Marikana and Sharpeville

 

One of the great myths of South Africa relates to the massacre at Sharpeville.  Certainly it was a tragedy and should not have happened.  The truth is that a group of young, inexperienced Policemen, badly trained and with the belief that weapons are the solution to many problems, were confronted by thousands of screaming Black ‘rioters’, as it certainly seemed to them.  They lost their nerve, and opened fire on the mob.  The ‘riot’ was not a spontaneous event.  It was organized and incited by politicians who had the secure knowledge that, sooner or later, a tragedy would result, as it did during the Soweto Riots.  And a tragedy did result.  The fact is that the Policemen did not plan to kill the rioters.  The killing resulted because they believed that they were faced with their own deaths if they did nothing.  They panicked, as would most people faced with a seemingly almost certain violent death.

The slaughter at Marikana was a different matter in many ways.  The rioters were called to the hill to protest.  They brought weapons with them, and had already demonstrated by ten killings in earlier days that they were not only willing to use them, but that they intended to use them.  The Police knew of this gathering of armed and potentially violent people – even the South African Police Services must have been aware of ten people having been killed, including two of their own – yet did nothing to stop the situation developing.  Once the riot had reached the point where it seemed to be out of control, the Police, inadequately trained as they were and with no understanding of crowd control, poor discipline and having a background of violence as a solution to any problem, were given a command by a Commissioner of Police to open fire on the crowd.  The fact is that the people killed and injured went to the hill with at least an intention to use the weapons they possessed.  They were ‘treated’ by a witchdoctor, who assured them that they would be invisible to the Police and invincible to the Police weapons.  These are hardly the acts of a group of peaceful protestors.  The fact is that the Police, eighteen years into an ANC Government, do not have the capabilities or training to handle the situation adequately and with minimum force.  The fact is that the Commissioner of Police, the Commander of the Police Force, had no understanding of the basic principles of policing in such a situation and was not competent to undertake the task.  The whole situation is a mess.  The tragedy of Marikana would have happened, if not there, then elsewhere.  If things do not improve, it will happen again. 

Unfortunately, that describes the situation in much of Government in South Africa.  People have been appointed to senior positions, in which they have considerable power for good or for bad, without any understanding or experience to qualify them for that position.  Being a card-holding ANC Member, regardless of the fact that the Ministers believe that they have universal knowledge, is not adequate proof of capability to do a job.  The result of that situation is that many parts of Government in South Africa are either bumbling along or are in the process of imploding.  The structures of Government are in a state that will, in many cases, ensure failure.  There are many good Black Managers in South Africa, but unfortunately, the examples of abjectly bad management are so glaring to the public that the good examples are not seen, and the impression is given that all Blacks in Government positions are ANC stooges.  The recent run of two Police Commissioners and a General of Police being involved in serious criminal allegations has painted so poor a picture of President Zuma’s ability to choose the right man or woman for the job that, inevitably, any new incumbent will be subjected to very careful scrutiny.  The new Commissioner of Police has proved her lack of experience, a lack that has almost certainly led to many unnecessary deaths.  One can only wonder whether she, and also the President, will learn the lessons of Marikana.

The numbers of deaths make Sharpeville a more severe example of the failure of training, but the fact that, in Marikana, a considered order was given to open fire on a mob, against a background of an almost incredible series of Police and Government bungling, makes Marikana a much more serious event.  It is one that will certainly remain in the memory of responsible people as a clear statement of the inability to manage of the Zuma Presidency and the ANC Government, long after they are consigned to the footnotes of the history of South Africa’s decline.

Countering Corruption in South Africa

The State President has stated that the Government will take steps to ensure that the level of corruption in South Africa is reduced.  The Deputy State President of South Africa is on record as demanding that ‘ordinary people’ in South Africa take action to prevent corruption, the scourge that, more than any other, is dragging South Africa into the ranks of other failed newly-independent African States.  One must take him at his word – would a President or a Deputy President lie to the people?

If there is a serious desire in Government to stop the corruption, certain things must be done, in order to make corruption no longer the standard.

There must be an independent body, reporting only to Parliament, whose task it is to identify acts of corruption, investigate them and bring those found to be responsible to trial.  This body must be totally apolitical, not beholden in any way to a sitting Government or to an official of the Government.  It must be entirely free to act as required, and its actions must be publicised in such a way that no person or institution is able to rewrite or edit the reports.

