Risen to grace

SA has a president who is more popular now than he was in January 2018

One of the great things about travel is that it allows you to see new places and meet new people. But the really great thing about it is the opportunity it gives you to hear citizens of other countries whinge and moan about their politicians.

It may not seem credible to South Africans, who’ve long regarded themselves as global leaders in this quasi sport, but the fact is that we might not even have made it to the semifinals if this had been a global competition in 2018 (2017, of course, was an entirely different matter).

In 2018, the award for the most whinged-about politician would certainly have gone to either US President Donald Trump or UK Prime Minister Theresa May — though in the final few months of the year the gilets jaunes (the “Yellow Vest” protesters) in France pushed President Emmanuel Macron into the running.

Remarkably, Germany’s Angela Merkel, one of the better leaders of the past decade, was also looking like a possible contender. And even in Ireland, where the citizens who can’t be bothered to emigrate have a sort of sad passive-aggressive relationship with their political leaders, there were signs of growing resentment towards Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

The reality is that SA is one of the very few (perhaps only) large-ish democratic countries that can boast of having a president who is more popular in January 2019 than he was in January 2018. In an environment of hate-filled social media, that is a remarkable achievement.

Of course, the point must be quickly made that the popularity of the president is no indication of the affection citizens have for the associated political party. The ANC remains about as unpopular and distrusted in January 2019 as it was in January last year.

However, while trust in SA’S political leader may have improved during 2018, the same cannot be said for the country’s business leaders. In this regard, SA was in step with other market-based economies, where the scars of the 2008 global financial crash remain largely unhealed.

In SA, 2018 was book-ended by the Steinhoff debacle: in January the company’s share price plummeted to a fraction of its month-earlier value; in December investors were told the much-awaited PWC report on Steinhoff would be delayed and would be a shadow of what had been expected.

The news fuelled suspicions that no-one would be held to account for the greatest corporate heist in SA history. By the end of 2018 it was apparent that the prospect of someone being hauled to court to defend their role in wiping out R200bn of investor funds was considerably more remote than that of former president Jacob Zuma or his Gupta cronies having their day in court.

During the year, the reputations of various pillars of the business community — SAP, Bain, Mckinsey, KPMG, PWC and Deloitte — toppled, as the nature of their dealings with politicians and companies was revealed to be dubious and chronically self-serving.

The JSE attempted to stanch the steady outflow of trust, calling for the “guardians of governance” to help rewrite the rules of engagement. But there is little doubt the business community has lost what moral high ground it occupied in 2017, when its venality was overshadowed by Zuma’s.

Trust in SA’S political leader may have improved during 2018, but the same cannot be said for its business leaders