JUSTICE MALALA | Talk is cheap: Government has become expert at saying one thing and doing another

South Africa is stuck in a deep rut politically and economically because our government is fantastic at coming up with great policies and schemes — and immediately undermining or even contradicting them. We don’t move forward because we plan and say one thing, and then act in a manner that achieves the exact opposite.

This behaviour happens with regards to significant policy matters and on small, day-to-day, stuff. We have no backbone or a discernible principled stance on foreign diplomacy, while we shoot ourselves in the foot every day on domestic issues.

We say we want foreign investment, but our political leaders’ favourite pastime seems to be to tell organised business that it is the enemy, while tying investors up in bureaucracy and red tape. We claim to be headed north in the state of the nation and budget speeches, but immediately pull south when we must put our words into practice.

Here’s an example. Over the past three weeks President Cyril Ramaphosa has been making a song and dance about the new border management authority. At the beginning of the month, he travelled to Beitbridge, a huge entourage from various ministries and departments in tow. He smiled at the cameras and gave speeches about border security.

The government claims that it is against the kidnapping of children, but every week smiles and waves alongside Russian officials whose army has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children.

Then he stood there smiling with Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa, the man who stole an election just a month before (that is what the Southern African Development Community’s own election monitors say).

One does not need a doctorate in political science to know that one of Southern Africa’s biggest problems over the past 20 years has been Zimbabwe’s harassment, torture, and detention of its people. This, coupled with economic mismanagement and corruption, has driven desperate Zimbabweans to cross the crocodile-infested Limpopo River on foot and to find other ways of breaching our borders.

Ramaphosa and his entourage’s visit to Beitbridge was a joke. No amount of drones and speeches will stop Zimbabweans coming to SA illegally. If he is serious about sorting out our border issues he should use a simple tool — his voice — to ensure that democracy prevails in Zimbabwe. Then he would see a huge reduction in the number of Zimbabweans that flee Mnangagwa every day and come to SA illegally.

Ramaphosa’s administration is a champion of contradictions. The government claims it wants to fix state-owned enterprises and have them run as efficiently as private sector businesses. Yet it has ministers such as Pravin Gordhan meddling and micro-managing every small decision made at entities like Eskom. Ramaphosa, seemingly, has not said a word to Gordhan about the man’s tardiness in approving the appointment of a new CEO for Eskom, for example.

Truth is, Ramaphosa is simply not serious about fixing Eskom. He has been fixing Eskom for nine years now and still has not produced an inch of forward movement.

A year ago, the government could not get itself organised to replace the SABC board and find replacements for executives whose contracts were up. Now, weekend newspapers report that the government’s communications service wants to start its own streaming service. Why not fix the SABC instead?

Ramaphosa told us back in 2018 that he intends to part ways with the bloated executive of his predecessor and reduce the size of his cabinet. Now he has increased it. The same government talks incessantly about cutting costs, but increases civil service — and politicians’ — salaries every year. Indeed, a few months ago parliament said it would NOT pay its new CEO Xolile George a huge salary. Four months later it doubled his salary, a clear indication of the lies, hypocrisy and chicanery of the whole process.

The government claims that it is against the kidnapping of children, but every week smiles and waves alongside Russian officials whose army has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children. It claims to stand for human rights, but was conspicuous by its silence when it failed to condemn Hamas for the murder of Israeli civilians on October 7. The next minute it was first to rail against the equally unacceptable murder of Palestinian civilians by the Israelis. Where is the principled stand here?

So it goes. We claim we want the best education for our children, but we don’t rush to eradicate pit latrines. We want to stop corruption, but we appoint people who colluded with the Guptas to key government posts.

The famed scientist Albert Einstein never said that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, though the saying has been erroneously attributed to him. The ANC can, however, learn from this neat little maxim. We are going nowhere because we keep doing the same thing again and again, even when it is patently clear that we are getting no good results from it.

It is simply insane to run an administration by saying one thing and doing the exact opposite. We can do better.