There must be legislation that makes the commission of an act of corruption by a public official a serious crime in every case, with mandatory prison sentences that cannot be reversed, commuted or pardoned, and without the possibility of parole.  Corruption is a crime that should rank alongside treason in terms of the public’s and the Court’s standards of disapprobation.  The seriousness of the crime should be multiplied by the level of the person found guilty of it.  Corruption of a petty clerk is certainly less serious that the corruption practiced by a State President, and this seriousness should be applied to the sentence.  In every case, the funds lost to corruption, calculated in the widest sense, should be recovered from any party found guilty to such corruption, whether or not that person benefited directly from the corruption, and regardless of the amount of the benefit obtained by that party.  A person who pays a bribe is equally guilty of the corruption as the person who receives it, and any person who negotiates a bribe, or other form of corruption, should bear an equal responsibility for the entire act.

There must be a system that encourages persons who know of corruption to report the facts.  An unconnected whistleblower should be given absolute protection from any form of retribution, possibly to the point of protecting his or her identity even in the trial.  A person who is a participant to the corruption should be given immunity from prosecution in respect of that act of corruption, or any other in respect of which he or she provides adequate and usable evidence.  It is better to punish only one party to a multi-person act than for that act of corruption to remain unpunished!  Any person who is the first to give usable evidence of corruption should be given a substantial reward – say twenty per cent of the fine and of the funds recovered by the State from the guilty party.  If more than one person is involved in bringing the corruption to trial, the reward could be shared between them, or the Court could be given the power to allocate more that the approved amount of the reward, possibly even up to the full amount in each case, depending on the value of the information given and the seriousness of the act of corruption.

The Government must take steps to ensure that any international act of corruption is investigated and brought to trial wherever the parties to it are to be found and where it may have had effect.  This will certainly require new treaties internationally, and it will certainly require an unusual degree of openness in its negotiation.  Any country that does not accept such a treaty or give effect to it should automatically be subjected to trade and other penalties, such as an import duty of all goods derived from such country, and a refusal of entry to any person associated with a proven act of corruption or employed by any company so associated.

Finally, ensure that all discussions and votes relating to the proposed new laws are fully open and available to the public.  Let the Parliamentarians perform their duty to the public in an open way.  Every possible step must be taken to ensure that the Members of Parliament do not subvert their responsibility to the people in the protection of their own interests, as happened so clearly during the Arms Scandal, when Andrew Feinstein, a long-standing ANC member, was forced to resign his Seat in Parliament after he had attempted to go against the will of the then State President and numerous other Members and Ministers in demanding the exposure of all the facts relating to that large-scale theft from the People.

The suggestions set out above will give real meaning to South Africa’s claim to have one of the best Constitutions in the world, and give the country back much of the international status and respect that it has lost in the wake of criminal conduct that remains, in most cases, unpunished.  Unfortunately, they are almost certainly never likely to be implemented.  There are too many criminals running the Government, not only of South Africa, but also of many other countries. 

But would it not be nice for people to be able to say, for once, “My Government represents me!”

New Thinking

Albert Einstein once made the point.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we did when we created them.

We have numerous problems in South Africa: high unemployment, rampant corruption, wealth inequality, low labour productivity, strikes, dishonest government, low levels of investment, incapability of utilities to meet the demand, abysmal education, increasing racial tension, declining food production, and many, many more.  It is difficult, looking at each problem as a single problem, to find a solution that we can rely on.  Each problem, in itself, does not require rocket science to solve.  Yet we seem to be unable to solve them.  The Government produces plan after plan, promise after promise, excuse after excuse.  Caught up in the excitement of the moment, we go along with them, hoping for an improvement, a different outcome, until, one day, it suddenly strikes us!  There will not be an improvement!  We realize that the old saying is true – a definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome.  That is what the Government has been doing for the past fifteen years.  It has an outlook on the world – it would be difficult to define it as a policy! – and its actions to correct the increasingly rapid slide of the country and its citizens into destitution and chaos are all informed by that outlook.  Each action is premised on the views that the ANC is capable of improving the things it has done wrong.  A slightly more cynical view is that each action is taken only when the people at the top can see how they can best benefit from it, in cash, in promotion of the decision-maker in the eyes of the voters or in enabling them to secure their position by means of patrimonial dispensations. 

