BRYAN ROSTRON: Practice of ‘selling smoke’ has become an industry in SA

“How is it,” mused the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “that a person instantly becomes wise when Caesar puts him in charge of his chamber pot?”

Of course, you immediately thought of ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula. Alas, in an election year, that Roman-era aphorism seems tailor-made for various ANC ministers, state-owned enterprise deployees and a plethora of MPs of different stripes.

The wider crisis of the chamber pot syndrome is its trickle-down effect. Our bigwig incompetents are likely, in their empowered wisdom, to anoint only those more useless than themselves. This cascades down the deployee chain. Consequently, you end up in a self-referential universe where everyone at the top looks around and, seeing only bunglers, is reassured of their own brilliance. As many readers have doubtless experienced, this routine works in business as well.

Nor is it new. The classics scholar Mary Beard describes in her latest work, Emperor of Rome, how that system flourished in the first century AD. Success was all about proximity to power. Not just to the emperor, but to his family and entourage as well. Inevitably, corruption flourished. “In general,” says Beard, “patronage, personal favour and back-scratching were as influential as competence in appointments and promotions.”

Consequently, the phrase “selling smoke” became the colloquial Roman expression for peddling influence with the man at the top. Two thousand years later we could say the same. With large tenders for procurement and projects never carried out — schools, roads, hospital equipment — “selling smoke” has become an industry.

In modern SA, as in ancient Rome, this culture of proximity to power depends on secrecy. In Rome under Augustus, the first emperor, lip service was paid to prior republican values and customs. Instead, writes Beard, “the really important decisions were made in private (however much emperor after emperor claimed to respect the senate’s authority)”.

And so it is today in SA. Despite the ANC’s sanctimonious guff about accountability, with its rigid dogma of cadre deployment the real decisions are made in secrecy.

Indifference and inefficiency permeate the public service. Recently, President Cyril Ramaphosa conceded to the Cape Town Press Club that “some” civil servants remain “stuck in the old ways of doing things”. Anyone who has to deal with departmental bureaucracy experiences that it’s not just “some” who do not feel the need to offer the public a service.

As president, Ramaphosa must know how taxing it is to get officials to act and actually implement. Even so, there’s no attempt to reform the public service. In government offices the public is habitually treated with rudeness and obfuscation.

Even something as straightforward as renewing a driving licence can be exhausting and demoralising. When I did so this month after nearly four hours of crawling queues, mumbles of discontent had grown into outbursts of irritation. Finally, after another long wait to pay, an officious woman shouted: “Everyone out, we’re closed!” People left, cursing loudly. “Just come back tomorrow,” she snapped.

A couple of days later I accompanied a young black woman to court. She seeks a protection order against a male neighbour. The abuser turned up with a lawyer. At a previous hearing I’d been assured I could be called as a witness. “You don’t talk to me,” snarled the lady magistrate. At least she was rude to everyone, including the lawyer. After five minutes the case was once again postponed for two months. “That’s why so many women get killed,” sighed the young woman.

Staggeringly, it took fighting for 18 frustrating months to get Cape Town city and Western Cape officials to provide a long-established crèche in a poor area with plans — plans that had either been withheld or lost by officials themselves. Even exposing the scandal in Business Day (“Let the little children suffer”, March 10 2023) didn’t embarrass those responsible. Instead, there are spools of 30 or more emails as bureaucrats press the send button to ask someone else to look into things. The inertia is palpable.

Years ago, an American diplomat was given a tour of a newspaper where I worked in London. “How many people work here?” asked the diplomat. “Oh”, replied our editor flippantly, “about a third.” The diplomat didn’t get the joke. In SA, where Ramaphosa will only admit “some” officials don’t pull their weight, we are entitled to ask if even a third of public servants are hardworking and respectful.

It’s all a result of your chamber pot problem, Mr President. The public feel they’re having the contents dumped all over them.

• Rostron is a journalist and author.