New leaders need policies that will divert SA from cliffs that remain

Ramaphosa has to confront financial realities while placating populist lobby and dealing with land reform

Plettenberg Bay is the poster resort for the glaring inequalities confronting SA — magnificent R50m mansions overlooking Robberg Beach, a proverbial stone’s throw from the shacks dotting nearby New Horizons settlement. Plett, though, was also the place where I had a reunion during the festive season with one of the foremost business leaders in SA from the fraught 1980s.

Readers of some vintage will recall when PW Botha hedged his reform strategy with lashings of repression and marooned himself on the banks of the Rubicon that he proved unwilling to cross. He died, perhaps aptly, in the postapartheid era.

Botha might be long gone, but the dilemma for reformists seeking to make transcending changes but fearful of the consequences in terms of holding on to power and preserving party unity, has immediate application as SA again enters a moment of political transition.

I suggested to my eminent interlocutor, who was at the forefront of progressive business thinking long before it became fashionable, that the close-run result of the jostle for the ANC presidency was incontestably a good thing for the country. I opined that before the party’s Nasrec conference outcomes, SA was headed towards and over the cliff. But with the election of Cyril Ramaphosa, we had swerved off this path of national self-destruction.

My host had a different gloss: “No, they simply applied the brakes, but the cliff is still in front.” That seems in the new year the essential question: will the refreshed ANC leadership make the tough policy choices needed to rescue the economy and the country from a set of steep rock faces over which the country could plunge — fiscal, institutional and racial?

Meanwhile, as President Jacob Zuma — a famous crooner — reprises the 1981 Clash pop hit Should I Stay or Should I Go? — there is no shortage of distractions from answering these existential issues. It might be that if Ramaphosa can, reasonably swiftly, shoe-horn the reckless Zuma out of the Union Buildings that he will have the space and authority to make some longpostponed decisions on averting economic stagnation and worse.

But the cliff remains in front: Zuma — whether his political lifespan is long or short, or zombielike, as he occupies his current in-between halflife position — is leaving with parting gifts that could have been wrapped by Pandora. He has strewn his successor’s path with booby traps.

Zuma has a lot in common with US President Donald Trump: both offer crude populism, both are expert in appealing to their own bases at whatever cost to wider national unity and both declared themselves, very recently, as geniuses. Trump’s response to questions of his mental stability, raised in the enthralling and gossipy Michael Wolff tell-all book Fire and Fury, was that he was a “very stable genius”. Zuma advised an audience recently that he was a “political genius”.

Zuma’s recent acts of political virtuosity include a staggering series of adverse court judgments against him; the unilateral announcement to provide free university education without a cost assessment; the retention of wrecking ministers especially in public enterprises, mineral resources and social development; and promoting radical economic transformation as a barely disguised code for looting the state and upending the Constitution.

This suggests that should Ramaphosa prevail in the power stakes for national authority, he has some easy wins to improve both national and international confidence: reverse the most egregious ministerial appointees; place competent and ethical leaders at the helm of the South African Revenue Service, National Prosecuting Authority and at the Treasury; sweep out the corrupt incompetents who bestride so many failing and worse state-owned companies and enact his campaign promise to — finally and effectively— slay the dragon of corruption.

Tackling corruption and making some smart and reassuring public appointments will be the easier part of the challenges Ramaphosa confronts. After all, who can be in opposition to these demonstrable public goods except malefactors? The really hard and existential part starts even sooner: how to square the circle of radical populist sloganeering and expectations with the economic realities contained in a nearempty fiscus, the encircling hawks of the credit ratings agencies and business confidence at its lowest level since the era of Botha?

In his ANC January 8 statement to be delivered, bizarrely, this Saturday, he might offer the way forward. But in his charm offensive earlier this week to placate the excluded (from ANC top leadership) Zulu nation and sovereign, he effectively did a Boris Johnson. The UK foreign secretary and leading Brexiteer offered during his country’s referendum the fatuous reassurance, “my policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it”. He suggested that on exiting the EU, Britain could retain most of the advantages of membership without the disadvantages. But as his government is discovering with the thin gruel from Brussels, no Europe à la carte is on offer.

Ramaphosa must be aware of the economic reality that once you eat cake, you have no cake left. But he displayed no such public awareness in KwaZulu-Natal. Instead, he offered the bromide that land restoration without compensation will restore SA to some sort of prelapsarian, edenic paradise. Or maybe his Garden of Eden offer was an acknowledgement of the serpent that lurks in such greenery. For he was quick to qualify the promise with the ANC-approved mantra that this ideal state could not be achieved if it affected “agricultural production, food security or undermined the economy”.

As the late Dene Smuts observed when the 1996 constitution was being finalised and the issue of land and expropriation nearly prevented its passage, “this was a clause which cut its own throat”. Back then the so-called land lobby produced a draft that the ANC initially adopted and which Smuts termed a “Trojan horse”: it allowed land reform to be undertaken without regard to the safeguards built into the interim (1993) constitution against uncompensated and arbitrary expropriation.

Smuts and I lobbied then Constitutional Assembly chairman Ramaphosa and his colleague Kader Asmal on the issue and we were hardly alone in beating a path to his door. Most economically literate people also knew — and lobbied — that without certainty around when and in what circumstances expropriation could occur, economic growth would evaporate.

At the time, Ramaphosa had shelved his presidential ambitions and was headed off to seek a fortune in business. He understood the imperatives and some of the sense of the 1993 clause was clawed back into the final version on property now enshrined in section 25 of the Constitution. But now as future president of the country, Ramaphosa heads a party that embraced a version of a property clause that truly does “cut its own throat”: it doubles down on uncertainty for property holders (including every direct or indirect investor in the JSE) but hedges the heightened expectations of the populist lobby by qualifying it with economic realities that cannot be met should it ever be implemented.

So on Saturday, Ramaphosa can decide if he wants to do a Johnson and suggest the cake can be eaten without reducing its size. But that leads to fatal paralysis and the avoidance of crossing his own Rubicon. He could also surprise by offering the truth and a reality dose. After all the delusional magical thinking of the Zuma years, that would be a real new start — and a reversal from the cliff.