It is very hard to find any action taken by the Government in the past fifteen years that would have been unpopular amongst the ANC voters, or which would have deprived the nation’s leaders of the opportunity to cash in, in some way.  However, Government is not an easy task.  On many occasions, the leaders of the nation have to take unpopular decisions, to demonstrate that, like a good father, they are acting in the long term benefit of the people they serve, even though the medicine may be unpleasant at the time.  Generally, when a Government is honest with its people, the people act in a responsible way in return.  In the case of South Africa, the only unpopular decisions are those that hurt the minority of voters and benefit the ANC and its associates.

The result of this course of conduct is that many of those who make up the minority have come to believe that there is no hope for them.  They generally would like to see actions implemented that, at best, benefit them but, at worst, do not prejudice them.  When they see that the deck is always loaded against them, they often decide to walk away from the game.  Many Whites, Coloureds, Asians and Blacks have recognised the situation for what it is.  They have seen that there is no hope for them to be able to achieve their potential in South Africa, and they have taken their skills and talents elsewhere.  They are unwilling to compromise their integrity by joining the ANC to become eligible for the hand-out.  Any South African who does business abroad will know that there are numerous of their compatriots in important positions in foreign countries, in management, in the professions, and in their own businesses.  By definition, the people who emigrate are those who are desired by other countries – most destination countries for emigrants do not issue permanent residence or working visas to the unskilled, the indigent and the uneducated.  By definition, the emigrants are the cream of the working society.  They are the people who have given up on the South African dream.  They are the people we desperately need to retain.  Their exodus must surely be a cause for concern in any thinking Government.

Why do these people leave the country of their birth?

They leave because they know that the leaders of the nation are lying to them.  It is clear to anyone who has owned an industrial business or managed a business at the top, that the labour policies of the country are wrong.  Those policies, designed to kowtow to the Cosatu members of the tri-partite alliance, are not capable of creating the large numbers of jobs that the leaders so frequently promise, and just as frequently fail to deliver.

They leave because the statistics are lying to them.  The rate of unemployment is proudly announced to be below 25%.  25%!  In any advanced economy, which South Africa should be, an unemployment rate of 25% would be an excellent reason for the Government to resign en masse, in recognition of its incapability of providing for the people those policies for which they were elected.  However, the Government points proudly to the great achievement of reducing the rate from 25,5% to 24,8%!  What they don’t tell the people, but what is clearly evident to anyone with open eyes, is that of the 100% of employable people, only about 45% have employment or other means of earning an income!  That implies that about 55% of employable people are effectively unemployed!  The reasons are several, starting with an education system that continues to produce an unimaginably poor result, even with an adjustment of the standards to boost the real results to something that the Government imagines will redound to its credit.  Another reason is the very high cost of doing business, particularly in relation to the costs associated with employment, as well as the cost of transport (including the cost of unreliability of the Spoornet service), the cost of the numerous reports to multiple organs of Government, the numerous levies and fees, the cost of having to provide a substantial share of the business to BEE members who do not have the capability of adding in any way to the business, the cost of dealing with devious and plain crooked organs of Government, the cost of providing security that should be the preserve of the Police, and so on and on.

They leave because they see no end to the decline.  Remember, the rats that leave the sinking ship are the smart rats!  They hear the calls from the Deputy President to all South Africans to fight corruption at all levels, and they ask themselves where he was at the time that Thabo Mbeki was working to destroy Democracy by manipulating the Parliament to prevent an enquiry into the Arms Deal corruption.  They see the new Plan presented by Trevor Manuel to grow the economy at a rate of more than 5% per annum in order to reduce unemployment to 6% by 2030, but they don’t see the plans to implement the Plan.  They do the calculations and realise that the planned growth rate, even if the unrealistic bases and the unplanned implementation are ignored, cannot hope to achieve the effect it is aimed at.  They see the approval for the importation of 2 000 Chinese workers to ‘train the local labour force’ in construction (!), knowing how difficult and time-consuming it is to obtain a work permit for a highly-skilled German engineer to fill a gap that the uneducated South Africans cannot, that the Chinese workers will not receive the same wage conditions as the locals, and that they will almost certainly not be repatriated at the end of the two-year contract.  They see the sale of thousands of pieces of rolling stock to China as scrap metal, the ripping up of hundreds of kilometers of railway track and its sale to China as scrap metal, to be followed by an announcement that Spoornet is planning to import billions of Rands of new rolling stock to replace the poor quality Chinese wagons that were bought to replace those sold.  They see Eskom making undertaking after undertaking to increase its capacity, each undertaking having a later completion date and a higher cost, while the cost of manufacture soars with the massive increases in the cost of electricity, the cost of downtime due to the failure of electricity supply escalates and the production for export declines.  They see the President jetting around the world, attending conference after conference, and wonder whether he is doing it to advance the interests of South Africa or of the President.  And all the while, South Africa is slipping from its once pre-eminent position as the Leader of Africa.

