PALI LEHOHLA | To ‘democratise’ or ‘democrise’? South Africa must decide

During the transitional arrangements of 1994, the transitional local councils made for interesting reading, where terminology revealed deep and substantive cleavages between the old white and the new black.

I was serving in North West as a director of statistics. There was a white team and a black team. I led the technical team based at Bophuthatswana Statistics. The product of the team fed into Darky Africa who was the MEC for local government.

The terminology of democracy was alien to the outgoing apartheid apparatus and its verbal construct ― “democratise” ― was too much of a tongue twister for a Van der Westhuizen from the Klerksdorp TLC negotiating team. He constructed his own terminology instead ― “democrise”. This wording difference underlay the substantive distance in understanding between the dying apartheid state and the new democratic state. So what is in a name? For a rose by any colour smells just as sweet.

Our globally en-vogue terminology of public-private partnerships (PPP) resembles the obfuscation of “democratise” versus “democrise”.

The web of narratives, which misses Mariana Mazzucato’s correct interpretation of systems thinking and design in the construct of an entrepreneurial state, fails to recognise the key ingredients of what is in plain sight ― the apartheid state was an entrepreneurial state albeit with major factory faults that racialised appropriation of benefits of enterprise against the black majority.

But essentially it was an entrepreneurial state. So is the US with similar factory faults that tend to exclude the plebiscite, especially the non-white races of blacks and Latinos.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, written by Mazzucato, argues that the US’s economic success is a result of public and state-funded investments in innovation and technology, rather than a result of the small state, free market doctrine that often receives credit for the country’s strong economy.

Mazzucato crucially differentiates between the “myth” and the reality of this success, saying: “If the rest of the world wants to emulate the US model, they should do as the US actually did, not as they say they did.”

Unfortunately, South Africa’s mix-masala policy bickering represents a true hallmark of the notion of “democrise” and not “democratise” ― a do as the US actually did, not as they say they did.

South Africa is obsessed with what the US says it did but not what it actually did. Recent actions of the US on tariffs are what America does and not what it says it does on glorified benefits of free trade and small government. The post-apartheid state has obfuscated and maligned the erstwhile apartheid relationship of state and capital under neoliberal phrases such as public-private partnerships.

Understanding power was not a fleeting pastime but was essential for solving the problem of the white Afrikaner.

Under apartheid the government was strong not only in politics but in policies and instruments of economic execution. The apartheid state based its leverage on a pentagon of rail, race, maize, gold and war. Into this pentagon apartheid deployed science infrastructure as a central feature of statecraft. It unleashed state power with SOEs, a classical comparator of China’s founding philosophies of “an ever normal granary” and “shoot with the heavy at that which is light”.

Starting with ESCOM in 1922, Smuts had recruited Hendrik van der Bijl as his scientist. To him he gave a mandate that would spawn ISCOR, for you cannot speed up rail infrastructure that started in 1867 with a 3km line to the point in Durban.

Massive steel production saw massification and modernisation of rail including signalling. Such work would not succeed without integration of science and industrialisation, and the CSIR was established. Meanwhile, funding would be needed. So the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), to massify industrialisation, was established.

Understanding power was not a fleeting pastime but was essential for solving the problem of the white Afrikaner. The Carnegie studies were commissioned and a white policy for destitute whites was established, spawning Sanlam and other financial institutions whose mandate was to look after die volk.

The Volkskas Bank was established into which the salaries of die volk were deposited to achieve an economic independence for die volk. The Bantu had to be studied and future paths of the journey of South Africa had to be understood, and as a consequence the Human Sciences Research Council became the arm of government to deepen their understanding of societal trajectories.

Informing all these Afrikaner strategies was the undeclared Anglo-Afrikaner love-hate relationship that ultimately and formerly converged on the formalisation of apartheid, under which Anglo American became the biggest economic driver of the erstwhile South African business miracle success.

Unfortunately, in the newfound-love story of the government of national unity, memory of this history is lost as South Africa fails the Mazzucato test of an entrepreneurial state and free-falls into neoliberalism.

Trump has just shown how the US does it. Russia’s history is replete with scientific and industrial success and now is fast recovering from the beating of Mikhail Gorbachev by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. China’s ever-normal granary and shooting with what is heavy at that which is light. The US is waking up in a rather clumsy way, but what Trump is doing is throwing neoliberalism down the pipes and defying a PPP sweet-coated approach.

Brazil has long questioned neoliberalism and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first term paved the way. Bolsonaro’s disastrous term tried to reverse that, and Lula is back to restore a developmental policy directive. India has followed Gandhi’s amazing rejection of being anglicised, and his symbolic wearing of Indian cotton cloth as self-reliance now connects his cultural innovation into an India that industrialises.

