Extract If you were to ask any experienced builder whether he would want to build a new city or fix an old one, they’d all choose the new-build. With old stuff, you never know what you’re getting or, worse, you do. There was nothing wrong with President Cyril Ramaphosa dreaming about new cities and high-speed trains running through the countryside when he made his state of the nation (Sona) address on Thursday night.
Naturally, he’s been mercilessly mocked and teased for it, but the people doing the teasing and mocking are the same ones screaming at him to do something to grow the economy. You want to get local industries up and running and selling to an internal market again? Build infrastructure.
And while the government can plan it, give the job to experienced private-sector hands to implement. The Spanish built a high-speed train line between Madrid and Seville in 1992. It looked madly expensive and sort of useless, critics wailed. What’s the point? But today it works. Poor people travel on high-speed trains all over the country now as more lines have been added.
But the Spanish had EU money, we don’t. And after promising Eskom to further front-load the R230bn bailout it has been promised, there’s nothing left in the kitty.
The fact is, Thursday’s Sona was hopeless. They always are.
— Peter Bruce
The fact is, Thursday’s Sona was hopeless. They always are. Apart from standing up for the Reserve Bank mandate, Ramaphosa took few risks. There was survival at Eskom, but nothing in the way of growth for the rest of us. And while the smart city and fast trains are possible, they’re not feasible.
And, seriously, whoever thought of throwing in the “I Have a Dream” speech the day after Faith Muthambi got promoted to chair a portfolio committee should be let go.
Ramaphosa looked and sounded exhausted, his delivery stiff and halting. You can’t read an hour-long speech off a bloody iPad. Bizarrely, his vagueness might buy him some space as he deals with critics who wanted action plans and clear directions, more or less the same people crying foul at the distribution of some parliamentary portfolio committee chairs, because they include former Jacob Zuma acolytes accused of corruption. The anger is warranted. The appointments of people such as Muthambi, Mosebenzi Zwane, Bongani Bongo and Tina Joemat-Pettersson to chair committees stink.
But you have to remember that it could have been worse. The people who complain loudest at appointments like these are the same people who warned us years ago that it would take a decade to recover from Zuma’s ruinous presidency. Now that it is indeed taking forever, they still complain even though they were right.
The truth is that at every turn Ramaphosa has to confront the Zuma rot. And he has to push back. On the committee chairs, he did. If you remember the front-page lead in this newspaper last week, Ace Magashule was derailed while trying to pull off a far worse select committee schlenter. Muthambi was going to get justice in order to protect the public protector (she eventually got co-operative governance). Bongo was going to get foreign affairs, and a big travel budget (he eventually got home affairs). The fanatically pro-Zuma Joe Maswanganyi was heading to public enterprises to torture its minister, Pravin Gordhan, but eventually got finance and, thus, Tito Mboweni, who will torture him.
Run by clever and ethical people, a portfolio committee can make life difficult for a government. We will have to see who, among the names that keep being mentioned as Zuma acolytes, is smart. What I would really like to see, though, is someone do a really deep-dive reporting job on the current balance of forces in the ANC, its NEC and its parliamentary caucuses. Is it true that, as headlines constantly insist, Ace holds all the cards? Surely not, my gut tells me, but I don’t actually know.
I know absolutely nothing, for instance, about Gratitude Magwanishe, the new chair of the portfolio committee on justice, other than that he was Rob Davies’s deputy at trade & industry. Or Philemon Mapulane, formerly chair of the committee on the environment, whose record looks good and bad. Where do we count him? Cyril or Ace?
We really need some solid reporting to bring these people to life before we emigrate.
There are lots of ways to see the political story at the moment. The glass isn’t empty but it sure isn’t full either. From tomorrow, Ramaphosa’s government has to start functioning and we will soon be able sense if there is any change for the better.
The one thing we can be sure of is that both the National Prosecuting Authority, where new leadership has repeatedly promised to chase down corruption, and the Special Investigating Unit, back under Willie Hofmeyr, are beavering away to create winnable cases and to identify assets worth chasing. It’ll happen.
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