The Batswana idiom of fifing go tshwarwanwa ka dikobo is the opportunity for a social compacting process we desire. King Moshoeshoe embraced this to eliminate cannibalism and built a nation.
For the past 15 years SA has been speeding through a journey where the risk of an ultimate collapse has been unfolding . In its assessment through the art and science of scenarios, the South African government in 2007 pondered playing out of this scenario in what it termed The Future We Chose Scenarios that imagined SA in 2025.
The questions asked in this process of thought that pondered what the reality of a post-Polokwane elective conference would be, was played out through three-scenario paths. These were Nkalakatha, Not Yet Uhuru and Muvhango.
The scenario playing out for the past 15 years has been what the government considered as Muvhango. This is playing out today with an explicit articulation of a Not Yet Uhuru character. The Muvhango scenario qualifies itself as follows: despite an initial resurgence of the economy, and positive world conditions, the government battles to govern well, characterised by Bang Goes the Boom, Politician vs Politician, The Champ Slips Up and The Brink of a New Era.
In 2016 a new set of scenarios called the Indlulamithi Scenarios was introduced to SA’s landscape. They were constructed by what has become the Indlulamithi Trust in which I serve as an executive. Among three scenarios, they have the Gwara-Gwara Scenario, which is playing out today as our demoralised nation of disorder.
The Batswana saying counsels and guides us on how a collective conduct is shaped when a nation’s survival is faced with a deep crisis such as the one materialised under a Muvhango or Gwara-Gwara outcome. “Fifing go tshwarwanwa ka dikobo” translates into: in the dark each holds on to the other’s blanket. The Bang goes the Boom that we witnessed from 2011 after the sustained boom from 2002 to 2007 has been disappointing. During the 2003-2007 boom, growth was on the up, unemployment heading south to 20%, debt to GDP ratio at its lowest, credit extension growing by double digits and gross fixed capital formation at above 20% annually. This has been replaced by growth prospects that are lower than 1%. Politician vs Politician is a clear sign playing out with precipitation of political murders. The Champ Slips Up is classically summed up in the ongoing presidential Phala Phala saga that has mired an explosive series of short circuits in important institutions of the state such as the public protector, the South African Revenue Services and the South African Reserve Bank. Their reports have revealed an absence of systems thinking and paucity of an instrumentation of a unified intentionality of democracy well captured by former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng. He defined the president as a constitutional being. For the Reserve Bank to think of a president as a private person whose suspected transactions can be private is ludicrous and undermines the constitution and the president. Finally, the Brink of a New Era, characterised by the purposeful and intense conversations that society is engaged in as a consequence of the world of filth we have been plunged in, has germinated in SA. It is gaining momentum against a government that is lost in action.
SA has begun to have high-intensity conversations with clarity of mind as articulated in the Future we Chose Scenarios of 2007 by government. South Africans are now asking the right questions, especially in the light of prospects for coalition governments as our new policy terrain. To this end SA has copied the bad political habits of Lesotho and augmented them multifold. In Lesotho the “khekhethane” or proportional presence in the power of politics have been transacted as merchandise. Mayoral roles and political management are up for sale like toilet rolls in SA. Little wonder sewage in our streets has become an output of our political system. The man-made disasters have converged in a very forceful and repulsive way. The onset of Covid-19 played an important role in making us think as a nation. While being a woke nation brought to the fore our nationhood as defined by the Batswana that fifing go tshwarwanwa ka dikobo this thought process was regrettably momentary. Thus on the back of the cholera deaths in Hammanskraal, the flying taxis in Bree Street, to the inferno in the City of Johannesburg last week, which killed more than 70 people and counting, the nation has started serious discussions about accidents waiting to happen. This includes what an accident waiting to happen will be elected to rule in the 2024 elections.
South Africans are now asking the right questions, especially in the light of prospects for coalition governments as our new policy terrain.
As a background to the inferno in Johannesburg I reflect on the Census of 2011. In that population count, I personally conducted the counting in some of these multistorey buildings. On any of the floors we came across subletting, and the only demarcation would be a curtain. Where there were offices, whole floors had been subdivided into sublet units with multiple curtains dangling dangerously above cooking stoves. The man-made disaster that ultimately happened last week was but a matter of time.
