President Ramaphosa and the Covid-19 Crisis

Not all that long ago, Cyril Ramaphosa was viewed as a reasonably competent manager, even if somewhat pedestrian in his decision-making and childish in his aspirations, as evidenced by his Wakanda new city plans, and his aspiration to teach every school pupil to code, where it is known that a high proportion of schoolchildren are not able to read with understanding and most children, not to mention teachers, are at a very low standard in mathematics.

Unfortunately, the continued experience gained by the public of Ramaphosa over the time he has been President have exposed many of his weaknesses. That has come into stark clarity during his mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis. As an experienced businessman, we would have expected Ramaphosa to understand that important decisions need to be made after careful consideration of expert advice. That has not happened. Just as Mbeki did during the early phases of the AIDS crisis, he seems to have locked in the advice of a group, perhaps only a few, ‘experts’, ignoring the views of others, particularly those of the public. This is clear in regard to the ban on cigarettes and liquor, where he has chosen not to permit the public access to the information or the reasoning process on which the decision was made.

The very name of the ‘Command Council’ gives a clue to the mindset: it is dictatorial, the action of a group of people who have no need to submit their deliberations to the scrutiny of an elected Parliament, no matter how feeble and emasculated that body may have become under ANC rule. This is certainly not the way one would expect an enlightened, confident and capable manager to act. The example of Angela Merkel provides an example of how he should have acted.

As an experienced manager and director of large companies, Ramaphosa should have the ability to understand when he can trust what he is being told, and what he should view as a sycophantic giving of information to please him. That is an important quality of any manager, and it is critically important in managing the response of a country to a pandemic, which has the potential to cost the lives of thousands of citizens, all of whom are entitled to rely on the capability of the elected President to make decisions that are well-considered and effective, in the light of facts.

Ramaphosa claimed at the outset of the lockdown that the purpose of it was to give the Health Service the opportunity to prepare for the crisis. That alone is a little naïve, given that the government knew, or should have known, early in January that the pandemic would be life-threatening. It should have started making the preparations at that time. It did not. The result of that failing has been that the hospital services, already at breaking point after 26 years of incompetent and corrupt cadre misrule, is now likely not to be able to handle the rush of patients. That level of incompetence seems to have prevailed until now. Two months ago, Ramaphosa visited the Eastern Cape ‘to check on the state of preparedness of the Province’. During that visit, he expressed his pleased satisfaction that the ‘Province was well-prepared’ for the encroaching crisis. That was patently incorrect, either as a result of his inability to investigate the matter correctly, or simply a political assurance, to avoid any political fallout. In either event, it amounts to criminal negligence on the part of a man whom that the public has a right to trust. The Province is not now prepared for the crisis, and was plainly never prepared. Ramphosa’s well-publicised endorsement of the performance of his Party in the Eastern Cape was wrong and misleading, and it came after 25 years of Press reports regarding the incompetence and corruption in that Province. Surely, that alone would have prompted any reasonable manager to interrogate the situation thoroughly. Ramaphosa failed to do so.

The prime requirement of a manager is that he manages. The antics of the members of the Cabinet, and more recently of the members of the ‘Command Council’, each going his or her own way, prove conclusively that Ramaphosa does not manage: he passes on the decisions made by the ANC NEC (a body that has no standing in the legislative or regulatory framework of the government under any law, but which is certainly the de facto government of the country). Ramaphosa’ s conduct in this regard is clearly in breach of his duties under the Constitution and his Oath of Office. His dereliction of his duties is clearly visible in the actions of Dlamini Zuma, in contradicting his statements on tobacco, and in the excesses of Cele and Mbalula. The fact that he would simply ignore the breaches of the law by the taxi industry in loading to 100% of capacity and crossing Provincial boundaries is clear evidence of that, as is his caving into the demands of the taxi bosses in forking out a subsidy of R!,2 billion, at a time when practically every industry is under existential threat as a result of his bungling of the Covid-19 crisis, without any form of support by the government.

Another vital capability of any manager is the ability to plan. Clearly Ramaphosa does not plan. The ‘Command Council’ has lurched from one self-made crisis to another, making ad hoc decisions and reversing them, and never bringing the public into its confidence. The rationale behind many of the incomprehensible decisions, if, in fact, there is a rationale, is conceived in dark rooms and edicts are issued.

