Deploy and destroy is the ANC’s way, and Unisa is next
Every week in South Africa brings a new wonder as the ANC and its government collapse institution after institution. Right now Blade Nzimande, the minister of higher education, leader of the SACP, and meddlar suprem e, is trying to put Unisa under administration.
Back in 2007 when the ANC upended Thabo Mbeki and voted Jacob Zuma in as his replacement, Blade was a Zuma guy. He got a job in Zuma’s first cabinet, but by 2017 he was calling for Zuma to fall. Zuma dropped him in a late reshuffle that year but President Cyril Ramaphosa, with his unerring eye for a poor appointment, made him transport minister in 2018 before returning him and his gifts for mismanagement to higher education.
Unisa is the biggest distance-learning institution in the southern hemisphere. It has, it claims, 370,000 students and is 150 years old. Its imminent collapse — the courts and the unions are for the moment blocking Nzimande’s attempts to appoint an administrator — would be another feather in the cap for a government that has so far sunk the railways, three national airlines, the arms manufacturer, the post office, the health service, most small towns, most large ones, the air force, the navy and the electricity supply.
Most were functioning when the ANC came to power in 1994 but what the party did next was critical. It didn’t only change the populations these services existed to serve or protect. It also replaced the people running the services themselves and called it transformation.
It wasn’t supposed to fail like this but transformation was poisoned from the start by the ANC’s practice of cadre deployment. Very soon the people running the police and the navy and the hospitals and the universities were all either members of the party or approved by it. The result now is chaos and a desperate effort by the private sector to save the government from the destruction it has wrought.
Who knows what will happen to Unisa. An administrator will be found and appointed. But when? And who in their right mind would want to report to anyone in Ramaphosa’s cabinet, let alone Blade? Nearly a year after former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter announced his intention to leave, neither the Eskom board nor the public enterprises minister has been able to find a replacement.
There is no end to fiasco. Just this week the minister for communications & digital technologies, Mondli Gungubele, told the Universal Postal Union summit in Saudi Arabia (it’s OK to have a drink after reading this): “We see the South African Post Office as the national e-commerce aggregator central in the platform economy...”
Clearly Gungubele has no objective understanding of what has happened to the Post Office or what might be required to revive it. Hundreds of Post Office branches are closed. It is in business rescue, barely delivers the mail, cannot pay its bills nor staff their medical aid and is routinely bailed out by Postbank.
According to Business Day, business rescue practitioners reckon Post Office debt now exceeds its assets by R12.5bn. There is no way on Earth it recovers from this to become the fantasy “national e-commerce aggregator” in the minister’s eye. We must worry for his mental health.
But delusion has become the norm in the Ramaphosa era. Or perhaps it’s just late-life ANC; its final years of unchecked power. Hallucination is at the wheel, just as it was when Portia Derby was appointed to run Transnet. Based on what experience, for crying out loud? She was just ANC once director-general at the department of public enterprises. She then “transformed” hundreds of old hands out of the rail and port monopoly and was shocked when their fresh young replacements couldn’t cope. She’s gone now but the damage is done and real people are losing their jobs because of it.
Cadre deployment is our national catastrophe and nothing but time can stop it, not even Ramaphosa.
In fact, he ran the ANC deployment committee for years and even contrived to lose its minutes when the commission he appointed into state capture asked for them. This is how the nationalist beast feeds. Before the ANC deployment committee, we had the Broederbond overseeing appontments.
But experience worldwide tells us that when the money runs out, nationalists fall apart and wander off. They’re not bound by principle. By 1989 the old Nats had exhausted the coffers and it’s happening to the ANC now. Pity about Unisa, but a lot more will get damaged as the crowd leaves the stadium.
But leave they will. We must hope we have a chance to make a decent plan for when they’re finally gone.
Delusion has become the norm in the Ramaphosa era … Hallucination is at the wheel