They leave because the level of security in the country remains in the ‘hazardous’ area.  Once one has lived in the United States, in Britain or in Europe, one realises just how stressful it is to live in a war zone.  One looks at the evening news and sees a war going on between two Trade Unions for over a week, while the President jets off to attend to the problems of Zimbabwe, the Minister of Mineral Affairs sits in Cape Town, and the newly-appointed Commissioner of Police does a tour of the country while making reassuring statements about the future quality of policing in South Africa, statements that have been made by previous Commissioners of Police who achieved nothing better than to be tried for corruption.  They look at the burglar bars and security doors, and remember the statement by a Minister of State Security that ‘the Whites must be compelled to tear down their security walls because they have forced criminals to the poor areas!’

They leave because their belief in the country has been destroyed.  They leave because their home country has become a laughing stock in the world.  They leave because they no longer trust the politicians who have brought this once-hopeful nation to the point of collapse.

Just as it has taken many East Bloc nations decades to recover from the calamity of Communism, it will take South Africa many decades to recover from the depredations of the ANC and its associates.  The once-proud Party of Nelson Mandela, the leader of the aspirations of so many in the early years of the Rainbow Nation, has degraded to the standard that almost every other African nation achieved.  It has confirmed the belief that the Dark Continent will remain a blighted area.

All of these problems and situations have been created by the policies, and the actions or lack of actions of Government.  It is no longer possible to blame the ‘evils of Apartheid’ for the compounding disasters that threaten the country.  All should know that the vast majority of the Whites want South Africa to be a place that they and their children can live in.  They want the Government to succeed, whether it is an ANC Government, a DA Government, or one made up of a number of parties.  They want an honest, efficient and effective Government, as do the vast majority of every racial group.  Whites and Blacks are all South Africans, regardless of what President Mbeki and his version of the ANC propagated.  It is time to look carefully and brutally honestly at what has been done incorrectly, what the real reasons are for those mistakes and, often, intentional mismanagement, and then to work out what is to be done now. 

As Einstein said,

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we did when we created them.

Driving Away Investment

South Africa is in desperate need of investment, particularly in industrial activities that generate sustainable jobs.  That investment may be by locals, who are subjected to a relatively high degree of ‘binding’ to the country by virtue of their living here, owning assets here and understanding how things work here.  Increasingly, however, these investors are looking elsewhere to make their investments and to establish the factories that will create the jobs.   They are taking their capital, their skills and ingenuity, and their entrepreneurial capability to places which are more welcoming.  They are being driven away by a number of factors.

The other investors, the group that has the potential to make large investments in the country, are less bound to the local scene.  They make a (largely) rational investment decision, taking numerous factors into account, including the long-term safety of their investment, the cost of doing business, and the likelihood of having to solve problems that have nothing or little to do with the business.  These investors have the ability to move their investment to other locations, of which there are plenty, both keen to receive the funds and provide the labour, in return for the benefits those investments generate.  We have looked at some of the cost-related factors that influence the investment decision in previous weeks, but several other factors have been raised very pointedly in the past week by a client who requested an evaluation of the investment climate in five different countries.  The client has a sentimental attachment to South Africa, and was willing to compromise on some of the decision factors in order to make the investment in South Africa.  He was willing to overlook the ‘highwayman attitude’ of the South African Revenue Service, believing that, under new management, that organ of State might have come to believe itself to be bound by the laws and customs common to civilized countries.  He was willing to overlook the fact that the Government is becoming more clearly anti-Europe in its apparent desire to cosy up to the Chinese.  He was more uncomfortable in regard to the high cost of labour, but was willing to accommodate that by increasing the level of automation in the factory in order to cut the number of jobs from the planned 182 to 127, although that involved a substantial additional capital cost in setting up the business unit.  (Those figures were the labour component at commencement of business – the planned total staffing stood at 423 within two years of commencement.)  What drove the decision not to invest in South Africa was the combination of riots blocking the road from the airport into Cape Town, the war between opposing unions on the mines, and the threat by the ANC Youth League to “make the (Western Cape) Province ungovernable”.  The decision was made en route from the airport to Cape Town not to invest in South Africa, now, and for as long as the governing Party is unable to assure the company of a stable situation.

