I watched the annual State of the Nation (SONA) ritual with particular interest this year. Partly, it was because of the general state of the country – the cynical might say that declaring a State of Disaster (widely mooted and ultimately delivered) merely gives a fitting name to a universally recognised truth about South Africa’s condition. But partly it was because the actual speech was preceded by a couple of pronouncements from President Ramaphosa that helped to put SONA into context.
One of these was a piece carried in News24, which had the feel of his weekly newsletter to it (although this piece does not appear on the Presidency’s website). In it, he discussed the upcoming address and the priorities that the government ‘must’ address. This caught my eye. Almost as though the President was a bystander giving advice. Perhaps this is part of the problem. Insurmountable problems to be faced by all of us in general, but with none of us in particular shouldering responsibility.
The President devoted much of his missive to the imperative of dealing with loadshedding, understandably enough. There is probably no issue – nothing – since 1994 that stands as starkly as testimony to a failure of governance as the power crisis. Its impact is immediate and universally visible. It intrudes into every facet of life, its disruptions ranging from minor inconveniences to the threatening of life and livelihoods. It cannot be concealed, and in the minds of the public responsibility for the present disaster cannot be spun or passed on to anyone else. The supply of power was in the hands of the state and it was the state and successive governments that mishandled it.
Understanding the problems
So, wrote the President, the SONA needed to proceed from an understanding of the nature of the problems confronting the country. From this, he went on to detail six priorities: dealing with the energy crisis; ‘accelerating’ efforts to reduce unemployment through ‘inclusive growth and transformation’; ‘sustaining’ the fight against poverty, implying a mix of social services, workfare and economic stimulus; service provision and infrastructure maintenance; remaining ‘undeterred in our in our war against crime and corruption’. He capped this off by saying that ‘in order to achieve all of the other priorities, we must ensure an efficient, effective and capable state, paying close attention to the state of municipalities.’
At the Mining Indaba, the President listed hindrances to doing business, including ‘[improving] the regulatory environment’. He also made a much-publicised call to the private sector to ‘work with us’ to resolve the country’s manifold problems. ‘We’re not saying don’t be critical,’ the President said, ‘we’re saying, “stop moaning”.’
In both of these, this was all standard presidential fare. He also chimed in that ‘we cannot do our business as we normally would. We need to do things differently.’ This has been the subtext of his entire tenure – the ‘New Dawn’, for example, which would see the departure from the old (though in his first SONA, President Ramaphosa pointed to his predecessor’s tenure as one ‘during which the country made significant progress in several areas of development’). In fact, it’s a refrain that predates the Ramaphosa presidency. In his SONA in February 2008, President Mbeki invoked the idea of ‘business unusual’ to address growing concerns about a range of matters, not least the growing electricity crisis.
‘More than at any other time,’ Mbeki said back then, ‘the situation that confronts our nation and country, and the tasks we have set ourselves, demand that we inspire and organise all our people to act together as one, to do all the things that have to be done, understanding that in a very real sense, all of us, together, hold our own future in our hands.’
These words might well have been written for President Ramaphosa’s address last week. As expected, the electricity crisis dominated the content. He thrice stressed the imperative of all in the country to ‘work together and act boldly and decisively, leaving no one behind.’ Getting things back on track would be a cooperative effort – offer solutions, don’t just shout from rooftops, he admonished – and he came back to the need for something new. ‘We cannot proceed as we usually would,’ he declaimed.
More of the same
Yet his promise of a new turn is paired with a pledge to do more of the same. ‘We are not presenting new plans’, he affirmed. Rather, the aim was primarily to do better what was already in train. (This was, incidentally, almost precisely what then President Mbeki said in 2008.)
The same only better, it seems. Social pacting was resuscitated, despite the failure of the initiative after its announcement last year. A State of Disaster is to handle the electricity crisis – the second to be introduced during the President’s term of office, and less than a year after the termination of the first one – although whether this has any solid legal grounding is debatable. ‘It will enable us to accelerate energy projects and limit regulatory requirements while maintaining rigorous environmental protections, procurement principles and technical standards,’ said the President. It’s not clear what would necessitate a State of Disaster, and what would preclude these goals from being achieved via ordinary regulatory or administrative action. Allowing the private production of power proceeded at a glacial pace, even while the crisis took hold. And if any regulatory demands are hindering the efficient resolution of the crisis, why are these on the books at all?
