Pravin Gordhan, the comrade whisperer
I don’t blame you if you missed it. You were probably trying to pick a mood that best reflected living in a country that, at the same moment, is home to Miss Universe and is staging a staggered retreat from the international community, a retreat still euphemistically called “load-shedding”. it ’I s don’t possible know. that Maybe Pravin the Gordhan’s two events complemented each other. After all, stars shine more brightly in the dark. Either way, oped in the Sunday Times passed you by.
If it did, you missed nothing. Indeed, most of Gordhan’s piece — an explanation of why SAA has been crash-landed, upside down and on fire rather than being flown nose-first into the sea — was truly baffling.
Over the past few years the public enterprises minister has more or less mastered his Mr Cleanup act.
When he turns it on, he is stern without scolding, sharptongued without being impolitic.
At his best he is like a concerned uncle who has just discovered that you text and drive rather than, say, a concerned uncle who has just discovered that it’s not all a horrible, cheese-induced nightmare and he really is a cabinet minister.
That routine, however, seems to be losing its polish. First there was Gordhan’s laughable claim last weekend that it is the patriotic duty of South Africans to fly SAA. Patriotism is always an unrequited love, but if your guy is asking you to buy return tickets to Bloemfontein to save the relationship, it really is time to have a talk.
In Sunday’s piece, likewise, the disher-out of tough love was nowhere to be found, replaced by the kind of cautious, slightly insipid stuff we used to get from the invertebrates in Jacob Zuma’s administration.
Admittedly, there was a mention of past failures and “blatant corruption”, but otherwise the tone of the piece was less a stern uncle than a country doctor from a Jane Austen novel washing his hands, reaching for his wig and saying, “I have applied a poultice that may draw some of the humours, but whether she will see the morrow is now in the hands of our Lord.”
Indeed, at one point he even offered a medical metaphor, explaining that SAA had been “likened to a patient experiencing multiple organ failure”.
The trouble with invoking medical metaphors, of course, is that you create the expectation of an explanation.
If you tell me about multiple organ failure, I want your best guess as to how the patient got like that.
For example, was it a virulent bout of Dudu Myeni, a condition for which there is no known cure? Was SAA exposed to highly contagious, accountability-resistant cadre deployment?
Was it huge trauma sustained after prolonged contact with a wrecking ball operated by a vandal who kept going “Heh heh heh”?
But of course Gordhan named no Patient Zero. SAA, he wrote, had simply “reached an untenable state”, a bit like a naughty sheep that had wandered away in the night and fallen into a donga.
As I said, it was baffling. The piece clearly wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t much of a diagnosis. So who had it been written for?
I found the answer in the penultimate paragraph, which revealed the two big lessons that needed to be learnt after the SAA debacle. Are you sitting down?
Because here they come. First, people who run stateowned enterprises (SOEs) need to have certain skills and know about the sectors in which they operate. Second, the revenue of a business needs to be greater than the cost.
And right there, Gordhan’s intended readership became startlingly, depressingly clear.
It wasn’t you or me, or anyone else who learnt when they were a child that there is a theoretical connection between competence and success.
It wasn’t anyone who, as an adult, expends a huge amount of time and effort making sure they make more money than they spend.
No, the target audience was one entirely unfamiliar with those connections or the pressures of balancing a budget. Gordhan was talking to the ANC. Well, whispering.
It’s why he was so gentle, offering perpetrator-less metaphors about organ failure. It’s why he never defined the “we” and “us” he used throughout: assign responsibility to everybody and you assign it to nobody.
If Gordhan’s comrades and employees were even moderately skilled or had even a basic grasp of how money works, his “lessons” would have been grossly insulting. Perhaps some thinner skins were pricked.
But the fact remains that Gordhan knew he could offer his “lessons” as polite, uncontroversial advice in a national newspaper; that these incredibly basic facts were, quite literally, news to many people in his party.
Sometimes you can say very little and still say it all.
Gordhan knew he could offer his ‘lessons’ as polite advice