There was a stage when President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered captivating speeches. He had a speech-writing team that knew his style and his interests. Authors such as Ben Okri were often quoted. They also understood his fascination with Asian development and passion for education as a propeller for human advancement.
Those days are gone.
It feels like only yesterday when, in 2018, he delivered his landmark “Thuma Mina” (send me) speech.
This week, five years later, Ramaphosa will deliver another speech to open parliament and get the administrative and political calendar going.
His new surroundings are different. It was another team that wrote the powerful 2018 speech. The speech was prepared in a way that Ramaphosa could deliver it effectively.
The death of jazz icon Hugh Masekela a few days earlier gave the speech writers the perfect theme to infuse goosebump-inducing lyrical elements from his Thuma Mina song.
Thursday night’s speech will be Ramaphosa’s seventh state of the nation address — two were delivered in 2019.
He will now be used to the process. It evidently brings him a lot of stress conjuring a coherent message to a nation hungry for positive news. He has to be a magician pulling rabbits out of hats, or even Jesus, turning water into wine.
This year, he will find zilch. He will have received poorly written documents and submissions from all departments
This week, Ramaphosa is dealing with the stark reality that the administration is ineffective and dysfunctional. Ordinarily, he would make announcements drawing on reports from ministers about programmes from the past year and the many things to be done this year.
This year, he will find zilch. He will have received poorly written documents and submissions from all departments. And he will go to bed late and get up early, with sweaty palms, trying to figure out what he can say.
Last year, he regaled us with plans to cut red tape. In 2019, he told us about the arrival of a man who would restructure Eskom. All smart ideas on paper, like his “smart city” announcement in 2020. He knew it was merely PR talk.
The government is big and broken, so it can only replicate its broken self.
To make up for his lack of faith in his cabinet and administration, he relies on intelligent people in bodies such as the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC).
He appointed the PEAC in 2019 as a nonstatutory and independent body that brings together prominent local and international economists with technical experts from academia; the private, labour and community sectors; think tanks and other constituencies. It boasts great things from a range of disciplines.
Highly-regarded Standard Chartered economist Razia Khan was quietly added to the council at the end of last year, taking the place of Prof Benno Ndulu, the esteemed Tanzanian central banker, who died over a year ago.
I’m told the team that met Ramaphosa early last month presented their reading of the South African economy in the global context. They recommended support for institutions such as the Land Bank.
Khan reportedly drove home a few obvious but super-important points about South Africa’s debt redemption profile, with redemptions in the coming financial year standing at about R193bn.
Focusing is hard when everything is a priority, as is the case with the Ramaphosa administration.
About a decade ago, the other guy, his predecessor, could rely on the balance sheet of institutions such as Transnet and make big announcements about infrastructure programmes. But now Transnet is yearning for the shareholder to bail it out.
What does he do this year? He might be tempted to steal the finance minister’s thunder and give us a taste of the Bbudget statement later this month.
The financial markets will look for details on reorganising Eskom’s debt, moving a big chunk of the R400bn to the national books. Many people see the Eskom debt as sovereign debt anyway, so the principle of moving it is neither here nor there.
Khan and her PEAC colleagues would have driven home the need to boost investor and societal confidence. But their question is whether the government has the capacity to do anything at all.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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