A large investment in an economy such as that of South Africa has a Multiplier Effect far beyond the money inflow and the immediate number of jobs created.  Projects to create jobs in other economies has shown that each job created directly has the potential, if the situation is managed correctly, to create at least eight additional jobs through the economic effects it puts in train.  In a depressed economy such as that of the Eastern Cape, it is quite possible to increase that Multiplier Effect factor to twelve or fifteen – in other words, for each job created directly, the total number of jobs able to be created can be as many as sixteen!  For those who do not know the figures, it is realistic to place a capital cost on each new job created at approximately $250 000.  The jobs that have been lost to South Africa, in this one decision not to invest, by the actions of the Trade Unions and the Youth League total to nearly 3 000!

It is not only the jobs that have been lost.  The factory aimed to export at least 90% of its production.  It would have produced annual export sales of over R386 000 000 and net profit, taxable, of at least R90 000 000!

The company investment that is described above is only one example of the investments that have been driven away from South Africa.  Taking my own experience of this flood of funds that could have made its way to the country, but failed to do as a result of the numerous failings of Government and the Ruling Party and its constituent parts and allies, there can be no doubt that the loss of investment to South Africa exceeds tens of billions of Rands, and tens of thousands of well-paid, sustainable jobs each year. 

In the current situation in which South Africa is now stagnating, with over a half million jobs lost in the last decade, with a Government which has proven itself either unable or unwilling to do the things essential to take the millions of its citizens out of the poverty trap in which they now find themselves, with a President who considers the need for the status bestowed by a large ‘private’ aircraft to carry him and his minions to the numerous international talk-fests that produce nothing for the people, with a Trade Union component to the ruling Party that is unwilling to countenance any measure that does not result in an increase in its power, and all compounded by a group of politicians who are locked in a struggle to gain or hold onto power at almost any cost, surely the creation of sustainable jobs should enjoy the highest priority?  Surely the politicians, those small men who claim to represent the people of South Africa while they are enriching themselves, can see that the greatest benefit to all, including themselves, can be achieved by ensuring that the economy grows?

The ANC Youth League and the Trade Unions have achieved in this New Democracy what years of sanctions were unable to achieve against the Apartheid Government.  They have succeeded in making South Africa a place where even its friends would rather not be.

Thabo Mbeki - Does he have a Role to Play?

There has been much discussion recently about Thabo Mbeki, with many commentators raising the view that he is an erudite man with experience in African politics.  Many have commented that he was 'recalled' unjustly, and should have been allowed to serve the balance of his Presidency.  What is remarkable is that it appears that Mbeki’s greatest failings have been forgotten, and only the better qualities are now remembered.  This is entirely understandable in the light of the performance of his successor, but it is a mistake to judge a disastrous President by the standards of a bad President.  Before the people of South Africa get carried away on a wave of enthusiasm for Mbeki, they should recall some of the points for which ex-President Mbeki was responsible.

There are two main matters, either of which, when measured against the standards of Nelson Mandela, or any Leader of a civilized nation, stand out as glaring disasters.

Thabo Mbeki, for all his erudition, insisted that AIDS was not the cause of death.  He, together with two Ministers of Health, refused to consider the introduction of a system of treatment that would minimise the AIDS crisis, insisting that eating potatoes and garlic would cure the disease.  He will be remembered for many years for his speech, declaring to the people that “AIDS is a syndrome, you do not die from a syndrome!”  The result of that disastrous stance, contrary to the views of the vast majority of experts, was that hundreds of thousands of AIDS victims were condemned to die, and remains the cause for South Africa presently being the home of the greatest number of AIDS infectees in the world.  This stance, in the view of many, is tantamount to genocide.  On this ground alone, Thabo Mbeki should be relegated to the garbage heap of history, together with others like Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and more recent perpetrators of mass killings like Robert Mugabe.  It is not unusual to hear the view that a man of Mbeki’s erudition could not have been as disastrously out of step with practically all informed opinion, that he saw the AIDS crisis as being a convenient way to solve the problem of unemployment.  This, if correct, would certainly brand him as insane, a view which does not appear now to hold water.  The question remains, however, how an intelligent, educated leader of one of the world’s great nations (then!) could have adopted a policy that was, even at that time, so out of line with science and public opinion.

