Correcting the Errors of the Past

Imagine a large corporation, employing thousands of people.  The corporation is headed by a Managing Director, who is assisted by several Divisional Managers, and so on, down the organisation structure.  There are millions of Shareholders, who attend a Shareholders General Meeting regularly, listen to the report of the Managing Director on the state of the company, then go off to discuss what they have heard with the media.

The individual Shareholders have a minimal input into the operation of the corporation, and are subjected to the heavy propaganda put out by the Public Relations organisation of the corporation, which has many years of experience in manipulating the opinion of the Shareholders and the public, and a long history of being the ‘only game in town’ in respect of its product range.

Over the years, the corporation, which was never really efficient or effective in its operations, but which had ridden on the wave of its PR, became less efficient and less profitable (or more expensive, depending on how you look at it!).   The Shareholders became restive, demanding that their interests be better protected, and the customers started looking to other suppliers.  The Managing Director and the Divisional Managers denied any wrongdoing, repeating over and over that the problems had been caused by the previous management, which had been ousted nearly twenty years earlier.  They instituted new rules, preventing the workers in the company from talking to the Press, and the PR Department went into high gear, calling on the names of heroes from the company’s past, and providing a clear identification between them and the current management.  Still, the incompetence and the corruption of the present management grew, becoming more visible as Divisional Managers were found by the Press to have stolen from the company, or to have managed their whole divisions so badly that they were in danger of collapsing and brining the entire edifice down with them.  Eventually, the Shareholders General Meeting took place again, and, this time, the Shareholders felt that their interests had been so badly mismanaged that they rolled up en masse to vote in a new Managing Director and Board of Directors.  These people took their offices seriously, realising that they had no right to the positions other than the rights given them by the Shareholders, and they set to work, replacing the dishonest, the ineffective and the corrupt members of the company.  It required many years of dedicated work to undo the errors of the past, to institute a training program that enabled the new workers to become effective employees, to build the capital of the company back to the point where it was no longer the ‘basket case’ of its industry, to re-establish the trust of the lenders and the joint venture partners in the honesty and integrity of the company and its top management.

Does this story ring any bells?

The African National Congress was established with honourable intentions.  It made a number of mistakes in its progress to maturity, including allying itself with the Communists, which told a seductive story with the purpose of gaining control of a potentially valuable piece of real estate.  It came to power, not in a bloody revolution, as it now increasingly claims, but in a controlled handover by a White majority that no longer had a fear of domination by the Russian Communists, a government that had committed acts of terror against its own citizens on a scale that made the tyranny of Hitler seem almost insignificant.  It took power in an atmosphere of confidence, the people believing that the opportunity had now come to correct the many errors made in the past.

It did not take long for the new Government to realise that it had been handed a cornucopia of personal wealth.  The top people set to work with a will, to appropriate to themselves as much of the wealth of the country as they could.  This attitude spread rapidly down the ranks, as numerous cadres were rewarded for their membership of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and Cosatu by the means of cadre deployment.  The institutions that had enabled the National Party, representing a very small proportion of the citizens of the nation, to build a strong economy even in the face of world disapproval, were dismantled or allowed to fall into disrepair under the management of incompetent and dishonest people.  The economy started to crumble, first in less obvious, longer-term ways, such as the health care system, where once-proud hospitals were stripped of their capabilities to become ghosts of what they had once been and the training of nurses was almost abandoned, the educational system, where an untried and untested new system was introduced with disastrous results and where the experienced teachers were retrenched to bring in new cadres who had little understanding of education or management of an educational system, the Atomic Energy Corporation, a world-class nuclear research establishment, where the scientists were dismissed to go to Iran, North Korea and other potential danger areas) and the assets were stripped and sold at give-away prices in order to realise the commissions to cadres, Eskom, where the failure to understand the necessity of maintenance and continued investment brought about a near-collapse of the economy which is now in the process of correction with massive price hikes that are resulting in the country losing its previous standing as a favoured industrial investment location, in Spoornet, where the sale of thousands of wagons as scrap steel (again to realise a commission to a cadre) brought about a massive decline in the capability of the mining, forestry and other industries to be competitive on an international scale, in the Police Service, where crooked Commissioners were appointed in order to protect the top politicians from investigation and the Crime Intelligence Service was turned onto the political enemies of the elite, in the labour system, where the demands of Cosatu have been allowed to run rampant, bringing practically all sectors of the productive economy into a state of uncompetitiveness and forcing unemployment to levels that exist only in declining Third World economies, in the Department of Public Works, where the disease of corruption has become endemic while the capability to perform the necessary works has dropped to an all-time low, in the South African Revenue Services, where the morality now appears to permit a system of demand, enforce and collect, even where the demand has no basis in law, in the Department of Defence, where the military capability of the country had declined to the point where it is only marginally capable of undertaking a peace-keeping role in a foreign country, to the Courts, where the case load has grown, in some cases, to over two years while under-qualified and under-managed Judges sometimes fail to deliver their judgements for many months, to the universities where law graduates are unable to write, even to read, effectively.  The list goes on and on.  Even within the Party, allegations abound of purges of ‘elements opposed to the Leadership’, and joint Press conferences of the top leadership are held to give the impression that the Party enjoys internal unity!  The same allegations are made of the South African Communist Party, where branches are disbanded without clear and credible reasons being given.

It is safe to say that South Africa, under the ruling Tri-Partite Alliance, is heading down the same road of corruption, mismanagement and incompetence that led to the ruin of so many other African countries.  The only question is whether the ‘Shareholders’ of the country, the voters, will see past the smoke and mirrors that the ruling Party is putting up, and decide to elect a new group of people to run  the country in the businesslike way it deserves.  In the same way as the Managing Director who fails to manage his company must resign, so should the President, in the same way as the Directors fail to perform their duties to protect the interests of the Shareholders resign, so too should the Ministers resign.

If the ANC is to have any honour in the future, the Party must now accept that it has failed to perform its duties over the past eighteen years.  It must accept that lame excuses are no substitute for performance.  It must accept that it has moved away from being the Party of hope to being the Party of division, between the races, and between the classes.

Finally, it must accept that it does not have the qualities that are needed to manage a sophisticated modern economy in a dynamic, non-racial world.