapless parking attendants into factories.

Bill Clinton's '92 election campaign team was right... It's the economy, stupid!