Business needed to help rebuild SA
How can we give up hope? Why is it that there isn’t much movement in the area of investment?
I GREETED the news of South Africa’s candidacy to host RWC 2023 with a sense of elation and, I must admit, some melancholy.
The image of my grandfather adorned in his No 6 green and gold jersey brought back thoughts of a time when it seemed we were united as a nation pursuing a dream. Now, reality has dawned and optimism has given way to doom and gloom. We have returned once again to the precipice.
Those who love South Africa – irrespective of who is elected president of the ANC next month, or who forms the government after the general election in 2019 – would do well to listen to Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s recent sage advice.
Addressing a business awards function in Johannesburg last week, the chief justice challenged business leaders to put their considerable brains and muscle together to come up with a definitive plan to rid the country of racism and exclusion.
For South Africa to continue on its present trajectory is unsustainable. We all need to work together to find solutions. Perhaps as never before, post-1994 political opportunists are smelling blood and some even harbour a sense of triumphalism, and imagine they are going in for the kill to wrest power from the ANC.
In this environment, we have witnessed failed no-confidence motion after no-confidence motion, such that even the opportunistic politicians have lost confidence in their own efforts to muster the no-confidence card. Every day, a new matter is brought before the NPA and courts in an incessant attempt to achieve a goal by any means possible. It is not only the politicians who have fallen to these acts of desperation. Business has never been an innocent bystander in the political machinations pre and post-1994, as has become self-evident.
However, it seems that business, too, is hell-bent on pursuing the precipice by failing to step up the level of investment, and in the strategic areas required in South Africa’s future, the business community has become complicit in creating an environment ripe for opportunists to exploit. Is this an end game?
“How can we give up hope? Why is it that there isn’t much movement in the area of investment?
Are you not running the risk of waiting until it is too late? The same applies to land.
Why do you sit back with all the talent you have and allow a few opportunists to ruin it for all of us when you could come up with a plan to resolve this peacefully?”
Chief Justice Mogoeng reminded the business community that its engagement with the then-banned ANC (in the late 1980s) had been an important step on the road to democracy. Engaging government, now, would be more productive than open confrontation, he suggested.
The chief justice’s voice must surely rank among the most credible in the country at the moment. He was appointed to his position by His Excellency President Zuma, and was not the media’s first choice, he was initially dismissed as an ill-qualified stooge. But in his six years at the helm, he has won over his critics to become, arguably, the most widely trusted civil servant in the land. The institution he heads, the judiciary, is among a few that have emerged from the recent past with their reputations enhanced.
The point he was making is that when the election fervour is over, regardless of who wins, the crisis of the skewed ownership of the land, its resources and economy will not have miraculously disappeared.
The sustained climate of bitter rhetoric, accusation and division we are in can only deepen the crisis.
We should not allow this environment to divert us from the real job at hand: addressing the structural inequity that apartheid left behind.
Regardless of the identities of the winners in December and 2019, perceptions of widespread corruption must be addressed, and confidence in our state-owned companies and sovereignty restored. These are non-negotiables. The sooner that investigations are completed, alleged wrongdoers are held to account or exonerated, and ill-gotten gains are returned to the fiscus, the better it will be for all of us.
I can’t imagine any of the candidates or parties participating in elections – or the business community – disagreeing with that. But this is where it gets complicated.
We don’t all agree that accelerating the transformation of the economy is an imperative – or, even if we can understand it theoretically, we are not all in agreement on the agenda or the means.
That is the real fault line in South Africa. How and whether to deal with the inequitable foundations on which we have built our house that has resulted in such devastating poverty, unemployment and exclusion today.
Slogans and labels are not always helpful, and for a variety of reasons we don’t need to go into here, talk about economic transformation has become radically politicised – and is therefore offensive to some. One of the country’s richest businessmen recently described the term “radical economic transformation” as equating to corruption, and he is certainly not the only one who believes that.
It is this aspect of the national conversation that Chief Justice Mogoeng’s remarks of the other night throws into sharp relief. He didn’t exactly say it this way, but he was advising us not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1984, the then-General Secretary of the South Africa Council of Churches, Bishop Desmond Tutu, said: “I come from a beautiful land, richly endowed by God with wonderful natural resources, wide expanses, rolling mountains, singing birds, bright shining stars out of blue skies, with radiant sunshine, golden sunshine.
“There is enough of the good things that come from God’s bounty, there is enough for everyone, but apartheid has confirmed some in their selfishness, causing them to grasp greedily a disproportionate share, the lion’s share, because of their power.”
South Africa was in turmoil, socially, institutionally, geographically, politically and economically divided. Not to mention the cultures of patriarchy and violence, or race. It didn’t take business leaders much longer to realise that the divisions were unsustainable and begin talking to the ANC.
What Chief Justice Mogoeng was saying is that it would be good to see business playing that role again. If the country is unable to have a reasonable conversation about the crises at its door, beyond governance, it will be unlikely to come up with solutions deemed reasonable by all. The contribution of the business sector to this conversation is critical.
Mandela is the Chief of Mvezo Komkhulu and an ANC Member of Parliament.