Thabo Mbeki cannot be forgotten to have officiated over one of the nation’s greatest wastes of public money for the purpose of the gross enrichment of a few politically-connected elite.  The Arms Deal of the 1990s, seen in the light of attempts by a few ANC, IFP and DA politicians to cast light on the real machinations behind the decisions, was initiated in a desire to transfer huge sums of public money to private bank accounts, creating a massive expenditure on items that were of no value to the public, that made the country a laughing stock throughout the developed world, and that brought the scorn even of the suppliers of the munitions involved in the deal on the very politicians who were stealing from the public.  The senior Manager of one of the suppliers has been heard in public repeatedly referring to Mbeki and his Cabinet colleagues as ‘jungle bunnies!’  Mbeki ensured that no meaningful discussion of the transactions and the decisions behind them could take place in Parliament, the home of the ‘Democracy’ that is espoused by the ANC as the centrepoint of its policies and achievement.  He was supported in this by numerous Cabinet colleagues and even by Speaker Ginwala, a woman who would otherwise have gone down in history as a person of high moral value, and by the institutions of Democracy, such as the Auditor General.  By his conduct, Mbeki proved to the world that the ‘New South Africa’ was firmly on the path to becoming just another failed African banana republic, headed by a succession of crooked and incompetent presidents.  By his failure to uphold the noble principles of the ANC, Mbeki opened the door to the enormously high levels of corruption that the country is now experiencing.  By the example that he set, Mbeki has put the Party and the country on the path to jubilant support of convicted criminals, to their ‘deployment’ in high office once they are released after serving only a small fraction of their sentences.  By his example, Mbeki has shown that wrong, immoral and self-serving behaviour, whether criminal or verging on it, is the right standard for the newly-democratic populace to aspire to.

One cannot forget that it was Mbeki who chose the path of ‘quiet diplomacy’ that enabled Robert Mugabe to entrench his position as one of the most depraved leaders of Africa.  At a time when Mbeki had the opportunity to show the way to real democracy, he chose to take a soft line with Mugabe, setting him up as an example that the young now aspire to.  The repeated restatement of policies espoused by Mugabe and his Government, such as ‘expropriation without compensation’ and ‘nationalisation of the land’ mouthed in recent years by ignorant populists such as Julius Malema were given birth by Mbeki, the man who single-handedly destroyed the esteem that the Western World held for the ANC of Nelson Mandela.

One can also not forget that it was Mbeki who set the tone for the semi-dictatorship that the ANC Government has become, stifling all debate that might have brought a conclusion other than the one he wanted, even though that ‘want’ was no more than the result of it being the one that he had first formulated without the benefit of discussion, a process that is one of the foundations of a real democracy.  It seems likely, as South Africa drifts increasingly towards the Stalinist form of Communism, that that ‘quality’ of Mbeki is one that will earn the disapprobation of all thinking people in the years to come.

The Fish Stinks from the Head

The education crisis in South Africa is only one of the many crises in Government in the country.  Citizens have become so used to reading of the latest crisis that they have become inured to the situation.  If text books had not been distributed until eight months after the start of the school year in Germany, the Government would have fallen.  Education is one of the most important functions performed by Government in any country, and particularly so in a country like South Africa, where many of the downstream problems can be traced back to the very poor education of the mass of the people.  The fact that a significant proportion of the country’s Education Departments have shown conclusively that they are incapable of performing this important task must give cause for serious concern at all levels of society, from the child at school, receiving an inferior education and so being condemned by the Government to a life of continuing poverty, to the President, who has shown repeatedly his inability to manage a Government, resorting instead to ‘Second Transitions’ and blaming the ‘legacy of Apartheid’ for the failings.

It has become normal for crises to arise: the failure of Eskom to provide a secure and affordable supply of power, the failure of Spoornet to provide efficient long-distance transport to mines, forestry and industry, leading to overloading of the roads system and a failure of South Africa to benefit from the minerals boom of recent years, the failure of the Departments of Health to ensure that the Clinics have adequate stocks of even the most basic medications, the failure of the municipalities to pass an audit test that, in almost any other country would be viewed as the most basic requirement of responsibility of Government to the electorate or even, in some cases, to submit to the audit, the failure of the Police system to manage the honesty of its Commissioners, the failure of the Roads Agency to maintain and develop the excellent road system that the apartheid Government left behind, turning rather to handing toll road contracts at exorbitant cost to Party favourites.

