Seldom before has a South African administration confronted so pressing a challenge to lead the country boldly towards a genuinely fresh and hopeful start, based on truths and a sober reckoning of consequences.
And seldom before has the risk of playing the same old game been so great.
The long-running American game show, Truth or Consequences, offers a disquieting parallel. It became so famous that there’s even a town in New Mexico named after it; Hot Springs proudly swapped its old name in March 1950 after a challenge by the founding host of the popular NBC Radio quiz, Ralph Edwards, to air the programme on its 10th anniversary from the first town to rename itself after the show.
Strange, but true.
So, too, the enduring popularity of Truth and Consequences, which ran from 1940, later crossing over to television, until 1988. It wasn’t really a quiz show. Contestants were given about two seconds to answer a trivia question correctly (usually, according to Wikipedia, ‘an off-the-wall question that no one would be able to answer correctly, or a bad joke’) before ‘Beulah the Buzzer’ sounded, at which point the failed attempt at ‘Truth’ would give way to the ‘Consequences’, usually a zany and embarrassing stunt. The audience’s reaction, it’s said, led Edwards to say of himself and his producers: ‘Aren’t we devils?’
It struck me this week how familiar we in South Africa are with the bewildering and senseless procedure of playing the fool with truth, and with consequences. Ours, though, is the unfunny version.
We play it all the time, but under duress. The truth and the consequences are lost in the hopeless mismatch between words and meanings, hopes and failures, pledges and lies. We just participate, because we’re here.
Truth or consequences?
When President Cyril Ramaphosa says, as he did on his visit to KwaZulu-Natal this week, that the economy is facing ‘total destruction’, does he mean the government he is leading is urgently engaged in framing a wholly different response to the one it has embarked on over the past six weeks, or does he mean that he and his ministers can only stand by and watch?
We are, after all, staring at a devastating blow: South African Revenue Service Commissioner Edward Kieswetter estimated this week an annual revenue loss of R285-billion. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a function of the sluggish economy, but also the impact of lockdown.’ National Treasury’s modelling predicts lockdown job losses of between three to seven million. But is there a plan?
Truth or consequences?
When Ramaphosa says that what needs to be done is that ‘we must begin to put in place the pillars of a new economy’ and that we ‘cannot continue in the same old way,’ what does he really mean?
Does he mean that he intends finally steering the ANC out of its costly ideological rut, and abandoning the failed policies which, even before the pandemic, delivered rock-bottom growth, falling investment, soaring state debt, steadily climbing joblessness, dysfunctional schooling, healthcare and other services, and ineffective empowerment measures that still leave millions immiserated by disadvantage? Or does he actually mean persisting in that same old way, only with – what? – more grit? Or more aggression, more stubbornness, more failure?
Truth or Consequences?
We must wonder what the president envisages when he says: ‘We need to find, create, and build jobs for the many of our people who are going to lose jobs. We need to be asking ourselves what is this new vision that we envision for our country going forward, we need to come up with a clear economic strategy, and the building blocks are already in place. We now need to put them all together.’
With unemployment at nearly 30%, whatever South Africa is doing right now is not working. And the world knows where jobs come from: an economy that attracts investment that enables enterprises to thrive and expand, and the scope for every possible opportunity to create, transact and trade, with skills and opportunities to match. If this isn’t it, what does the president have in mind?
Truth or Consequences?
Crises do present opportunities. In fact, they force them on us. Which is why Ramaphosa’s candid acknowledgement that ‘Covid-19 is quite frankly giving us an opportunity to relook at our economic side of life to see how we as South Africans reconstruct our economy’ was refreshing. As, indeed, was his acknowledgement that the country ‘must be able and visionary enough to … rebuild the economy, to look out for new sectors, new ways of economic activity, new ways of management of our economy’.
Does this mean Ramaphosa is finally signalling an acknowledgement of the costs of the ANC’s long and damaging record of hostility to the free market and the private sector, the only agents of economic activity, of enterprise and innovation and the creation of new sectors?
South Africa’s potential, in resources, and the ambitions, determination and resilience of its people, is enormous. Will these be unlocked under a new vision in which disruptive state intervention will be replaced by an environment that enables greater economic activity?
Truth or Consequences?
When Ramaphosa promises that the new economic future must be ‘inclusive, empowering to women, young people and to black people in the main’, does he mean he intends at last to address the country’s most damaging pathologies? These include the dysfunction of education that denies the most vulnerable citizens access to the skills most in demand in an economy shifting inexorably towards high-skills sectors (and that 4th Industrial Revolution the president is fond of talking about), and the failure of empowerment measures over 25 years to actually address the burden of disadvantage rather than merely enrich the elite and deter precious investment?
This could be the single most important shift in assuring South Africa of a fairer, prosperous future. But is that what he meant?
Truth or Consequences?
Assuredly, the state has a role. How promising, then, that Ramaphosa declared that state-owned entities ‘must function in a way that is developmental, in a way that will be ethical, and in a way that will be innovative’ and that state capacity must be strengthened.
Does he mean hastening the prosecution of corrupt politicians and officials, cleaning out and fixing failing municipalities (the majority of them) and collapsing state-owned enterprises, holding ministers to account for delivering on promises, and trimming the civil service down to an efficient, honest, hard-working core? Or does he mean only more cadre deployment, and greater – more-of-the-same – regulatory interference?
Truth or Consequences?
Best of all, Ramaphosa underscored the biggest single need for a collapsing country when he said: ‘We are going to have to go for growth in a big and exponential way, and be willing and be brave and courageous enough to massify whatever needs to be done, because playing around on the edges with whatever efforts we are making – that time is over now.’
At last – growth is at the centre of the government’s programme. Yes? Is that really what he means? Or do we only come round to where we began – the old way of doing things: ‘Radical economic transformation,’ Ramaphosa insisted, ‘must underpin the economic future that we will need to craft going forward. We should be able to do this through a new compact we are going to build.’
Doesn’t this sound familiar? Can he seriously mean Zuma-era radical state intervention, which is guaranteed to stifle the enterprise and entrepreneurship that are our only hope of responding and adapting with dynamism and vigour? And if that’s what it is, how does it not utterly contradict the conviction that ‘we cannot continue in the same old way’?
We cannot, it seems, be sure whether the bold vision is what we think it is, or what we fear it is. We are left wondering whether Ramaphosa himself is sure, or doesn’t want to say what he thinks. Or that, ultimately, he does think we can go on as before.
Whatever the truth is, all we can be certain of is that consequences will follow, for the administration, but for the rest of us, too. It’s not the greatest game for a country in this condition.
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