NDP a starting point for rebuilding trust
Of all the things that went wrong under the administration of Jacob Zuma, the erosion of trust in the state may well be the most difficult thing to turn around.
We should be a bit more honest though — without appearing to absolve Zuma from wrongdoing at all — and acknowledge that there has been a general, ideologically driven decline of trust in the state since the late 1970s and early 1980s.
This general distrust may be associated with the ThatcherReagan revolution, which emboldened free marketers and market fundamentalists and quite rapidly strengthened finance capitalism, all of which triumphed, albeit briefly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
By the late 1990s, based in part on the successes of the East Asian Tigers and in part on the collapse of states in various parts of the world, there have been serious attempts to determine how states can be brought back in, as it were, and become more capable and effective in the provision of public goods and services, and evaluated on the basis of overall wellbeing and prosperity.
As it goes, we have just passed the 20th anniversary of the World Bank’s landmark publication World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, which gave significant though not full expression to bringing the state back into ensuring overall wellbeing and prosperity. It would be interesting to know how far we have come since then. Never mind.
Restoration of trust in the state, at least in SA, would require an acknowledgement that the state has historically played a fairly central role in research and development, innovation and in initiating new technologies. For most of the post-war period investment in research and innovation by the state gave us much of the technology that produced our cellphones and those satellite navigation dinguses in our cars.
The state also initiated research that resulted in advances in medicine, medical technologies and the treatment of noncommunicable diseases.
States also invested in or initiated research into solarpowered batteries and in some cases provided seed funding for the algorithms use by some high-tech companies.
The worldwide web has become indispensable in our daily lives. but would probably be a few more years away if it were not for investments in research and technology by the state in the decades after the Second World War. There is probably an argument to be made that the Teletype of the 1920s was the precursor to the modems that were built in the 1950s — initially as part of the US defence programme — proliferated in the 1960s and would, four decades later, be central to the functionality of the internet.
All of this is, or at least should probably be, common knowledge. There is no great revelation in making the above claims. Things should, however, not be allowed to slip so deep into common sense as to become irrelevant and beyond scrutiny, especially not at a time of upheaval and a desperate need for new ideas to tackle age-old questions of poverty, inequality and precariousness.
Bearing these things in mind should help us imagine a state that is inventive and committed to research — entrepreneurial and developmental — as well as being trustworthy.
This trust deficit was flagged by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his state of the nation address when he said: “We should put behind us the era of diminishing trust in public institutions and weakened confidence in leaders.”
Of all the intangible assets of society, trust is probably the most valuable. We can spend time pettifogging, but that will get us nowhere. What does seem clear is that trust in the state should not be blind.
Blind trust is that which you may give a loved one, family members or ideological comrades in arms.
The trust that we need to create between the public and the state should be more radical. It should be reflexive, in the sense that public servants should take pride in their work, and their performance should be evaluated by how they have helped change citizens’ lives.
Officials of the state should be kept on their toes, always, and should know that they can be replaced if they act unprofessionally or unethically.
One way to ensure this is to turn to chapter 13 of the National Development Plan, which proposes that public servants be immersed in the development agenda of the state and be “insulated from undue political interference”.
I would drop the adjective “undue” as a starting point towards restoring trust in the state.
WE SHOULD PUT BEHIND US THE ERA OF DIMINISHING TRUST IN PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS AND WEAKENED CONFIDENCE IN LEADERS