Fair or not, whining won’t help

IUntil the state is capable of making tough calls and of making them in time, there’ll always be a begging bowl in its hand

f by the time you read this we have been beaten by New Zealand in the final of the 2023 Rugby World Cup, I hope we are gracious, or at least stiff upper lipped, in defeat. If we have won, you’re allowed to shout and scream and brag as much as you want for as long as you want. My gut feeling going into the game as a Springbok fan was pure dread. The All Blacks can be terrifying.

But please let’s not complain, not about the ref or the crowd or our bad luck. We took a squad for the tournament and we picked a team for the day. None of those things were imposed on us.

Let’s not take a cue from our government or the ruling party, both of which whine constantly about how unfair the world is, while not only doing nothing about it but at the same time blatantly reducing our chances of succeeding as a nation.

Consider two front-page stories in Business Day on Friday. “Carbon border taxes ‘are perverse’” read the headline on the lead, and “Transnet revival ‘impossible without R100bn’”. Both illustrate the gravityof our problems here.

The “perverse” carbon border taxes, to be introduced by the EU as climate control measures, will levy extra charges on imports that have been produced using environmentally damaging energy technology.

The taxes have been on the cards now for more than 10 years and we have done absolutely nothing about them, forcing our industries to continue gulping fossil-fuelled energy (when it has been available) and utterly failing to speed up the use of renewable energies. The coal lobby in South Africa is a major funder of the ANC. It is naturally all the fault of the West.

And though it is at least a decade since electric cars began rolling off the assembly lines of big producers in the West and in China, carmakers here have been told to expect mention of an electric vehicle master plan, maybe, in the medium-term budget policy statement this week. The industry and the market have been waiting for the government to make up its mind about electric vehicles for years. The result is lost investment.

Still, the government will be at the next iteration of the conference of the parties to the UN convention on climate change, COP28, in the UAE from the end of

November, with a list of demands and whinges as long as your arm.

The border taxes, says the government, “transfer the burden of climate action onto developing economies”.

On Friday, one of a string of days without Eskom loadshedding, it was announced that Karpowership, the Turkish-owned floating gas power station operator with which we have signed a 20-year contract, has been licensed to operate in Richards Bay. I hope Eskom declines to buy or to transmit its foul offering.

Rather than see the future introduction of the carbon taxes as an opportunity to set ourselves apart from the rest and to do our best to comply, we will pile on expensive fossil-fuel power and cry foul at COP 28 instead. Last year at the same conference, in Egypt, the West pledged to us $8.5bn (about R160bn) to start readying ourselves for climate change. Now that there’s no new money on the table, we will bang on it and throw our toys out the cot.

Over at Transnet, the chair of the new board, Andile Sangqu, also cries out for more money. Of course he does, and what, really, is R100bn these days? There’s barely any executive management in situ and the board, typically for a state-owned company, just takes over. No wonder Eskom and Transnet struggle to find decent CEOs.

Transnet has been run into the ground over many years. Its rail and port operations have been left to founder while managements have mainly fussed over the books, all chasing the holy grail of a clean audit. Now the books are buggered too, and the first call is for cash.

What about cutting your costs before asking for money, like in the real world? The private-sector company that publishes this newspaper is going through a brutal cost-cutting round right now. Why not Transnet? Why doesn’t the chair go to the state with a new organogram for a Transnet with half of its 67,000 employees and say: “Here, I’ve done the hard part. Now, about that money?”

That R100bn is the price of unmitigated failure, year after year, and it shouldn’t (but it does) matter that there’s an election next year. Until the state is capable of making tough calls and of making them in time, there’ll always be a begging bowl in its hand and the tough calls are never going to happen with this government in office. It has run out of road.

It is all so embarrassing.