We have the power to change South Africa, let’s get cracking

Everywhere in the world citizen satisfaction surveys show worsening results.

Most people say the past was better and fear the future; inequality and unemployment are increasing, inflation is rising; household and country indebtedness are growing.

Social fractures and polarisation are on the rise in both developed and developing countries  and personalistic dictators exploiting the fears of citizens are on a quest for power. 

The people seem to be prepared to give up democratic rights for vague promises of socioeconomic benefits. We are witnessing rapidly escalating geopolitical polarisation and Europe — our major trading partner — is in crisis. 

In SA load-shedding, unemployment and food insecurity have hit record highs. The promise of a better life for all remains an illusion. 

Individually and collectively, we are emotionally exhausted and disillusioned about the state of our country, and anxious about the future. We are in survivalist mode, have turned on each other and lost our sense of nationhood. 

How do we begin rebuilding our damaged national psych? How do we respond and adapt to this unsteady and unpredictable landscape? How do we build new forms of sociopolitical, economic and environmental resilience?

How do we safeguard ourselves against the new forms of economic and political populism that thrive in chaos and uncertainty? Importantly, do we have the leadership to get us through the crisis? And what would a visionary and iconic leader like Govan Mbeki be doing in times like these?     

I still find it hard to understand why some of our comrades embrace a personalistic autocrat like Vladimir Putin. Is it ignorance?

I will structure my argument in three parts: 

The first looks at the present: key global and domestic trends. 

The second looks at the political crisis and underlying political philosophies thereof. I will argue that this is where the real crisis lies. 

The third will look at a possible galvanising agenda and provide thoughts on the kind of agency and leadership required to get us there.

First, though, let me talk about Oom Gov and how his personal, political and intellectual traits might help us navigate the crisis. 

Oom Gov was scientific and analytical — he didn’t take things at face value. He would want a  strategy to be thoroughly considered and based on rigorous analysis. This is not the case today, and I think Mbeki would be appalled at the dearth of intellectualism and thought leadership in the ANC and broader alliance, as well as the rest of society. We correctly put a lot of scrutiny on the ANC as the governing party, but the truth is there is not much fresh thinking outside the governing party either. 

Oom Gov was historically specific, and his strategy was borne out of an appreciation of the material conditions of the time. He was ideologically consistent but not dogmatic. He was a Marxist and a communist, but of the kind informed by dialectical materialism. I’m sure he would have rejected the ahistorical and autocratic leaning that occupies the populist left. 

I still find it hard to understand why some of our comrades embrace a personalistic autocrat like Vladimir Putin. Is it ignorance? Some kind of twisted Cold War nostalgia — my enemy’s enemy is my friend? Or something worse and scarier — aspirations for unrestrained power?

Oom Gov had a real appreciation of political agency. He would be disappointed with the leadership of the alliance. Mostly, he would be disappointed by the lack of fresh thinking. It is interesting that two of his sons, Thabo and Moeletsi, are at the forefront of questioning and leading debates, albeit in different ways, on the revolutionary agency and class formation. 

I’m sure Oom Gov would have lamented that 28 years into our democracy, we have not succeeded in building a black productive class. This failure opens us to populist incursion.    

Using these personal, political and intellectual traits, how might one look at our current crisis ? It is useful to understand our problems as symptoms of a deeper set of interrelated crises — of the economy, environment and of politics.  

Starting with the economic crisis, I would argue it is best understood as a growth, inequality and environmental crisis. We cannot address one component without addressing the others. 

SA’s dilemma is its growth prospects are closely tied to global commodities demand and prices. SA is a small open economy that has struggled to overcome its path dependency as a commodity exporter. We have not transformed our industrial structure. This has made the country extremely vulnerable to global commodity cycles. 

Fixed investment is low. The National Development Plan sets a fixed capital investment target of 30%; we are now at 14%.  The prospects of state-led investment to drive recovery are not good, with a highly constrained fiscus and more than R400bn in bond redemptions due by 2026.

High interest rates in developed economies together with perceived business risks in SA (mostly linked to the electricity supply crisis and corruption) are likely to see reduced foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to SA in the short term. Domestic investment remains equally constrained. 

South Africa is experiencing its longest downward phase since World War 2

This weak investment underlies our poor growth prospects, with projections for the outer three years estimated at an average of 1.8%, lower than the 2.1% expected growth for 2022.  

SA is experiencing its longest downward phase since World War 2. This stagnant growth is accompanied by inflation, resulting in declining living standards for most South Africans. The working class is feeling the pinch, which partly underlies the frosty reception the ANC leadership  experienced at the recent Cosatu congress.

