Business is still willing to help a responsible state

If you’re in any doubt as to what the resignation of Sizwe Nxasana as nonexecutive chair of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) means, check out his CV. He was one of the first African chartered accountants in SA. He’s a founding member of SizweNtsaluba Gobodo, the fifth-largest auditor in SA. He became CEO of Telkom in 1998 and for 10 years was CEO of the FirstRand banking group. He is a man of unrivalled integrity. When he left banking, the government asked him to run NSFAS.

He accepted. Nxasana is passionate about education. His family foundation funds university students and builds and operates private nursery, primary and high schools. His wife, Judy Dlamini, has just become chancellor of Wits University.

So we’re talking about people at the very summit of their lives here, and Nxasana walking away from helping out the state is a very bad sign. He had created a model of how the private sector can help the government do things together.

Not only did he not draw board fees due to him for the three years he spent at the scheme, he attracted help from the private banking sector, from all the banks, none of which cost the government a cent. The private sector deployees were all paid by their original employers.

But you can only do so much. Two weeks before the start of the 2018 academic year and hours before the ANC’s 2017 elective conference was about to start, that star developmental thinker, Jacob Zuma, announced free university education for anyone who couldn’t afford it.

Zuma’s candidate lost to Cyril Ramaphosa but his parting toxin was strong. Suddenly NSFAS was overwhelmed. Students already in receipt of loans would continue to have to pay them back. The 600,000 would-be students who flooded NSFAS with university applications after Zuma’s capricious decree would be given bursaries, not loans.

And for them “free” meant free. The fact that even bursaries come with conditions (for instance, you have to pass your first year) mattered not. Many are protesting that they haven’t received their promised financial aid, when in fact they may never have signed up for the conditions. Zuma knew all of this would happen. It was meant to make him a hero, and make villains of the people who would have to make it work.

Well, running one scheme with loans and bursaries and an impossible remit finally proved too much. Nxasana has gone. The people he brought with him will probably drift off as well. He’s a real leader. They were there because he was there.

The lesson in all of this for President Cyril Ramaphosa to learn and hold on to — is that the private sector can help (indeed it wants, still, to help) but the state has to be cautious with its money. Assuming Ramaphosa makes no (more) unnecessary gaffes on land expropriation without compensation, ensures that land invasions are resisted and begins to spell out and sell his vision of how an orderly process of expropriation might trigger an economic recovery, the private sector will probably stick by him.

But he has to recognise that his remarks after an ANC lekgotla the week before last took the wind out of a lot of business sails. That may cheer up the peanut gallery, but in SA private sector co-operation and leadership will be key to the success of any deep and sustainable land reform. Once land is expropriated it’ll need to be developed, divided up, surveyed, titled — a million small things that, left to the state, would throttle even the most basic process.

Luckily for Ramaphosa, Anheuser-Busch InBev boss Carlos Brito arrived in Johannesburg this week with a small herd of US investment analysts to look at his company’s business. They arrived the same day the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial comparing Ramaphosa to Robert Mugabe and SA to Venezuela. Wrong and wrong, but impressions are sticky and hard to shift once they take hold.

Ramaphosa met Brito’s entourage. “We will not allow land grabs or anarchy,” he told them. “We will handle this challenge … if we could negotiate the death of apartheid, we will be able to find a solution that will put the land issue to bed so that this country can really unleash its power.”

Ramaphosa’s job is almost impossible, but you have to believe in SA, if not in him. He has to right a great wrong. If he doesn’t, we’re screwed. And he has to keep capital onside. If he doesn’t, we’re screwed. Infuriating as this process is going to sometimes be, and as morally and intellectually desolate as his party can sometimes be, we’re still lucky he won in December.