In the mix of South Africa’s “democrise” mimicry that distorts Mazzucato’s entrepreneurial state and the self-adulation of green shoots driven by peripheral regulatory antics that fail to appreciate Smuts’ direct interventionist architecture, black excellence is pummelled with rotting eggs.

In the case alleging bribery by Matshela Koko, which saw him unceremoniously taken out of Eskom, evidence points differently. Koko, the former Eskom boss who is in and out of court for bribery charges, sheds light on a spiderweb of lies, obfuscation and scapegoating.

He points to Die WELT article (November 15), which he says “spotlights a damning twist in the ABB-Eskom saga: after years of scapegoating low-level players, the company itself now faces Swiss scrutiny for allegedly fabricating evidence to shield executives from the Kusile bribery fallout.

“Unlike the NPA, Zurich and Mannheim prosecutors aren’t buying the spin — they’re chasing ABB for false accusations. Something’s rotten in our justice system when foreign watchdogs see through the lies, but we’re left in the dark. I pray the Madlanga Commission drags this rot into the light.”

Associated with burying black excellence is the story in Daily Maverick by Adrian Enthoven (November 11) in which he showers roses on the private sector while throwing black excellence under the bus. To avoid a true narrative on Eskom that should include lessons of responses to crisis, Enthoven avoids former president Thabo Mbeki’s admission on how his cabinet failed to heed Eskom’s warnings and how he reacted with speed with the plan for a long-term Eskom rebuild which included Medupe and Kusile.

Enthoven deliberately glosses over key decisions that led to a moment of glory of 2003-2010 in which business had held back but government led in investment in public infrastructure.

By providing a narrative of a declining point of Eskom power generation from 2011 to 2023 and not breaking it down in time periods is failing to account for Ts’eliso Matona’s tenure, the Brian Molefe-Koko tenure, the Malegapuru Makgoba-De Ruyter tenure and Mteto Nyati-Dan Marokane tenure. By not reading into the narrative about how in that decade, Molefe and Koko by 2017 had restored Eskom to performance, Enthoven fears to discuss De Ruyter’s disastrous tenure and what mandate was hidden in closing Komati.

He suddenly jumps to the three-trillion possible investments into green energy and gives accolades to the intervention by the private sector and Operation Vulindlela. Therein lie the Mulilo Javelin.

The truth is about not what America did in defining entrepreneurial state but what it said it did. The case of Eskom, the most significant story of entrepreneurial state in South Africa’s history, is about how Koko and Molefe were scapegoated by the green lobby and De Ruyter’s mandate to finish off the SOE.

Faced with an election in 2024, ANC was left with no choice but to go back to a Molefe-Koko equivalent in the form of Nyati-Marokane duo, who did exactly what Molefe-Koko did between 2015-2016. As a result, Molefe-Koko’s intervention of maintaining the fleet solved the problem.

But other factors came into play, and Koko was dismissed as the ABB scandal took root. Today we know better what ABB was about, as independent sources suggest Koko is being framed and used as a scapegoat.

In preparation to shower praises on the PPP approach Enthoven talks about recovery without saying what America said it did but about what private sector says it does.

The truth is by 2017 Molefe-Koko’s strategy of maintaining the fleet worked and had eliminated load-shedding. The coal-destruction decibels were at their highest, and strategic missteps by some like Anglo’s disinvestment from coal, precipitated the decibels to deafening proportions, which emboldened the ushering in of De Ruyter to finish the job and shut coal-fired power stations.

He succeeded in shutting down Komati in the midst of the worst load-shedding, and the footnote in the Presidential Climate Commission about the closure of Komati is, “This was a mistake.” No-one is held accountable for lost livelihoods and lives in this Komati manmade tragedy.

Elections were around the corner, and the ANC had to shop for a Molefe-Koko duo. Nyati-Marokane were a perfect match. This is the formula that restored Eskom to power after the De Ruyter-Jan Oberholzer disaster of four years.

This is what South Africa should say it did. When we look at these, key issues come out. It dispenses false economics that deforms Mazzucato’s entrepreneurial state thesis and thus debunks the neoliberal South African posture and definition of an entrepreneurial state through PPPs that Enthoven puts forward.

Second, it places black excellence at the centre of a Smuts-Bijl duo in the context of Eskom, thus centring the entrepreneurial state thesis correctly instead of the pyrrhic green shoots thesis that attempts to put words in what “America said it did” instead of the false path we followed on what America said.

Third, it opens the path to what needs to be followed, which is the Mulilo Javelin of Oberholzer ― (De Ruyter’s right hand man at Eskom) ― and establish which businesses congregate around that Javelin so that we can possibly seek justice for the graves left in Komati.

This is the national dialogue, not this mumbo jumbo of PPPs where business is at the centre of government and labour and society are at the periphery. This is a toxic neoliberal design that even apartheid would have never allowed in its myopic racial public policy.

Dr Pali Lehohla is a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa