Business has no option but to help fix SA
Desperate for news upon which to hang an opinion, I waited until 3pm for President Cyril Ramaphosa to begin answering questions in Parliament for the first time yesterday.
I still can’t get used to the fact that he finally got the job, and he is oddly clumsy as a speaker. With Jacob Zuma you knew the English would be bad, but he would at least seem relaxed.
Not Ramaphosa. He stumbles over phrases and repeats himself endlessly, as if stuck on words such as “compacting” or “our country” when alternatives such as talking, negotiating, our land, our nation and SA are hanging there just begging to be used. Just for some relief.
He spoke about how South Africans are good at finding solutions to problems, even intractable ones, but all the time he seems to lack conviction. He seems to hang back, almost apologising for speaking. There’s a fine brain in there obviously, but is there a leader?
I ask because, well, everyone else is asking too. Where’s our leader? It may not have occurred to him to get some public relations advice or a group of speech writers, but he needs both.
Having said that, Ramaphosa was good when DA leader Mmusi Maimane finally got to ask his question, which was about the land issue and expropriation without compensation. What do we then want of the poor, Ramaphosa asked Maimane, when they have nothing? For a moment he seemed more fluent. In a one-on-one argument, he may beat you. In a loud debate in a crowded room he might not.
Ramaphosa’s problem is that he is a gentle person running a rough country. His heart probably isn’t in all this radical economic transformation stuff he now has to represent, but it would be wrong to assume his leadership of a party leaning to his left is cynical.
He is a black South African who has had enormous good fortune, but don’t underestimate what his childhood would have taught him.
We are the same age and I clearly remember the late 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. I would not dream of telling a black South African to put it all behind him. It was Maimane, though, who crystallised things for me when he rose in response to Ramaphosa’s answer to his question. “You cannot have it both ways,” he said, or words to that effect, “you can’t have expropriation without compensation and economic growth and property rights.”
Forgive me if that isn’t quite accurate, but it is close, and when Maimane said it my first thought was, well, why not? I know I’m on thin ice here, but while we are “compacting” again (this is Ramaphosa’s inaugural call for a new social compact among South Africans on how we create and share wealth) and land is brought into the question, almost anything is possible.
Let’s say the state gives up all its 4,000 or so farms. That would be nice. Ramaphosa said on Wednesday that Afrikaner farmers had come to him with offers to share land they don’t use. That’s brilliant. Take it.
There is also tons of land owned by state-owned companies. And there are vast tracts of land owned by private families around places like Dullstroom that are used for amusements such as trout fishing and hiking. Trade it.
And for those not fortunate enough to get a small parcel of snake-infested bush in Limpopo to farm, why can the state not give them co-ownership of all stateowned companies and property (I’d be particularly partial to our high commission building in Trafalgar Square in London) in the form of vouchers to be redeemed annually or more frequently as the government leases them back from the people.
The private sector could resuscitate an old postapartheid idea out of Standard Bank, where companies listed on the JSE increase their issued capital by 1% and pool it. You don’t even need a shareholder meeting to do that and no one would notice an effective 1% move in the share price beyond the 6pm news. In the process you, as business, raise about R160bn and you ensure (because you appoint and oversee) that the money is used to help citizens who’ve moved onto state land to get the homes and farms going. What you want within 10 years is a new farmer outside Tzaneen shipping his avocados to an international airport in Hoedspruit on a Thursday and them being consumed in Tokyo by the weekend.
We can reimagine SA and make it so. The fact is we’re rich enough to solve all our problems. But our real deficit isn’t fiscal, it’s emotional. We don’t trust one another.
You’d have to be blind to assume that is sustainable. Ramaphosa has no choice but to pursue expropriation without compensation; that is the price his party extracted for electing him leader. The only choice business has is to help him get it right. Or would you rather turn the clock back a little?
Close your eyes and imagine Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma had won that election. Imagine where we would be. Appreciate the cold fact that we have had an enormous stroke of luck.
Let us not throw it away because Ramaphosa isn’t Captain America or the Black Panther.
OUR DEFICIT ISN’T FISCAL, IT’S EMOTIONAL. WE DON’T TRUST ONE ANOTHER. YOU’D HAVE TO BE BLIND TO ASSUME THAT IS SUSTAINABLE