We need leaders who are open to new ideas
Experience from across the world shows that the notion that economic growth inevitably benefits all is inherently flawed. Instead, in most instances, economic growth has failed to deliver significant numbers of jobs and has entrenched poverty and inequality. So, while we agree with the view that South Africa needs to pull out all stops to unlock growth amid the grim economic outlook, we recognise the importance of political stability as a precondition.
Racialised disparities do not bode well for longterm political stability, which is crucial for attracting investment and an ingredient for sustainable growth.
A diverse mixture of domestic and global factors has conspired to reinforce a bleak economic outlook. The economy, as per Stats SA figures, contracted in the second quarter. The downward spiral is predicted to continue.
Our economy will fall or stand on the success or failure to stabilise energy supply. An unstable and deficient energy supply is the single most significant test for South Africa.
We have natural gas in most parts of Mpumalanga straddling into northern parts of KwaZulu-Natal, the Waterberg district in Limpopo and Virginia in the Free State.
With natural gas we can create a balance in the baseload, which is the nub of the problem at Eskom. And we have natural gas inland, not even offshore. With it we can create jobs, a new manufacturing sector and an economy based on gas. We also need to ensure effective and sustainable supply of potable water; provide basic education to prepare young people for skills training at technical vocational education & training colleges; fix our rail and port infrastructure; attract investment to bulk infrastructure; and build the state at a local level to ensure local economies are created.
South Africa exists within a geopolitical context. The war between Russia and Ukraine poses a risk to global economic growth and, with the disruption of Ukrainian grain exports, threatens food security, mainly in Africa.
Global measures to deal with the harshest economic crises and the bloodiest political upheavals have, at times, stood in the way of the response of so-called developing nations to their own critical situations and violent troubles. Nonetheless, all means to recovery often prove fragile and slow-moving.
Where financially powerful nations of the world predicted a return to brighter economic growth amid international crises in recent years, most developing countries endure a constant state of becoming.
Crises originating in the major economic and political centres of the world have an impact on African nations and the global south, binding them to battles of technology and the ramifications of distant war crimes.
A peaceful continent is possible.
At the Drakensberg Inclusive Growth Forum we perhaps have a chance to amplify the utterances of human-centred policy implementation; to heighten the urgency for collective action against climate change; and from the highest mountain tops show the world how much we love and care for humanity.
From this vantage point we notice how all nations are susceptible to crises — political, economic, health, social; and natural catastrophes — multifaceted crises that have engulfed humanity since the misty beginnings of time. Sadly, as history will tell, whether during times of relative certainty or global crisis, it is mainly the poorest people who are left behind.
The salvation of the vulnerable and marginalised can at best be addressed under servant leadership. Leadership capable of leading from the front and leading from behind.
Late professor Ntongela Masilela’s interpretation of professor Njabulo Ndebele’s Inaugural King Moshoeshoe Memorial lecture at the University of the Free State on May 25 2006, titled “Leadership Challenges: Truth and Integrity in an Act of Salesmanship”, reads in part: “Examining the quality of leadership necessary in the present context, in a ‘very complex society’ in which the ‘complexity of governance’ has constitutionally been put in place, Ndebele argues that its effective form is realised when it is in compliance with the will of the citizens in a counterintuitive manner.
“By counterintuitive, Ndebele means the leadership that is open to alternatives other than those prescribed by the force of circumstances. He finds this exemplified in Moshoeshoe’s relationship with Mzilikazi in the 19th century and by Nelson Mandela in relationship to white South Africans.
“The true nature of this leadership is its ability to recognise the legitimacy of an alternative leadership that emerges to contest and democratically replace the present one which is hegemonic and dominant: in other words true leadership must be able to envision an alternative leadership to the one that is only capable of practising or facilitating.
“This is what the present political leadership of the ANC is incapable of envisioning, an alternative
and oppositional leadership that legitimately goes beyond the one the dominant leadership is capable of doing and achieving.
“The practice of democracy is predicated on envisioning an alternative other beyond one’s ability. This is the conundrum of the present crisis in South Africa.”
Masilela and Ndebele are pointing out that the task of political radicals is to get to the point where they become no longer necessary as their goals have been accomplished.
The time for ideas and the time to exchange has never been more pressing for the survival of democracy and humanity. All markers point to a precipice. This forum is an urgent invitation to all sectors of society to respond to the crises they find themselves in.
Allow it to be an engine of ideas that drive those who have the power to implement and inspire those of influence to rethink pathways to economic growth; to take stock and move this country and the continent forward.
✼ This is an edited extract from the opening speech by former president Kgalema Motlanthe at the Drakensberg Inclusive Growth Forum on Friday. Motlanthe was speaking at the Dialogue Among Equals, which was organised by the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation and held this weekend in the Drakensberg