Unemployment is extremely high and likely to increase to about 40% by 2030 unless something drastic happens. Operation Vulindlela — intended to fast-track structural reforms to trigger growth — has been a step in the right direction but is severely hamstrung by state weaknesses in execution. Partly, this is related to dynamics in the governing party almost completely preoccupied with positions at the upcoming elective conference, with no discernible focus on the big issues. 

Except for a handful of people in the National Treasury, possibly the presidency and one or two other departments, the leadership does not seem to have an understanding of the scale and depth of the crisis. Hence the lack of urgency, fresh ideas and focus on getting things done.   

High inequality constrains growth, and our low growth limits prospects for redistribution, especially fiscal redistribution. SA has a Gini coefficient of 0.63 and was recently named by the World Bank as the most unequal of the 164 countries benchmarked. 

The black share of income in SA has increased with a growing black middle class. But the black share of wealth has not changed significantly. This has to do with SA's high market concentration and barriers to entry which constrain economic participation. 

In recognition of this “cappuccino economy” and in response to ongoing capital denationalisation, government intensified efforts to create a so-called patriotic capitalist class through a developmental state. This led to the prioritisation of a number of positive discrimination policies — affirmative action (AA), BBBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment), preferential procurement, set-asides  and so on. But these measures have been compromised by state incapacity and corruption. The state has been placed at the centre of black wealth creation but the model has been vulgarised through classic processes of clientelism through which rents became tied to political patronage and invariably undermine institutions and state capacity.  

This resulted in the hollowing out of critical capabilities in the criminal justice system and security cluster. This in turn enabled the broader criminalisation of SA life and makes the country especially vulnerable to international crime syndicates. 

We have become a growing market, not for dollar-flush tourists as we had hoped, but for international criminals. This could get us greylisted by the Financial Action Task Force, which will make it far more difficult for our tech start-ups to access flows of global venture capital. 

Fiscal constraints and diminished resources feeding patronage networks have intensified conflict and violence within the ANC. Democratic cornerstones such as the constitution, the rule of law and human rights remain vulnerable until we have transformed our economic model. Part of the change required is the building of a new productive elite that creates wealth via innovation and entrepreneurship. 

The third dimension of the economic crisis is climate change and the energy crisis.  Our energy crisis dominates our everyday lives, and negatively affects all of us. Each day we load-shed costs the economy  R500m-R700m per stage. So, stage 6 — where we are short of 6,000 megawatts which we need to shed — costs the economy between R3bn and R4.2bn a day. 

HOW DID WE GET HERE? 

Poor planning and indecision. In 1994, only 36% of SA’s 40-million population had electricity. Our generating capacity and grid served fewer than 15-million people. Today, 85% of SA's 60-million people have electricity — when there is no load-shedding.  But we have added little new generating capacity, resulting in a 6,000MW shortfall. 

Underlying this structural energy crisis has been policy uncertainty. Initially, in the 1980s and 1990s, the plan was to privatise generating capacity, which saw the state withdraw capital investment). This decision was later reversed but with only Kusile and Medupi planned and implemented (poorly) as new generating facilities.

The past decade has seen much policy flip-flopping between renewables, coal and nuclear, aggravated by corruption, which slowed implementation of the private sector-led renewable programmes.

We have become a growing market, not for dollar-flush tourists as we had hoped, but for international criminals

THE POLITICAL CRISIS: 

It is useful to return to SA’s democratic transition and relook the considerations that gave rise to our political dispensation. As with the former eastern bloc countries, we had an elite-led democratisation in which the ruling elite acceded to concessions, in our case political rights with some redistribution of benefits. These typically only happen when the costs of concession outweigh the costs of the status quo (in SA the costs of repression and economic sanctions) and the risks of violent revolution. 

Such top-down or elite-driven political transitions rarely produce variants of democracy in which there are political rights, property rights and civil rights. But the deal was exceptional; it provided civil rights as part of the exchange, most likely because the propertied elite overlapped with the minority elite in whose favour the civil rights worked.   

BUT WHY DID THE ANC ACCEDE TO THIS COMPROMISE?

First, the ANC was inherently democratic and conscious of human rights, and we can see evidence of this in the Freedom Charter, the Bill of Rights and so on. This was the thinking of the old ANC of  Govan Mbeki, but has it been passed down the generations?  

Second, the apartheid government still controlled the coercive apparatus of the state and would have unlikely exchanged political rights without the ANC acceding to both property and civil rights which protected minority interests.    

