SONGEZO ZIBI: Rising above the ANC’s economic ignorance

Reading FM deputy editor Natasha Marrian’s “Mashatile — The ANC’s ‘Hollow Man’ Under Fire” (Cover Story, July 20-26), I was reminded of an observation by the great philosopher and logician, Bertrand Russell.

Writing in The Scientific Outlook, he observed that even among men of science who use studious methods to arrive at rational conclusions, that level of discipline falls apart on matters of politics. “If you tackle him on party politics ... you are pretty sure, before long ... to hear him expressing wholly untested opinions with a dogmatism which he would never display in regard to the well-founded results of his laboratory experiments”.

I was so reminded because a senior business person who attended a talk by deputy president Paul Mashatile was reportedly floored by the poverty of his grasp of economic matters. I find this reaction to be common among most business people when they relate their first encounters with senior ANC leaders. They are almost always shocked by how underwhelming the ANC’s bench is.

Of course, South Africa’s economic statistics have been devastating for long enough for anyone who claims to be committed to data to expect far less from these meetings. Yet business people who analyse data and spreadsheets for a living appear to gloss over the story told by South Africa’s own economic spreadsheet. If anything, I find them to be far more patient and accommodating of a level of engagement so poor that they would never tolerate it even from middle managers in their own companies.

Having participated in many a business and government meeting over the years, I found some to be torturous. Long, vacuous speeches and closing remarks from politicians demonstrate they have grasped very little from the meeting.

This is not how the fortunes of countries are turned around. In no country has stakeholder assistance succeeded alongside a poor quality of political decisionmaking and predatory corruption.

That said, I highly commend the deep sense of patriotism from which business people are helping our hapless government. I have met a few of them, and I know they battle to sleep at night knowing that things are falling apart. Our country would be far worse without some of their interventions.

But things are falling apart — far faster and more dramatically than any such intervention can arrest. In the Gqeberha public hospital complex, for example, there haven’t been biopsy needles for two months; much-needed specialist doctors operate without pay or contracts, and eventually withdraw their labour.

I can relate many similar stories from municipalities and government departments. The reality is that public institutions have been destroyed by corruption and political incompetence. There is a deadly, hyperlocalised, nationwide gridlock that cannot be improved by interventions in Pretoria.

It is also not possible to have businesspeople sitting in the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC). It is a political structure entitled to set its own agenda and take decisions. It is from the NEC that the political decay infects the government — such as a choice to take a bellicose stand against major trading partners because of loyalty to Russia.

South Africa is not short of quality people — they are here and abroad. But the ANC is not attractive to them. Even when a few of them are inserted into government — as business is now doing — they don’t have enough influence to prevent a company such as Clover from leaving Lichtenburg, in the administratively collapsed municipality of Ditsobotla.

Political decay is systemic

Rise Mzansi exists because we recognised that the political decay is deeply systemic, and that it is impossible to reverse if the quality of politics and politicians does not improve. This may appear to be a complex argument, but it’s not. Voters get it entirely, which partly explains why mostly young people are powering our organisation in communities across South Africa.

The precursors they identify to better socioeconomic outcomes are incisive. They repeatedly identify crime, corruption, political competence and social support as political priorities that will make it possible for economic opportunities to grow. They are right.

They also know that as long as the ANC is in power, the bonds that have developed between its leaders at a local and national level on the one hand, and corruption and crime networks on the other, will remain in place. This is why they no longer have faith in elite solutions focused on interventions in Pretoria, and not where they are being abused at a local level.

As if to illustrate this contradiction, as business people met Mashatile, there were and continue to be revelations about the funding of his lifestyle. [He insists there is no merit to claims of questionable dealings.]

In a normal country, he would be under investigation. South Africa’s business people know this, but they have so accepted the decay that none of them would dare ask about it, or factor it into their hopes. Yet they expect spectacular outcomes.

We all need to change our mindsets or we’ll sink South Africa while singing songs of hope that no-one believes, apart from the country’s elites.

* Zibi is the national leader of Rise Mzansi