Where Cyril gets race right and then wrong

AThe ANC’s greatest failure has been to underestimate the complexity of almost everything

fter his lacklustre state of the nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa came out swinging in parliament and the Cape Town Press Club this week, accusing critics of his rhapsodic vision of the state of the country of racism, or at least of wanting to “preserve racial privilege and to reverse the fundamental social and economic transformation that is taking place in our country”.

It is quite a charge, given the obvious mess our economy and society are in, but in a sense he is right. Black people and whites who opposed apartheid may have been more or less on the same side during the struggle, but blacks and whites experienced apartheid in utterly different ways. I try never to diminish the arguments of black friends who even today talk about the pain of it.

My close family opposed apartheid, and I’m separated from them and miss them to this day because of it. But they never suffered discrimination because of something they couldn’t change, never had their humanity and dignity stripped away, never (or hardly ever) were killed by the authorities because of it, and never were forced out of their homes and communities because of it. It is ludicrous to argue a mere 30 years later that black people, even those born into democracy, should somehow forget what was done to them and their parents and grandparents.

Politicians and commentators who press the majority of South Africans to “move on” are simply out of touch with the way people think. I was born years after World War 2, but my instincts and my politics and my values are still, irreducibly, formed by it and the experiences of my dad and his friends.

Ramaphosa is obviously playing politics when he makes those accusations, but that is only because he knows it works, and the failure of the opposition to find an effective response in the face of it is scary. Human nature aside, they fail effectively to hold the ANC to account for the things it does that have nothing to do with apartheid. For the vast waste of money in the face of grinding poverty, for the unspeakable waste of food in the face of widespread hunger, for the travesty that passes for management in our public health services.

It wasn’t apartheid that forced Ramaphosa to appoint lemons like

Bheki Cele to police, to put Aaron Motsoaledi in charge of opening our immigration regime to skilled people, or to make Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma responsible for local government. A small sampling, but he chose them all on his own, and they have all spectacularly failed. Crime has got worse, it takes years to bring just one skilled human into the country, and local government everywhere is a disaster.

The ANC’s greatest failure has been to disregard the complexity of almost everything. It thought running a sophisticated economy in a highly unequal society would be easy. I remember Ramaphosa visiting Eskom just 10 years ago and calling it a “glorious” institution as he stepped out of his car. I remember Malusi Gigaba airily telling me as public enterprises minister in 2010 that if the Treasury wouldn’t give him money to expand Transnet and Eskom he would simply “leverage” their balance sheets — that is, he would get them to raise money themselves.

But he then unwittingly and ignorantly proceeded to begin bankrupting them instead. He thought they were robust but, like all businesses do, they stood even back then on very brittle foundations.

Ignorance may be bliss, but in the hands of the powerful it is terrifying. It explains why we keep being promised a fix to Eskom that never appears. It turns out that converting the chemical energy in coal to kinetic energy in a power plant in Mpumalanga, and then into electricity, to then send it thousands of kilometres to switch on a light in Upington is hideously complex.

I don’t care that the electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, is an engineer. He’s a politician first. When he told us Eskom’s biggest problem was leaks in the steel tubing in boilers, it was only half the explanation. Can you guess the total length of the steel boiler tubing Eskom has to maintain?

The answer isn’t funny. It is around 50,000km, longer than the circumference of the earth. Only with deeply expert, regular and diligent maintenance can the boiler tubes not leak. Now that I know this, I can’t see Eskom ever really recovering. Nothing that complex could possibly survive the close attentions of a government as corrupt, conceited and negligent as is the ANC.

But it’s not the corruption. Boilers in Italy work, and the country is hopelessly corrupt. It’s the conceit and the negligence. Neither is the fault of apartheid.