All of this is happening at a time when the President is flitting around the world, doing deals that, in many cases, are not entirely clear.  Like his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, President Zuma seems to have abdicated his responsibility to manage the Government at home in order to devote his efforts to foreign relationships or, when he is actually in the country, to building his power base for re-election at Mangaung.  What is clear is that there is no management at the top.

The causes of the recurrent crises are clear. 

There is no insistence on adequate performance, never mind the good performance that South Africa desperately needs to grow internally and to remain a leader in Africa.  It is not possible to demand excellent performance from employees that are selected largely on the basis of carrying the Party Card.  Selecting management from a field of candidates who are, by definition, political animals, is a sure blueprint for management mediocrity.  Failing to discipline and, if necessary, to punish those who do not perform is a guarantee that the incumbents of critical positions in the functioning of Government do not see good performance as an extremely important job requirement.  The shifting of dishonest Party members from the scene of their putative humiliation to another, frequently higher-paid, position can only encourage the view that brown-nosing the Party bosses is the one requirement for success in one’s career in Government.

There is no leadership by example at the top of Government.  Jacob Zuma must rank close after Robert Mugabe as the most criticised leader of a country.  It would be a sensation in Germany if even an indirect aspersion were to be made on Angelika Merkel’s honesty or integrity, yet Jacob Zuma is known, more than for his leadership qualities, by the fact that he manoeuvred past several criminal charges immediately before ascending to the Presidency, and by the fact that both he and his family members are constantly involved in the sort of allegations of corruption that would bring down any Government that considered itself to be responsible to the People.  There is no indication in any communication from the Presidency that the President is either willing or able to take quick and firm corrective action in the event of any incompetence or corruption within the Government. 

There is a reliance on excuses and on misdirecting explanations.  In an interview after his State of the Nation address to Parliament in 2011, President Zuma gave a list of the failings of the ANC Government in its years at the helm of the nation.  He mentioned failure after failure, adding that the Government was taking steps to correct them, but, remarkably, he did not once apologise to the electorate for these failings of his Government and his Party.  On the contrary, during the National Policy Conference of the ANC, he went to great lengths to explain how the legacy of the past had now produced a situation in which the poor and the deprived, a number that has grown dramatically since the AN took power, must wait a further fifty years while the ANC tries new ways to do the job that any competent Government in a civilised country would see as everyday work.

While the country is slipping, in its ability to generate jobs, to attract foreign investment, in its leadership of Africa, and in its ability to play a meaningful part in the modern world, the ANC panders ever more to the demands of the South African Communist Party, which seeks to recreate a system that has been proven convincingly to be both destructive of democracy and incapable of satisfying the needs of the citizens, and COSATU, an organisation that has stated that the risks taken by entrepreneurs in creating employment and wealth for the people, are of little account.

The Dutch have a saying:  The fish stinks from the head.  Any competent Management Consultant will know that when an organisation is not performing to its level of capability, the first place to take corrective action is at leadership level.  If an employee is not performing, it is most likely that that employees supervisor is at least equally at fault, either for not managing that employee, or for failing to provide the leadership, the monitoring, control, discipline and corrective action to ensure that the employee does the best job of which he or she is capable.  If the supervisor is not performing, that supervisor’s manager is most likely also to blame.  And so it goes up the line to the man at the top.  In a situation in which the man responsible for delivering the textbooks to the schools in Limpopo fails to do that job, particularly where the education system has already been under close scrutiny and criticism for its failure to perform effectively, the Minister of Education must be held responsible.  Where that Minister is arrogant enough to deny any responsibility, the President, the man who appointed her to that most important position, must accept responsibility for the failure of his management.  If he is not capable of ensuring that the most high-profile jobs in his administration are performed adequately, there must surely be doubt about his capability to lead the Nation to the success it is capable of achieving.  South Africa can not afford politicians of the calibre of Mr Zuma or of most of the Ministers who hold their posts not because they are capable of doing the job, but because their appointment is designed to ensure the re-election of the President.

The fish stinks from the head.