Cyril’s challenge
Let civil society take the lead
● It looks like the danger that President Cyril Ramaphosa will be removed has been exaggerated.
His supporters ricochet between terror and euphoria as they watch both open and covert challenges to his presidency ahead of the ANC’s national general council. Yet his opponents understand that without Ramaphosa, the ANC will split, and an ANC led by the fightback faction will likely lose power. They need him to stay in power, but not strong enough to dislodge them.
The number of disillusioned former CR17 supporters may be growing, but they are not all in the same camp as the ex-Zumaites. There is a small camp of younger leaders who want clean government. Their frustration with the president is because they want him to move faster. Though it’s far too early to see a changing of the guard, there is a younger generation of leaders looking to a future beyond the generation of exiles and United Democratic Front leaders.
That leaves the initiative with the National Prosecuting Authority, which is moving at a snail’s pace to charge leaders who took part in state capture.
While there are some younger leaders with potential, this generation is far from settled in what it wants to do with the country, which is where SA’s civil society comes in. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of talent in government and party was filled by civil society, leading to the removal of Jacob Zuma, and it is civil society that is SA’s strength if it is to tackle the harder set of problems in mopping up unemployment.
For my new book I resumed research begun in 1991 to understand how the Asian tigers achieved the level of inclusive, job-creating rapid growth that is the only way to solve this fundamental crisis. In the 25 years since 1994, China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of poor people out of poverty into the middle class, 489-million between 2001 and 2011 alone, while we have had much more modest success.
There is a good reason for the difference: the policies of the Mbeki era — fiscal restraint, free trade and limited privatisation — have never achieved rapid, jobcreating inclusive growth in any country. The key to doing this, in all the Asian tigers and Western countries in earlier times, has been a strong state.
But South Africans in both the ANC and the opposition Democratic Alliance both got stuck in a debate about the wrong part of the state’s role: it’s not by owning industry that you achieve rapid growth, nor simply by privatising companies, though both have their place. The key to rapid growth is choosing the right growth drivers and using the state to promote them. Here South African politicians have failed.
In more recent times, the ANC came to regard stateowned enterprises and government tenders as jobcreators in themselves. Even where they aren’t corrupt, that’s not where the jobs should grow. Parliamentarians seem to know more about tenders in their areas than they do about legislation they approve. That is a mismatch of skills and tasks.
So what must we learn from the success of the Asian tigers if SA is to break out of its dangerous jobs crisis?
Most Westerners conclude that the secret must be the free market, that if you allow private enterprise, the rest follows. But those who study the problem thoroughly enough and without ideological blinkers usually come to this realisation: the state has a key and constructive role to play in finding and supporting the right growth drivers.
SA does not have a civil service with technocrats capable of finding the right growth drivers and pressing all the levers to ensure they are implemented with single-minded dedication. And there would be too much political interference if they tried.
However, there are South Africans in government and in civil society who have found some answers. In a report introduced by then trade & industry minister Rob Davies, the minister himself wrote that SA “deindustrialised prematurely”. While that was happening we were missing the great 1990s global information boom that we should have been wellplaced to enjoy.
In the 2000s, we missed the next great global trend, the resources boom driven by Chinese industrialisation. SA’s mining volumes continued to fall while world prices rose. Exploration all but ceased. Both these failures were caused by political mismanagement and interference.
Now we have a chance to build again. We still do not have a civil service ready to lead, so it seems that civil society will have to step up again. I see two clear global trends we can still surf relatively quickly while the slow pace of state-building endures.
While Davos Man is punting the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), South Africans who examine the data discover that 4IR is not the job creator SA needs. But the information economy we failed to complete in the 1990s still has remarkable potential, if we demand digital migration and new spectrum allocation to bring down data costs and improve broadband speed.
A second quick win should come from energy, believe it or not, because the urban African population alone will grow by 500-million in the next 20 years, and the International Energy Agency predicts Africa will be the world’s biggest new energy market.
That is the real reason Russian President Vladimir Putin sold then president Jacob Zuma on one of the 12 major nuclear energy deals he made in Africa, ensuring Russian jobs, technologies and geostrategic influence on the continent for a generation.
Russia and China are competing while we ignore the green opportunities that create massive job opportunities — for solar water heating, retrofitting and insulating existing and new buildings, new solar, wind and battery technologies, electric cars and charging stations and new-style urban environments.
We made a start decades ago but the government failed us. By now we should have been manufacturing and exporting into Africa, but it’s not too late to get moving again. Unless we want to continue showing up at international conferences where Chinese and Russian leaders continue to eat our lunch.