Meanwhile, the President announced a putative innovation in the introduction of a minister for electricity in his office. Perhaps this makes for good optics – taking focused action – but it’s hard to imagine that a minister will enjoy the sort of latitude for action that the President implied. In fact, the responsibility for shareholding will remain with the Department of Public Enterprises. And the ANC in government has always been shy about individual responsibility, preferring to assign it all to the ‘collective’.
This raises the thorny question of the politics of all this. I’ve argued previously that while getting the country on track depends on implementing suitable technical or administrative solutions, these only become possible if its politics will permit them. It cannot be gainsaid, unfortunately, that much of South Africa’s national dysfunction is the direct outgrowth of political choices. Many of these represent deep convictions, and even where the latter might be overcome, influential interests have profited greatly off these choices, and will be loath to lose their access and the benefits this has conferred on them.
Empowerment
So if the minister of electricity should be inclined to push for the downscaling of ‘empowerment’ or localisation demands in procurement, or the abolition of racial considerations in hiring (or even in the reduction of Eskom’s workforce), it’s hard to imagine him or her getting this through. The resistance to any of these measures – within the Cabinet, the ANC and its allies and the interests within its orbit – would be formidable. President Ramaphosa himself has not shown much decisiveness where divisions arise, as former finance minister Tito Mboweni could probably testify.
In the event, there is little indication that there is any substantive appetite to make any substantive changes to direction. ‘We are not presenting new plans’, remember. Rather, the President said, the country needs ‘a single point of command and a single line of march’. I would suggest that the line of march that has been followed has been a major contributor to the current state of affairs, and unless this is turned around, we can expect more of the same. Same plan, same result.
Perhaps one of the more interesting thoughts is just what the ‘single point of command’ is. Think beyond the responsibilities of the minister of electricity – just where is that ‘point of command’? Around about the time that Mbeki was declaring ‘business unusual’, there was a furious debate in the African National Congress about the existence of ‘two centres of power’: did dominance reside in the Union Buildings or Luthuli House?
Interests of the party
Ultimately, it’s hard to dispute that Luthuli House – the interests of the party, as opposed to that of the institutions of the state – looms largest. Its unity, always partly maintained by outdated and damaging ideology and now heavily dependent on patronage, is of paramount importance. This helps to explain the President’s aversion to making any potentially divisive decisions, which means pretty much any of the decisions that need to be made. More than anything, it makes nonsense of the President’s intention to creating a ‘capable state’. For this would mean a professional public service – again, a nominal goal – and fostering this is utterly incompatible with the politicisation that the ANC has driven through ‘cadre deployment.’ (It was notable in SONA that the President referred approvingly to the Zondo Commission, but neglected to note that his party had rejected its findings on the counter-constitutionality and illegality of this practice. Nor did he mention the fact that both the government and party were defending it in court.)
Ultimately, the SONA probably served less as an exposition of forthcoming action than as an illustration of the state of mind pervading President Ramaphosa’s government: a species of schizophrenia in which multiple realities are simultaneously believed, in which objectives are undermined by the manner in which they are pursued, and in which a sense of entitlement to rule vies with an almost pitiful evasion of responsibility. Those watching the address may have notice how commentary around the electricity supply tended to be hedged in the passive voice, accompanied by pleas not to apportion blame (though this was not a nicety that his party has observed regarding Mr de Ruyter) – and switched to the active when announcing the wonderful turnaround to come.
Not that there is much expectation of this. It was interesting just how many commentators, including those who’ve been sympathetic to President Ramaphosa, wrote pieces predicting a damp squib at best. This is more or less what they got.
For all this, the SONA did demonstrate just why South African politics has reached the impasse it has, and why nothing much beyond empty gestures can be expected. Both the government and ruling party are hopelessly out of their respective depths. For South Africa’s people, it suggests that little relief is imminent – though the moment of a profound opportunity for change may also be approaching.
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