Virtually every aspect of Ramphosa’s performance, or lack of it, since the coronavirus struck, casts doubt on his ability to be the President. The only comparison that is positive is that he has probably been better than Zuma would have been.

Surely South Africa deserves better.

It is Time to Go Back to Fundamentals

South Africa is in a crisis. It has been in a crisis for several years, with successive administrations chasing their unproven or disproven ideologies, conducting experiments designed to prove that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and structuring the State to facilitate fraud on a large scale. Even before the Coronavid-19 crisis struck, the country was in a parlous state, with unemployment at record levels and increasing steadily, school performance among the worst in the advanced world, the country’s ranking for economic performance among its peers in the developing world at record lows and declining, the finances of the country in the worst state for decades, and no reprieve in sight. The pandemic struck a country that was in the worst possible condition.

In a way, the pandemic, although hugely destructive in many ways, may present South Africa an opportunity to hit the Reset button, and grab at an opportunity to retake the place it held in the civilized world before lunatic policies and governing Party-institutionalised corruption dealt it such devastating blows. Tito Mboweni has recognised the need, stating that the Treasury should develop a Budget based on a zero-base process. He is fully aware that tweaking the existing Budget will not correct the many problems he, and the country, face. This would be an exercise in futility, a repositioning of the deck chairs on the ship of State as it sails at full power into the iceberg.

The first step in correcting any problem situation is to recognise what the real problems are, and where the country would like to be. A roadmap is useless until you know where you are on it, and where you want to go. This should be done in a dispassionate, non-accusatory way, so that the participants in the exercise are not compelled to defend their territory. The process of coming to a statement of where we are now must include theoretical and practical economists, businesspersons from large, medium and small businesses and people who are affected by the conditions, such as housewives, teachers, students and taxpayers, both active and retired. It is vitally important to have a balance of views. Nothing could be more destructive to the process than to have a preponderance of radical views, as is almost always the case when a committee of politicians and political advisors is convened. If you need to be convinced of the truth of this, look at the state of the South African economy! One cannot imagine that the ANC would be so delusional as to believe that it could benefit from the imposition of policies that would be certain to destroy the economy.

Once we know, realistically, where we are, we need to define where we want to go. At this point it will be almost impossible to avoid the political rhetoric and electioneering slogans, but a factual statement of the basics may help to define our desires. We could, for example, say that we desire to reach a state of 3% unemployment within ten years. The question then arises: employment in what? Let us say that we want the economy, in terms of GDP representation, to be 5% mining, 20% agriculture, 30% services and 45% industry. We can then break these desires down in terms of categories, and from these derive the growth needs to reach the targets. These, in turn, will generate the requirements, the absolute necessities, in terms of investment, education and training, infrastructure, labour conditions and so on. It will be a complex exercise, made more so by the need to avoid expressing the desires in terms of political aspirations and existing policies, but the exercise will be a valuable one, highlighting the actual needs, as opposed to what preconceived and often wish-list policies dictate.

When this work is complete, and not before, we can start formulating the wish-list, the configurations of the economy that we would like to have in the desired state, in accordance with the Constitution, and disregarding any other existing policy and legal imperatives and structures. We could, for example, desire an open economy, attractive to foreign investment, with equal opportunity to all its citizens and as much of the work as possible being done by private enterprise. It will be essential at this stage to ignore the past policies, because many people will see these as the only possible way, while others will view them as anathema. This wish-list will then be applied to the desired state and an assessment be made of how feasible it will be to achieve both the desired outcome and the desired form. Revisions and re-evaluations will ensue, until the majority accept that the statement is both comprehensive and realistic in terms of the South African scene and the world economy.

