That the country is no longer at ease is no longer debatable. South Africa Incorporated has our fingers and toes angrily pointing at others and not ourselves as we rattle on ad nauseam like the characters in Twelve Angry Men.
In his book No Longer at Ease, Chinua Achebe reveals the definition of tragedy in an encounter between Mr Green, a colonial civil servant in Nigeria, and Obi Okonkwo, who has just completed his English degree at a university in England and joins the civil service of post-independence Nigeria. The key question we have to ask is how long will tragedy be entertainable while we point fingers and toes away from ourselves?
Okonkwo describes tragedy as sudden and dramatic, leaving in its trail unprecedented misery. Green argues differently. He says it is not a one-off but a series of painful events and occurrences that continuously strike at unexpected moments. He defines it as a bowl of wormwood, a sip-at-a-time world without end.
For the past three decades, save, generally, for the first half, we were visited by policy incoherence, corruption, Covid-19, floods, fires, load-shedding, Phala Phala, litigation, former president against president, and other events big and small representing a bowl of wormwood. In the film Twelve Angry Men, ordinary men are asked to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of a young man accused of murder. The 12 are said to “bring their own histories, prejudices and biases to the jury room as they work through this life-or-death decision”.
Confronted by the monumental task of building a nation divided and devastated by apartheid, South Africa has indulged in a series of plans — Reconstruction and Development (RDP), Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear), the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Programme (ISRDP), the Urban Renewal Programme (URP), the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA), the New Growth Path, the National Development Plan (NDP), the Nine Point Plan, the Fourteen Point Plan, the New Dawn, the Growth Renewal and Sustainability Plan, the Economic Recovery and Reconstruction Plan, the District Development Model and attendant master plans, and Just Energy Transition. Fourteen plans in three decades is a new toy for the nation every two years.
None discusses what the impact will be when they are achieved. The how-to is lacking in all of them, so they fail to rise to scale. However, the RDP and NDP do stand out in terms of public appeal and were universally acceded to by parliament. Under the influence of the Mont Fleur Scenarios, the RDP spawned Gear. A course correction emerged and AsgiSA was born. Under it, South Africa had a taste of what an integrated plan could deliver. That should, possibly with Operation 2010, form a blueprint the country should return to in trying to understand how to do better. But we appear to be a nation averse to learning from history. Understandably, because without a plan to open old wounds, then return them to healing, requires skill.
The NDP was another interesting document that mobilised society and political parties, but because there was no plan to it, it was shelved, only to be remembered and quoted for budget purposes. Like a chick with a worm running away from its mother and siblings to enjoy its bounty alone, so do government departments. There is no integrated execution because the government, by design, is not integrated. King Cyrus the Great of Persia is revered for saying “Diversity in counsel, unity in command”. Based on this philosophy, he won many battles.
We have just received the matric results. As usual, they have been met with enthusiasm, the nation glued to speeches revering the three-percentage-point increase from the previous year. Certainly, we should congratulate those who successfully completed the basic legal right to education. But in the past 30 years, many have been unable to sit for these exams. Year in and year out almost half the children born each year are lost to the school system before they set foot in matric. This year, of those who did, only 287,000 attained a respectable pass. The loss of human resources in their formative years is the beginning of a tragedy, one that has not seized our national psyche as our palates are lulled to this modicum of success by the bitter wormwood we have sipped.
At the start of the pandemic, business hurriedly compiled a laundry list of things to be done, its eagerness to discuss a plan with government a step in the right direction. Business was disappointed by the state’s response to its effort. Very little, if anything, occurred, and where it did, efforts were so meagre as to have little impact, at the very least on jobs.
Planning is not a game of back-of-the-cigarette-box calculations but an indulgence in expertise and practice that requires the civil service at the centre of public affairs.
