Business should factor in Dlamini-Zuma
Needless to say, the outcome of the ANC’s December leadership contest is still as clear as mud. Anyone who calls it any time this month is a chancer. There are still eight candidates out there, with widely varying amounts of money to spend.
Jeff Radebe is still campaigning. So, believe it or not, is Baleka Mbete. So are Mathews Phosa and Lindiwe Sisulu, and so are Cyril Ramaphosa, Zweli Mkhize and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.
The consensus is that only the last three stand any chance of succeeding Jacob Zuma as president of the ANC and of replacing him as head of state after the 2019 general elections.
The deep political machinations that must accompany any contest to lead this divided party aside, the race is not only unusually rich with candidates, but has so far been quite civil. The candidates hurry from meeting to meeting, venue to venue. They don’t say much new. They’re all for party unity, all against corruption and all, in one way or another, for radical economic transformation or inclusive growth, depending on the audience.
My own heartfelt hope is that Ramaphosa wins in December. My instinct, which I would urge anyone who reads this column to treat with the utmost circumspection, is that the strongest candidate in the race is the president’s former wife, Dlamini-Zuma. My colleagues strongly disagree. They say even her base, the KwaZulu-Natal ANC, is divided.
They say Ramaphosa is way ahead. And that is why there’s so much talk about the elective conference being postponed or even cancelled. So dire is Zuma’s position that he simply cannot afford to allow a vote that he might not win.
It would take every sinew of Zuma’s capacity for creating chaos to stop the congress going ahead, if that is indeed what he may want to do.
But assuming he doesn’t try to stop it, and assuming Dlamini-Zuma is still in the running, it seems odd how little interest SA’s local business leadership seems to be showing in her. Not only could she be the next leader of the country, she is the only one of the candidates to have bothered to share in any detail some ideas about the economy she might try to create. She’s spoken at an important business school and wrote an opinion piece for Business Day in October.
And it wasn’t bad. Listing a string of woes (and this was before Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba presented us with a R50bn tax shortfall and zero plan to restore economic order in his minibudget last week), she followed with this: “All these are compounded by a slow and unresponsive public service, corruption, state capture, declining confidence in private and public institutions and [a] lack of trust among South Africans….
“The valley of a thousand hills that confronts SA today is the structural causes of poverty, unemployment, inequality and corruption…. To build an SA that belongs to all, we must know which hills to tackle next. I believe that these are the mountain of economic transformation, the highland of land redistribution and the summit that must see us educating and skilling our people. A more just and inclusive society is in all our best interest.”
In other words, reverse economic exclusion, face up to the land question and fix education. Hardly revolutionary, and if you think the pattern of land ownership isn’t a problem in this country you have your head in the sand. Of course, we’re talking Dlamini-Zuma here. She is Zuma’s candidate and, to rural audiences, parrots a lot of the policy gibberish he is so fond of. And perhaps some consultant to her campaign wrote the article. It doesn’t matter. There is stuff in there that all the leadership candidates are saying and that mature business leaders should be able to grapple with.
I know groups such as Business Leadership SA (BLSA) are rooting for Ramaphosa. That is understandable and reasonable. BLSA chairman Jabu Mabuza and CEO Bonang Mohale do business great credit. But it would be madness not to reach out to Dlamini- Zuma and, in the timehonoured phrase, “engage” with her ahead of the congress.
BLSA says it’s “open” to meeting the ANC candidates. I hope it pursues the idea with vigour. The fact is that whatever relationship she and her former husband have, Dlamini-Zuma would be a different proposition compared to him. Business needs to know exactly what she wants to do and how. They can only know that by talking to her. They don’t need to endorse her.
But imagine she wins in December and has no connection to the people and companies that, despite the wreck the Zuma administration has made of the economy, keep the lights on and the salaries and taxes paid? The last thing we need post-December is a continuation of the Zuma-driven chasm between the private sector and the state. It is destroying us.
I hope she doesn’t win. She seems distant, aloof and imperious. But she might well prevail and the economy’s
BUSINESS NEEDS TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT DLAMINI-ZUMA WANTS TO DO AND HOW. THEY CAN ONLY KNOW THAT BY TALKING TO HER