We will now be in a position to formulate plans to achieve the desired state. A combination of the desired shape of the GDP with the gap in number of qualified potential employees will result in an education outcome, and from that we can formulate the plans for a change in the education and training system. Similar changes will result in practically every area of economic activity. This must be done ruthlessly. Changes will bring pain to the participants in the existing structures, but this must be viewed as inevitable if we are to achieve the desired state. Some pain results from every change, but changes are essential if we are to move forward. The pain that we identify can be mitigated by plans to retrain and redeploy those affected. For example, it is clear that the civil service is overstaffed, underqualified and inefficient. When we know the necessary minimum configuration of the civil service, a performance evaluation can be performed to determine who is both capable of doing a meaningful job in their position and is actually doing it at an acceptable level. Those identified as being good in their present jobs will be retained or transferred to a similar job elsewhere, where a need is shown. Those who do not perform adequately can be put on a ‘B List’, while those who perform acceptably but whose jobs are no longer required, will be put on an ‘A List’. The A List can be offered a total retrenchment package, for example, of a value equal to their retrenchment packages plus, say, 12% plus benefits for a year, which can be drawn down as the interest on a loan to be advanced by the government plus a monthly salary, and they can be given leave of absence for three months to put together a business before the arrangement comes into effect. They will be supported in their efforts by a team of qualified experts in their chosen field and provided with retraining they may need. In this way, they will be given an opportunity to establish a business that, for example, is able to tender for the activities that they previously undertook as employees, or any other business. Of course, any attempt at illegally influencing the granting of tenders would disqualify them from the scheme. In this way, a large number of small businesses will be able to be established. Those on the B List will simply be retrenched on the normal terms, although they could be introduced to the business establishment support teams, or to retraining programs.

The restructure of the economy will require considerable changes to existing laws, probably including the BEE laws, the labour laws restricting the employment of workers, the generalization of Union settlements to non-participating employers and the setting of minimum wages, the laws entrenching tribal kings and chiefs in a position of almost unfettered power over their ‘subjects’ at high cost to the fiscus and the economy, the laws establishing numerous inefficient and economically non-productive bodies, and many others, as well as the passing of new laws to ensure that the civil service does its designated work honestly, efficiently and at lowest cost. Included in the latter could be laws that increase the penalties for dishonesty by 50% in the case of a person in a position of trust, such as a Mayor taking a bribe to allocate a contract illegally, or a bank director defrauding the depositors. This would underline the need for adherence to the doctrine of trust, particularly in elected officials. Other similar laws would penalise attorneys who persist in defending unfairly any person known to them to have committed the criminal act, on the basis that attorneys are officers of the Court, and should be expected to uphold the law, to the extent that they may act only to ensure that the client is given a fair trial. In this context, ‘fair’ should be applied to the client as well as to the prosecutor and the Court.

It is fair to say that a majority of thinking people are dissatisfied with the status quo. This is reflected in condemnation of an unfair, ineffective and unduly slow legal system, by citizens advising foreigners and foreign-based fellow citizens not to return to the country and not to invest in it, in racial bias between groups which previously strived to achieve the miracle that Nelson Mandela stood up for. It is shown by the near-insane call by the EFF to allow White businesses to die, echoed by the ANC Mayor of Ekhureleni, at a time when the country needs every job it can manage, and every cent of tax revenue. It is proven by a de facto real unemployment rate of 50%, when 5% would be considered by any thinking politician as a disaster, by the fact that South Africa has dropped in the ranks of economically-successful nations every year for the past decade, and has not achieved anything near its potential in the past 25 years. The need for a major overhaul of the economy is highlighted by the flight of major mining and industrial companies, such as Anglo American and Gencor, to foreign fields, by the continuing withdrawal of foreign investment capital from what should be the major developing economy in the world, as well as by the dismal financial reports regarding the performance of the economy. South Africa cannot afford to wait the months or years that seem to be normal in ‘urgent’ actions by the government, such as can be seen in the lengthy inactivity in combatting gender-based violence and the prosecution of those whose criminal actions have been extensively documented in reports by investigative journalists and the Zondo Commission.

The time for action is now, before the situation as deteriorated so much further that no rescue plan will achieve a result within less than twenty years. A naïve expectation that the ANC government will take the necessary steps in time to prevent the disaster becoming a catastrophe, an expectation that Cyril Ramaphosa would do that shortly after his accession to power, and then again shortly after his election more than a year ago, has been shown to be an illusion born of hope, not a realistic extrapolation of past conduct, and will inevitably lead to the collapse that seems, in any realistic view, to be imminent.