There are
some lessons to be learned by the ANC and the ANC Government from the Proteas,
the South African cricket team.
·
The
Proteas are a team. They have a Captain
who does not impose his ego or his demands, but works together with the entire
team to achieve their objectives.
·
They
have a plan, carefully worked out in the light of the objectively considered
facts. Their plan is not based on
ideology or other irrelevant factors, but on the Facts and on the
objectives. The ANC, in contrast, has a
plethora of plans, based on inherited and untested, or, even worse, tested and
failed, ideologies. The plans are worked
out, promoted, and then packed away, to be called on before the next
elections. In that way it is seldom
possible for an opponent to claim that the plans have been a failure. There are, of course, exceptions to this
rule. The alteration of the education
system has been shown conclusively to be an abject failure, but successive
revisions have been described as ‘improvements’, although repeated experience has
revealed no benefit, with South African education amongst the worst in the
world and the most expensive. The Black
Empowerment is another example of a plan that has failed, and continues to fail
even after numerous iterations of ‘improvement’. It is clear to any intelligent observer that
the BEE policies have created a massive brain drain, not only amongst Whites,
who are the target of this Apartheid system, but amongst all intelligent
people, who can see the probable results of this suppression of enterprise,
intelligence and capability. The result
has been the advancement of people with lower skills and abilities, some of
them with lower morals, at higher cost to the employer in order to attract even
the marginally capable talent, and at a huge cost to the competitive capability
of the economy and the ability to develop entrepreneurial capability. This is not an issue of race. It is a well-accepted fact that the skills of
senior management are developed and honed over a progression of talented
individuals through the ranks over a period of decades.
·
The
Proteas accept responsibility for their actions and their failures. They cannot blame their failures on the ‘previous
team’ for their actions twenty years ago, and the thought of that is totally
foreign to the Captain of the team. They
know that they have a current situation, and they act to achieve their
objectives in that situation.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the ANC, who have taken to
blaming the acts of the Dutch settlers in 1652 for their failures today. It is interesting that they have not yet blamed
the actions of Shaka Zulu, a bloodthirsty tyrant who slaughtered thousands of ‘enemies’,
friends and family on his way to becoming the hero of the Zulu nation.
·
The
Proteas have clear objectives. They do
not delay the implementation of their plans while the Captain decides on how to
maximise the payoff of their actions, and they do not spend time coming to
agreement on who is to participate from that payoff.
·
The
Proteas are a team. Each accepts
responsibility for the performance of themselves and of the whole team, and
they own up to their failures. The ANC
consists of a group of self-seeking individuals, who are together mainly for
what they can take from the fact that they are part of a Party in power. They give no thought to the cost of their
misconduct or dissimulation to the people they nominally serve, but, instead, put
in a huge amount of effort to hide those actions from the electorate. Examples are the Chair of the SABC, who hid
her lack of degrees, and who reinstated the CEO when he was found to have lied
about his qualification (ironically), the Chair of the Independent Electoral
Commission, who handed a large profit to her boyfriend, the Commissioner of
Police, who chose the route of corruption to enrich himself and bring the
country into disrepute and disgrace, the State President, who hangs onto power
in the face of a finding by an internationally respected Public Protector that
he, in effect, took money from the State to which he was not entitled, a
Revenue Service which conducts its business in a fraudulent and corrupt way,
and many other.
·
Most
significantly, the Proteas are a group of people who command and deserve
respect, a claim that the ANC has forfeited many years ago.
South
Africans are proud to have the Proteas as their representatives. Few of them have the same pride in their
Government
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