Given our polarised planning systems, there would be ominous gaps and oppositional positions on how we deal with energy transition. The Russia-Ukraine war revealed the underbelly of our “partners — Europe and the US — towards greening”, opening oppositional vectors on the matter in a country suffering the worst load-shedding. President Cyril Ramaphosa had to again cancel an international commitment to deal with matters at home. What is clear is that even a sip of wormwood can be lethal. It is a tragedy of monumental proportions.
The 55th ANC elective conference added its voice, and two seemingly seismic decisions have been made. One: moving all state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to their parent departments, with Eskom falling under minerals and energy. The second involves expanding the mandate of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB). Bureaucratic honchos have not kept quiet. Outgoing Eskom CEO André de Ruyter resigned ahead of the Eskom decision. Perhaps he smelt wormwood from his would-be minister Gwede Mantashe and was not prepared to sip it. He said his resignation was due to a lack of protection. De Ruyter sympathisers said he did a good job of raising $8bn. This begs the question: why, in the face of the country risking collapse that forced the president’s grounding, was De Ruyter raising funds globally to stop the use of coal? As a CEO who had to generate energy, he had his head in wrong strategic outcomes. A Primaresearch report correctly states: “In our view, the sensational reporting of problems such as apparent sabotage and poor coal quality diverts attention from the core issues. These are matters that should have been dealt with decisively by a competent management team implementing necessary internal controls.”
Drawing on the memoirs of Dr Ian McRae, Eskom CEO from 1985 to 1994, Prima noted these words regarding a skilled CEO: “A few days later, Koos (Oosthuizen) happened to be on shift when unit 5 tripped again, causing a full loss of load and the need to extinguish all fire in the boiler, with an immediate drop from 100MW of load to zero. There were clear operating procedures in restoring the boiler and generator back on load. With the serious difficulties we experienced with the performance at light load, however, it was quite difficult to maintain ignition. I joined Koos at the boiler control desk to assist him. I told him I would take control of the draught groups and water control, he should take control of the burners and the milling plant. After a while, we returned the unit to full load and the furnace was again stable.”
In a discussion with a former Eskom employee, the person said: “As for [Matshela] Koko, when he went on inspection he started at the plant, and when the meeting started he would be animated, as though his mind had departed him ... His feedback was factual and all calculations done in his head as he spoke. Blow by blow, he would point to where there were faults and risks. Then he would dispense ... strategies to resolve these. No one could bullsh*t him.”
Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago has thrown down the gauntlet on policy regarding the bank's mandate to create jobs. He said it did not have the wherewithal to deliver on it, quoting, among other things, poor education as a structural constraint. Yet Germany did it, resolving a 30% unemployment rate within a year deploying central bank tools. From 2003 to 2008 South Africa reduced unemployment of the same population that continues to be less educated. Accompanying this was a 13% annual growth in credit extension, average growth of 4.8% in government expenditure, concerted double-digit growth of 11.7% in gross fixed-capital formation, lower interest rates, low debt to GDP ratio and the best growth the country ever witnessed. The governor makes an important point though: line departments should do what they are supposed to do, including addressing deplorable education outcomes. But the Reserve Bank and Treasury have to come to the party as they did from 2003 to 2008 under the AsgiSA framework — not as visitors but to stay the course.
President Ramaphosa has convened a session on the energy crisis, and a plan is emerging. The question is: are the people at the table not 12 ordinary men burdened with adjudicating guilt or innocence of a young man accused of murder? Do these jurors not bring their own histories, prejudices and biases to the jury room as they work through this life-or-death decision? Is government giving them the tools to adjudicate this existential matter prudentially?
If this expertise does not exist in the load-shedding war room, its solutions will revisit us like a ton of wormwood — one sip and the grid will perish, as US intelligence risk report estimates suggest. Planning is not a game of back-of-the-cigarette-box calculations, but an indulgence in expertise and practice that requires the civil service at the centre of public affairs. Without it, public good is diminished and lost. At the heart of this tragedy is a public service system that has been hollowed out and replaced by ephemeral private and personal interests facilitated by those in the public service.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
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