In his address to the mining indaba in Cape Town on Wednesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa made a seemingly innocuous appeal to labour, business and others critical of his administration.
“Stop moaning,” he told the mining sector at the conference dubbed Invest in Africa. “Get into the ring with us, let us find solutions for the common good of our country,” said Ramaphosa. He decried criticism from those who appeared to be “standing on the rooftops”, adding “we are not saying don’t be critical, but stop moaning”.
On the surface, Ramaphosa made a tacit acknowledgment that his administration was at sea. It is tacit because he is clearly still looking for solutions when, after five years at the Union Buildings, we hoped he was right in the middle of implementing his ideas. His request for citizens to get in the ring with him could, perhaps charitably, be considered a funny way of asking for help.
Looked at differently, one could say his labelling of those feeling the ire of his poor service delivery is quite rich coming from him. If he doesn’t know how to lead the teams he has in government to find solutions to the country’s challenges, he could simply create platforms for the country’s esteemed thinkers — and our universities and corporate world are awash with these — to help him find the solutions. If he can’t create a platform for the sharing of ideas, he simply should make way for those waiting to lead.
It is also harsh of a president to label people crying out for help as moaners. Does he expect businesses and individuals plunged into darkness through load-shedding to suffer silently, simply because to raise concerns is to moan? When generations of people are subjected to lives of indignity because he is clueless about how to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they should not become moaners. They should behave. They should perhaps “get in the ring” and provide solutions he says he and his administration don’t have? How? Write tomes that will be ignored by his inept bureaucracy?
If Ramaphosa, for example, is genuinely inviting South Africans to a Codesa on how to reboot the economy, he should say so clearly. Ours is a country of many ideas.
The way we see it, Ramaphosa is lucky that the millions of people he fails to lead are simply choosing to moan rather than take to the streets. He is lucky they’re not blockading roads and plunging our country into absolute chaos. That’s what the people of Tunis did when they felt their leaders had lost touch. This led to an uprising that saw president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali being toppled in January 2011, and this spread to several countries in what became known as the Arab Spring. More recently, it is what the people of Sri Lanka did when they realised their leaders don’t know what to do with rising inflation in their country.
In South Africa, we only have patches of protests here and there, and so-called “Total Shutdowns” intermittently fizzle into nothing. In the main, the people moan. And the president is now moaning about the moaners.
We are hoping the president isn’t simply growing intolerant to criticism. We take him at his word when he says “we are not saying don’t be critical” even though he says critics must descend the rooftops.
It is unhelpful though to create an open invitation to nowhere — called “get in the ring” — when those doing the invitation have the potential to create platforms for meaningful engagement — with an address and a date. Without these, we are simply talking about talking, which takes us nowhere.
But if Ramaphosa, for example, is genuinely inviting South Africans to a Codesa on how to reboot the economy, he should say so clearly. Ours is a country of many ideas. His administration, in any case, introduced the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan. There surely is no paucity of ideas on how to move us forward. Our challenge has always been implementation, which he is supposedly in charge of. Unless, of course, he now wants to tell us he believes his economic plan has failed.
Or, if his administration is short of ideas on how to resolve the energy crisis, he should stop all the pretences and not blame citizens for moaning that a plan is not working. When he cut short his international trips to put in place plans, are we now to assume these resulted in nothing, which is why he is asking us to get in the ring? Yet when he addressed the ANC elective conference in December, he presented what we were made to believe was a workable plan. No? Which is which?
In the end, one thing is certain: this administration is struggling to create much-needed jobs. It is also battling to keep the lights on. Moaning may be cathartic in the absence of solutions. But if the president is genuine about getting in the ring — or inviting the populace to bring ideas, he must communicate clearly. In any event, he is lucky victims of poor service delivery simply moan.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.