Business needs to speak straight and loud

WE SOUTH Africans certainly live in interesting times. The year has seen a growing audacity on the part of our president with respect to challenges to our constitutional democracy, and finished with what in a more developed democracy would have been received with more surprise than an April Fool’s joke: the removal of an able, wise and respected finance minister despite a deluge of negative economic news including a credit rating downgrade by Fitch and the lowering of Standard & Poor’s’ outlook on the country’s debt.

The response from within the governing party and civil society generally, has been strong, to the point that the president was forced into a corner and had to change his position. A lot of brave people stood up — hats off to them.

The point of this article, however, is to look at who wasn’t there, and here we have the proverbial elephant in the room: the response of big business was, to put it mildly, lame.

There were some individual voices (too few, it has to be said, and then mostly black South Africans who expressed their views strongly), but the most Business Leadership SA could muster was “in this context, the replacement of an effective and trusted finance minister just 18 months into his term of office has raised doubts about our ability to maintain prudent macroeconomic policies”. And this is after reminding us of how important and powerful they are (… employ(s) more than a million people, contributes more than 80% of corporate taxes …).

Neither of us is any longer part of the leadership group of big business, nor of any of its formal structures, but we do consider ourselves to be part of the business community.

In that community, we notice the prevalence of fingerpointing — mostly in the direction of the government. We think it high time we started pointing a finger at ourselves and asking how we may have failed, and what we are doing to make our government more accountable for at least its economic actions, which directly affect our ability to do business and contribute towards the upliftment of South African society in the way business should do.

We advance the following rational reasons this form of engagement with the government is just not going to earn the respect of the government, nor yield the results it seeks to achieve:

As part of the business community, we mix with business leaders regularly and it is hard to think of a single one who has not lost confidence in the president — and this was before the sacking of Nhlanhla Nene. How can these same people believe that this view i s not known by the president and those around him? Surely you will earn more respect by getting out there and saying it rather than the toadying up that is evident in the current public stance? Can one not see the hypocrisy in criticising the government for saying one thing and doing another, and for its lack of transparency, and then engaging in the same conduct?

Nene bravely fought for fiscal prudence, respect for markets and respect for corporate SA — all things of critical importance to big business. You would surely expect the parties that stand to gain most from the success of this fight to come out in his corner when he gets a knife in his back? Not so, so it should not be surprising if the next finance minister takes corporate SA a little less seriously, knowing that he cannot rely on these people to hold their corner at critical moments.

Corporate SA has not been able to change the perception of it being untransformed, connected to the old SA and unpatriotic. While much of this is considered unfair, the response to the latest crisis plays directly into this narrative.

So, a battle has been fought and good has prevailed.

When the heroes of the day are acknowledged, we will find that the major beneficiary of this outcome was missing in action. How convenient. How very sad.

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Spicer and Ball are prominent South African businessmen.

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