PALI LEHOHLA | Nailed it! In counterrevolution, government is backing away from actual power

In the political economy calendar of SA, October is a busy month. The clergy are asking a legitimate question and taking steps to arrest the rot. Under The Interfaith Forum of SA (TIFSA), the clergy are taking SA into our confidence to discuss and drive solutions in the continuing government withdrawal from legitimate power and responsibility to deliver developmental outcomes of the National Development Plan. From October 9-11, TIFSA will engage this solution-driven initiative and drive a resolution away from ever more austerity that has become a solution by a government withdrawing from a developmental agenda.

Notably, October is when the apex of the state execution machinery is set in motion through a signal from the medium-term budget policy statement (MTBPS). This year it falls on November 1. It usually indicates what to expect from the budget speech in February 2024 and what happens in the next three years. The budget speech translates the state of the nation address (Sona) that usually gets delivered two weeks before the budget speech. Public policy is a contestation of political economy, a display of power relations. At its most grotesque, this contestation is about who wins and who loses. While politics is the art of agreeing on what we do as a nation, the outcome of the agreement, the methods and tools of shaping the agreement and continuous execution of the agreement can be miles apart. In SA, the National Development Plan represents this contrast. By their own assessment and admission, 11 years since the National Development Plan, its commission delivered a candid but damning report on the polar distance between hopes of the nation and its achievements. Hopes as represented by the National Development Plan, process as reflected in successive medium-term budget policy statements, the Sona,budget speech and achievement reflected in the summative reports of the nation's fact finder, Statistics SA. Where does this leave SA as a nation?

The government simply has no tools to battle poverty, inequality and unemployment. In Abraham Maslow’s words on governments receding from power, ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.

The situation is captured dramatically in the speech by former president Thabo Mbeki to the 22nd Annual Conference of South African Association of Public Administration and Management (SAAPAM) on September 19, just under two months from the November MTBPS. The central thesis of his speech can be juxtaposed with the assessment of the NDP by the national planning commission and what he quoted as: “Instead of political currents, a different trend will shape SA’s outcomes over the medium term. This is the receding power of the state — its loss of authority and credibility, its inability to translate plans into action, and the growing disconnect between the ruling elites and those they govern. This process will play out over a period of years but is already well under way.” Last week social media released snippets of the meeting of cabinet with private sector at Discovery headquarters and before then was the meeting of the president and Treasury officials. This was on the small matter of MTBPS and the looming chasm between fulfilment of the basic income grant and debt-to-GDP ratio, which was said to have been held in some private space in Stellenbosch. These snippets accompany the dramatic withdrawal of government from its legitimate power.

Not only has the government continuously withdrawn itself from legitimate power, but with increasing crisis, it has reduced its priorities to the three main areas, infrastructure, energy and crime. This is where the question Mbeki posed to SAAPAM is relevant, and I quote: “Among others, Dr Endres is saying that already, our public administration and management are collapsing, gradually giving way to an ‘innovative and resilient private sector and civil society, which are solving problems in the growing absence of the state’. In political science, this is characterised as counterrevolution. And counterrevolution is no innocent and pleasant game, but in our case, a direct threat to our democratic state and the welfare of millions. What should SAAPAM and all of us do to reverse the reality Dr Endres has pointed out — the receding power of the democratic state — its loss of authority and credibility, its inability to translate plans into action? To emphasise what you know, this negative observation about the democratic state is, in essence, a negative comment about the place and role of our public administration and management. It calls for the right response from our public administration and management themselves.”

I hold no brief for business but wish to point out severe malnutrition of thought leadership characterising this recession of government from legitimate power of a developmental state envisioned in the RDP and the NDP. This movement away from legitimate power became clear when Business for SA (B4SA) presented its proposals at the onset of Covid in 2020 with conscience-provoking impact targets to government. These targets would, if followed, have borne a different assessment of the NDP by the national planning commissioners. But the paucity of design thinking and systems design, which are core to being intentional, propel this government’s systematic withdrawal from responsibility. The government simply has no tools to battle poverty, inequality and unemployment. In Abraham Maslow’s words on governments receding from power, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Austerity and more austerity is what the hammer metaphor is to a nail in the context of the government’s withdrawal.

Mbeki makes the point at SAAPAM: “Naomi Klein explains the kind of outcome mentioned by Dr Endres as but an expression of the so-called Chicago School (of Economics) established by the late Dr Milton Friedman. She writes that central to the vision of the Chicago School are ‘the policy trinity — the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending’. She writes that the Chicago School teaches: “Just as ecosystems self-regulate, keeping themselves in balance, the market, left to its own devices, would create just the right number of products at precisely the right prices, produced by workers at just the right wages to buy those products — an Eden of plentiful employment, boundless creativity and zero inflation ...”

The reality, however, is very different. She writes that: “In every country where Chicago School policies have been applied over the past three decades, what has emerged is a powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians ... Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organise a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favours and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

The initiative of TIFSA should reclaim this legitimate power and be restored where it belongs as agency of intervention to the changes that the poor yearn for. For far too long October has been the hammer in the hands of the MTBPS, which sees poverty, inequality and unemployment as a nail on which to impugn and resolve debt-to-GDP ratio and by so doing withdraw the legitimate power of government from its responsibility of spearheading a developmental state.

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.