Third, the ANC appreciated the risk of capital and skills flight if we didn’t accede to property and civil rights (though we did experience high levels of skills and capital leaving SA). 

Fourth, we thought there were sufficient provisions in the constitution for asset redistribution, BBBEE, AA, fiscal policy transformation and so on. We now acknowledge the poor outcomes 28 years later. 

The debate continues whether this is because of state incapacity, weak execution and mismatched fiscal policy or because of real constitutional gaps that continue to secure minority interests and privilege instead of the interests of the historically underserved majority. I believe it is not a constitutional shortcoming, but one of state failure. The weak execution of land reform is a case in point.      

What does this mean for  the future? Are we likely to sustain the 1994 democratic exchange, or are we likely to backslide? 

In answering these questions, we need to be cognisant of the shifting sands globally with the new politics of self-expression, identity and polarisation fast replacing the old politics of compromise and consensus. 

This new politics is constructed around a narrative of victimhood — it is built around a damaged national psych. Think Germany between the world wars, or post-Cold War Russia. It is about citizens not just wanting to change government but wanting to change the entire political system. 

How could this play out in SA? Do we have a Ukraine phenomenon? Foreigners? Minority groups? The propertied elite? What irrational decisions might we take? Could we follow Zimbabwe’s disastrous land reform programme? Could the ANC adopt the narrative of African victimhood to survive? Are some of these traits already on show? How often have we heard the narrative that democracy might not be appropriate for Africa?

I would like to propose four sets of actions to both preserve our democratic gains and put us on a path of shared prosperity. 

First, we need economic growth. This is non-negotiable and should trump all other outcomes in the short term. Without growth, living standards will continue to decline, unemployment will continue to rise and social protections will continue to be eroded. 

Second, we need to do far more to address inequality. Democracy will always be under threat where there is no coincidence of interests between elites and the rest of society.  We need to be deliberate about building a black entrepreneurial stratum that creates wealth through productivity and innovation, to replace the rent-seeking elite. The private sector and banks will have to come to the party to enable this through market sharing and co-creation. As Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, authors of Why Nations Fail  remind us, democracy needs a productive elite that is vested in the stability of institutions. 

Third, we need to rebuild the state. Francis Fukuyama argues that a strong state is needed for democracy to be sustained. Our slow progress in rebuilding state capacity, particularly in the aftermath of state capture, is unforgivable and carries huge risk for the democratic project in SA.  

Fourth, we need to rethink political agency. Our default position has always been the ANC. But the ANC of old and the ANC of today are different. Clearly, we cannot rely on opposition parties to navigate the political crisis. Some trade on populist politics while others are driven by narrow minority interests. 

We must mobilise a robust and vigilant civil society, underpinned by a strong intelligentsia

Again, like the fight against state capture, we must mobilise a robust and vigilant civil society, underpinned by a strong intelligentsia. We need strong, ethical leaders — and we know we have many — to step up and take charge in all our corners, in all institutions. 

The original concept and foregrounding of our nation is gone — defeated by delivery paralysis, state capture, crime, load-shedding and the lack of real economic transformation — all of this worsened by weak leadership. How then do we rebuild a new unifying national identity, one that asserts the economic interests of the African majority, without going down the populist road of African majoritarianism, which could lead to state capture 2.0 and the downward slide to a failed state? 

The ANC remains highly fractured and needs to be thoroughly reorientated to succeed at governing a modern state and competitive economy. The constant and ritualistic drumbeat about the ANC’s organisational renewal dumbs down the debate about political agency and is a far cry from what the country needs. The only logical conclusion one can derive from years of talk about the eye of the needle is that the eye is too wide. The farcical coalition politics we are witnessing is evidence of political immaturity. The political theatre might be entertaining but is taking us nowhere fast. 

We need to change the narrative of inevitability and act with unity of purpose to rebuild our society. The alarm bells of state failure are ringing. But we are not yet a failed state, and it is within our hands to change things. We are a nation of capable and resilient people and institutions. 

 We need to live by the words of Welsh Marxist Raymond Williams, who said: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair.” 

Our collective despair tends to foster paralysis. I, like you, am tired of being disillusioned and feeling helpless. The gloom and normalised state of crisis must be replaced by hope and practical action. We must reimagine our society, embodying the values and spirit of our forefathers like Oom Gov, but based on a new politics in a rapidly changing world. 

I believe the people of this country have the power to change our destiny. Let’s get it done.

• Jonas is the chairman of MTN. This is an extract from the inaugural Govan Mbeki lecture delivered by Jonas  at Nelson Mandela Metro University.