Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Zuma didn’t have a snowball’s hope in hell
Faced with bad news and competing constituencies, the president’s speech lacked pep
IN SOME ways you had to feel for President Jacob Zuma.
It was an impossible assignment before he even sat down to write a speech that had to address multiple audiences who have not, since apartheid, been further apart.
On the one hand, his own people, and particularly the ANC’s core constituency of poor and working-class, mostly black citizens, hurting already from unemployment and now rapidly rising cost of living, who know things are about to get worse.
They needed something from the president he was unable to give; the hope this time would be different.
On the other, the business and investor community for health insurance and comprehensive social security, and angered by progress in policy areas like pension reform and the employment tax incentive.
Add to this the frustrations of black businesspeople struggling to get a foothold in the market and itching for the government to crack open the monopolies that squeeze the life out of their ventures before they even get off the ground.
Top it off with the rows of ANC MPs seated in front of him, silently asking themselves why they had to sacrifice so much of their honour to defend a president who had no hesitation in pulling the rug out from under them the moment it became clear his own interests were under threat.
Not to mention the opposition, baying for his blood.
Out on the streets, the country’s divisions played out in a spectacle of defiance against the might of the state. It said more about the state of the nation than the president had to offer.
It was an impossible speech to give in desperate times and few believed he could pull it off. He duly blew it. For once, the EFF got a bit clumsy, dragging out their hectoring of the president to the point of becoming boring, when usually they are everything but.
But Zuma was so uninspiring that, in the end, it may not have mattered. He said one or two important things.
That he has now personally committed to testing the market before proceeding with his nuclear ambitions and that this will happen only at a “scale and pace that our country can afford”, not only rules out the risk of a fiscal train smash, but probably puts paid to the project altogether.
He had some strong words for state- owned enterprises, saying they “must be properly governed and managed” and threatening to let go of those no longer relevant to the developmental agenda, but this was too vague to be meaningful.
The presidential review on SOEs he mentioned was accepted by the cabinet almost three years ago and, though it calls for the elaboration of an overarching strategic vision for parastatals, it doesn’t contain one.
It might be expedient – necessary – right now to get some of the parastatal debt off the government’s balance sheet, but that doesn’t resolve the tension between their developmental mandates and their financial sustainability.
Neither the review committee nor the National Development Plan have spelled out a clear mechanism for the appointment of SOE boards.
Zuma could have ignited a surge of confidence in his government’s commitment to sound governance by announcing a transparent process for future board appointments, but he let it go, feigning deafness when the DA responded to his platitudes about sound management with the jibe, “No more girlfriends”, in reference to the rumours about his relationship with SAA board chairwoman Dudu Myeni.
He was equally vague about the government’s intended response to the higher education crisis and the fit of racist incidents besetting society.
Faced with all these competing choices, Zuma came down on the side of the group that has most recently demonstrated its power – business.
Still reeling from the humbling experience of having to recall Pravin Gordhan to the finance ministry, Zuma made all the right noises to reassure investors. Only, even here, he didn’t go far enough, offering the same recipe of cuts in wasteful expenditure, only deeper this time, that Gordhan had introduced years before.
Moving Parliament to Pretoria would take years and cost a fair amount in the short term, too. It is little more than a distraction from the mismatch between the government’s means and its fiscal commitments, which will remain.
What the president needed to do, if he were serious about uniting the country behind an effort to kickstart economic growth, was to explain how this would be made to benefit everyone. He took a stab at it, saying when the economy grew fast it delivered jobs and workers earned wages.
“The tax base expands and allows government to increase the social wage and provide education, health, social grants, housing and free basic services,” Zuma said.
He could have sewn all the competing interests he faced into one narrative about where the country was going but he didn’t have the imagination.
craig.dodds@inl.co.za