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The inferno is evidence that those charged with responsibility on our collective behalf stuck their thumbs in their policy retinas and stuffed their ears with match sticks. See and hear nothing and harden your heart to the cries of the nation. The ongoing absence of electricity reminds me of a conversation between a minister in Zambia and one in apartheid SA. The South African delegate asked the Zambian how come they have a minister of marine resources when they do not have an ocean. The Zambian retort was, you also have a minister of justice, don’t you? So the conversations South Africans are having today are about a minister of electricity just as they are over many portfolios missing in delivery. One such conversation was last week where Police, Prisons and Civil Rights Union (Popcru) asked me to deliver a keynote address on the 24th of August on the theme, The effect of the socioeconomic challenges on the rising levels of crime in SA: what needs to be done?
My input in the face of a rising tide of crime and governance failure navigated what fundamental policy failures in our edifice have been starting from the Mont Fleur Scenarios that granted us respite to have a negotiated settlement. I argued that the window the political respite provided was squandered through seismic policy vacuums, especially in education and who we were becoming and ultimately have become as a nation as reflected in our crime. Popcru is fighting a war of beneficiaries of policy failure as a root cause. Thus Popcru’s role in the battle of policy is putting out fires caused elsewhere in a failing and failed socioeconomic and political system. More importantly in a failed family or household as a construct and nuclei of society. There is ample data illustrating how in the value chain analysis, Popcru is the last in the chain of society as a socioeconomic construct. Yet they have to be first in the design thinking room of social and economic systems. They have to be directing through hard experience what policies will bring joy to society. To this end they need tools of foresight that should ensure that society has future proof of what is being constructed — a world of prisonless society. The Scandinavians are closing down prisons because criminality is a socioeconomic construct that you choose to have, and they chose not to have it, just as King Moshoeshoe of the Basotho nation chose to eliminate cannibalism through productive assets of land to feed the nation. There are African precedents to solving our problems. An encouraging offshoot was an organically related, albeit structurally not, launch of the MTN True Value Assessment Report. This was launched by its South African CEO, Charles Molapisi. Molapisi comes from Hammanskraal, where the 32 cholera deaths occurred. He said going home, just under 50km from Lanseria where he stays, is painful and draining. His observation was shared by Prof Bonang Mohale. He said that Sandton is sitting side by side with Alexander and we say all is OK cannot be OK. That Sandton is lily white and Alexander is black expresses the pulse of our sickness. On August 30 Eskom invited me for a keynote on their women empowerment month. My topic was men as allies in the journey towards women empowerment. Invariably, this led straight to core policy failure questions that South Africans have to answer themselves. SA is woke to the vacuum government has left in favour of internal battles of who becomes the president or mayor or what opportunistic coalitions are formed, instead of how the constitutional mandate of SA as a prosperous nonracial, nonsexist SA is fulfilled.
Molapisi’s question to himself as CEO of MTN SA and other CEOs, is do we measure what we treasure? To this end the conversations we had at MTN are conversations we had at Popcru, Eskom and in Indlulamithi. My next stop is at the JSE, where the subject that we have been building upon at Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) in the past 13 years where I serve as a research associate and at the Economic Modelling Academy over the past two years has and still is relevant and more urgent. The JSE expects me to speak on the multidimensional poverty, how it translates to restricting social progress and how its measurement can contribute to strategic action. Further, what social practices I think companies can start implementing to improve their ESG performance. The field is quite ripe to get back to the thousand-paged document that business presented to government in 2020 with the onset of Covid-19, which government blissfully ignored, yet another crisis is knocking at our door. Are the top three crises of electricity, logistics and crime the most urgent? Einstein counsels: when an existential problem faces you and you have an hour to address it, the wise will take the first 55 minutes of the hour understanding it and the last five minutes executing its solution. None of this design thinking exists in our political edifice. The result is, the urgent becomes the important as we have stopped to measure what we treasure and have responded to what pleasures our palates.
I cautioned Business For SA leadership then that we have to insist on their input not because of the laundry list but because of the targets that showed business had its heart at the right place but needed ground truthing to establish the true north of the targets, but they argued there was no time for ground truthing. Besides, government gave a lacklustre unenthusiastic response to them as business. Now, three years later they are back at the oracle with three urgent assignments in the face of a deepening crisis. This is the time to heed that Batswana proverb. Business targets then provided the blanket to which society, government and business could cling in our moment of darkness. The targets were unifying and had provided the destination. The work we did at Indlulamithi of scenario quantification and policy design generated targets that were within spitting distance of Business For SA’s.
A winning formula was in the making, but the vacuum at the centre of state failed to take advantage of this critical opportunity, yet it still exists. The darkness is not going away soon, if not at all. It is this darkness the Batswana learnt from, that fifing go tshwarwanwa ka dikobo — the social compacting we desire. It is the idiom and blanket King Moshoeshoe used to build the Basotho nation in the darkest moment of cannibalism.
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 Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of SA.
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