On Saturday I reconnected with parts of the country that in the then homeland of Bophuthatswana fell under the Odi/Moretele districts. The area between Mabopane in Odi and Kekana in Moretele, North West in the 1980s up to the early 2000s had vast empty tracts of land. Today there is no inch along that road that is not built up. The road is tarred all the way, yet it is not faster. For the safety of pedestrians and motorists, the road has intermittent humps, imposing a fairly low speed limit because the humps have to be negotiated.
To grasp the scale of change, the 1996 Census will serve as a benchmark compared with the 2022 census. The 1996 Census returned a population of 7.8-million for Gauteng and the 2022 Census returned almost twice that number at 15.01 million. The number doubled in 26 years.
The memory lane meanders from Soshanguve through Mabopane to Kekana, passing Dilopye and Marapjane villages, among others, that now pass for conurbations. It was filled with remembrance and pain.
Lucas Ngobeni is no more. Gastric cancer robbed us of this colourful yet politically forceful and forthright character. He held the position of chair of the ANC in ward 89 and was a member of the executive of the Communist Party in Gauteng.
I led the first post-Apartheid census of the population. It was held in October 1996 and was a massive undertaking. Census peers globally define a census as the biggest mobilisation among nations in times of peace. Not even an election comes close to a census. An election is more the noise of a tree falling in a forest, and in contradistinction a census is the silence of a germinating forest. The fallen baobab that Ngobeni was captures both metaphors because he acted in both with excellence – a cool head focused on people first. This people-first trademark has not left my mind after my first encounter with Ngobeni.
A census is about excellence in logistics and that part is really hard. The 1996 Census of South Africa was held in October. A month when those who served would at least in a decent system have had their side of the deal, payment. This was the biggest nightmare we had – the payment of field workers.
This was pre e-wallet and e-mali. Cheques had to be printed. But before that due diligence had to be exercised to confirm who you are paying. About 500,000 people applied for the 100,000 jobs that were advertised. These applications had to be screened by location first and by minimum qualifications and competence second. All those who qualified had to provide a bank account into which the money would be deposited. This was far too complicated a requirement, so we had to get details such as ID numbers and prepare cheques based on the quantity of work done and the type of area where the task was undertaken to provide differentiated allowance for travel. The system was complex. What added to the complexity was not only the time pressure of recruitment, training, testing, selection and appointment, but the database had to be filed with head office, where the cheques were printed.
God is on strike and no longer manufacturing these antifragile, honest and dedicated human beings. The Almighty has unleashed vultures upon the nation.
Printing cheques had to be adopted as a form of payment because the recruits nominated those who had an account as people into whose account their salary could be paid. The ID and account would not match and the account claimant would be rejected, but we came to know about the rejection and the reason for rejection too late. So letters of appointment were issued on the basis of a presumption of a bank account that belonged to the appointee. What a nightmare. It had to be abandoned and the strategy of paying by cheque became the most feasible. Yet Bureau Beta, which printed cheques, had never in its life had to print that many – confirming that a census is the biggest mobilisation in peacetime.
So why Lucas Ngobeni? By December 10, we had not paid the people who concluded their work and mopped up activities by mid-November. Growing impatient, burdened by monies borrowed to fulfil government’s work and in fear that Christmas might come and go without them being paid, word had gone out that I had been addressing staff in Gauteng reassuring them of payments. That morning, I had been to the Mabopane office where census staff had camped for three days without going home. No sooner had I arrived in Steyn’s Building in Schoeman Street than a baby-faced man in a red shirt led a group of agitated handfuls demanding their salaries.
I walked with them to my office and provided the explanation I gave the Mabopane team earlier in the morning. Ngobeni the “rebel” would have none of it. I consulted Dr Mark Orkin, the Head of Central Statistics Service, on the impasse. He was adamant that all others across the country have to endure the same condition. I argued with Orkin that while equity of misery would be a correct moral position, by not addressing what was in our face successfully and immediately, our legitimate moral equity argument could ruin the entire census. Orkin and I went to meet Ngobeni and two of his self-appointed leadership. As we went past the lifts more people were coming into Steyn’s Building. And word went round saying Steyn’s Building would be under siege. The Mabopane team I met in the morning just rejoined. The situation was on a knife edge. Mark and I met Ngobeni. He had all cards in his favour – pay now or else. But “or else” had an olive leaf. And this told us what to do to so they could get paid, was the message from Ngobeni. Writing cheques was not unpractised, and for the 3,000 or so people who invaded Steyn’s Building, cheque books had to be ordered quickly from Standard Bank.
A workflow was put in place, and Ngobeni guaranteed the orderly process through which the task would be executed. By 3pm the first batch of cheques were written and received in what was then the Garankuwa Hall after Ngobeni’s takeover of the hall. It was at 4am on Saturday morning, 14 hours later, that I would drop Ngobeni at his shack in Soshanguve.
Those 14 hours cemented a relationship that would endure until his death. The 14 hours became an interview by observation that endorsed the leadership and management capabilities of Ngobeni. A crisis was solved; a disaster was averted through a great solution that created a path albeit not of writing out cheques but printing them out for the rest of the country based on the design triggered by Ngobeni. The interview of 14 hours got him a job at StatsSA from 1996 to 2011 when he chose to get into politics.
He was not violent but absolutely resolute. This resolute mission was articulated by his three children, Victor, who boasts a PhD in economics from Tukkies, Vanessa and Tshepo, who gave a rendition on how their father insisted on education from the tin shack they occupied. His ever-visible presence at school meetings was how he showed up. All his children became successful in their education and careers they followed.
The rendition by his children is one that affirms the success of the South African Indians who by all counts were in a similar position as Africans and coloureds in 1948 in terms of academic achievement. If 100% of Ngobeni’s poverty-stricken children acquired a post-matric education like the 70% among Indians and 60% among Whites, against a meagre 10% among coloureds and blacks, does Ngobeni not provide a floodlight of hope that black and coloured educational achievement is possible within a generation?
Dr Victor Ngobeni put it more dramatically, that when he did not have funds for university, his father Lucas published an article in the Sunday newspaper about his son’s plight, and there it was, he got into a PhD. But when Victor started a reckless relationship with alcohol, his father called him and said he should never set foot in his house in Soshanguve because he is not only embarrassing him but being a bad role model.
Ngobeni and his children expressed their distaste for poverty because they lived it every day but had to do something about it. When Dr Victor Ngobeni told me about his father’s passing and asked met to be at the funeral I said yes.
Ngobeni was a politician moulded differently. God is on strike and no longer manufacturing these antifragile, honest and dedicated human beings. The Almighty has unleashed vultures upon the nation. Unfortunately, death refuses an offering of 500 of these vultures to spare one Ngobeni’s life.
May Lucas Ngobeni Rest In Peace.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa
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