BONANG MOHALE: Blueprint for the future must start from the ground up

SA is no stranger to recurring upheaval, volatility and shifting geopolitical landscapes. Successful countries have the proven ability to take a long-term view, execute and manage through such challenges, by innovating and adapting. However, navigating the future has become increasingly challenging, especially because of our incessant self-harm in a more uncertain, complex, highly competitive global market, and the longer term backdrop has substantially changed. As a result, we are trailing both the competition and our own potential by some distance on most metrics and are now facing an existential threat.

Following the recent cabinet reshuffle, which aimed to strengthen our quick and effective responsiveness, service delivery and final accountability, it has now become urgent to correct our course. The “Two Weeks in July” were painful, traumatic and shocked us all, including the leadership. This is on top of an external environment that has significantly shifted. It worsened our licence to operate as a result of the lowest levels of confidence, trust and hope. It provided the necessary wake-up call that requires deep reflection on our collective performance — a thorough, granular top-down and outside-in assessment of where our country is going and where it could be going if it lived up to its full potential. 

At present there is no consensus about our current reality and consequently our collective future vision. This is a reflection of the broad range of viewpoints and interests. In practice, various elements of the perspectives can be expected to apply in distinct ways. In every perspective it is important to develop a clear strategic underpinning, focus on agility, sustainability in the short term and resilience in the long term, to leverage key enablers such as technology, innovation and collaboration and ensure we have the trust and support of all stakeholders.

We must transfigure from just development to production, from slow to agile and from “not fit, no future” to “fit for the future as the most competitive and resilient country”. There is more work to do to close the performance gap and deliver the country’s potential to be the most competitive and resilient country.

Our primary objective must be a holistic transformation of our economy across all of its aspects and value drivers such as effectiveness, productivity, debt, capital expenditure, cost and safety towards global competitiveness. To address some of the enduring challenges we must overcome, we have to strengthen our implementation muscle, a historical area of weakness, and develop new capabilities as a country and people with great natural endowments.

It is self evident that the type and pace of transformation now needed requires competencies that the government doesn’t necessarily have in sufficient quantity, which is a direct result of the hollowing out of state capacity. We need to leverage the elements that we know work, deepen front-line engagement, increase the alignment, implementation, reliability, ownership, front-line empowerment, and planned and preventive maintenance, and apply a portfolio campaign approach to decommissioning, benchmarking, analytical effort and final accountability as well as increasing the ambition on the president’s “Four Foremost Overarching Priorities”.

We must ensure we have a critical mass of leaders who can see the opportunity embedded in our Economic Reconstruction & Recovery Plan and who are willing to make the required leap of faith to commit not just at a personal level, but also to start driving their teams and the entire country to move in the same direction. The ingredients must include the substantiation of our realistic potential, calibration of the gap to our real potential, shared understanding of the case for change, committed leadership, distillation of a funnel of top quality infrastructure projects. Also required is the creation of performance infrastructure, with a programme management office operating as an implementation engine — including finance, planning, appraisal, and  continuous improvement.

The first confrontation with our realistic potential must be difficult and preceded by critical but nonetheless courageous conversations. It has to hurt a little. We must be prepared to start, adopt and learn as we go. We must build the behavioural change that will be critical to achieving the type of country we want to be, and what some of the associated cultural traits must be.

More creates more as the realistic potential is not the end state. Experience shows that the ultimate potential this type of approach delivers often more than doubles over time. We can most certainly get a lot better even by not being very good. The most important insight is the unease of not being satisfied with the status quo and how we go about improving. Addressing the country in totality allows us to make integrated decisions and prevent unwise trade-offs. We must urgently change the current reality where being black and female automatically implies being unemployed and impoverished with no stake in the future, living in squalor and misery — landless, dispossessed, disinherited and deprived, abused, hurt and scarred. 

Mohale is chancellor of the University of the Free State, professor of practice in the Johannesburg Business School College of Business & Economics, and chairman of both The Bidvest Group and SBV Services. He is a past president of the Black Management Forum and author of “Lift As You Rise”.