President Cyril Ramaphosa visited Richards Bay on Thursday to see what is causing the huge blockages at this economically vital point. Dozens of ships lie waiting offshore, either to load or offload, while the local municipality is so strung out by the number of trucks trying to deliver commodities and goods to the barely moving harbour that it has simply stopped them.
At ports around the country, the failure of logistics is delaying trade worth R7bn a day and costing many, many jobs. If you are waiting for an online order from abroad to arrive before Christmas, forget it. The chaos is in addition to the R2bn a day we are paying in interest on our debt — and in addition to the daily incompetence of the government in providing clean water to citizens, keeping the roads safe, the country defended and students learning.
Heads would roll, Ramaphosa promised. “I’ve made it clear to Transnet that I want all the problems solved by next year. By the end of the first month [next year], we must see some improvement,” he said. “The incompetence and lack of action that we have seen here must be a matter that is dealt with with immediate effect.”
Anyone who mistook that extravagant promise for leadership would have been disabused the next day, Friday, when Eskom announced it would reintroduce stage 6 load-shedding, over the weekend. Eskom is so far off achieving even a modest 60% energy availability factor out of its beleaguered coal-fired fleet it is just embarrassing.
Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has been promising security of power for months, touring power plants and promising workers bonuses if they get it right. It isn’t his place to promise Eskom workers anything, but he is an ANC politician and words are easy, cheap and meaningless. Just like Ramaphosa’s.
Patriotic funding should be alive to the telling moments we are living through
In the midst of this gathering economic disintegration, opposition parties and funders are feverishly trying to prepare for elections which most people assume will be held in late May next year.
At issue is funding. If the opposition can secure 52% of the vote, or about 210 of the 400 seats in the National Assembly, it gets a shot at forming a complex coalition that would oust the ANC — even if it allied with the EFF. A long shot, but given the state of the country not impossible.
But the effort needs money. About R1bn is said to be available to put behind an effort to vote the ANC out of office. But the money comes with conditions. The funders want their candidate, former Primedia CEO and FirstRand chair Roger Jardine, to be president. That could mean parachuting him into one of the bigger opposition parties as its presidential candidate. So far none has accepted and it is way too late now, however much the money, to create a new party around Jardine.
A more serious idea is to create an active organisation, for a fraction of that money, to co-ordinate and manage the many conversations between individual parties, the electoral pact that DA leader John Steenhuisen launched in April, and the funders. This electoral co-ordinating committee would run its own campaign during the election, persuading people to go to the polls (9-million registered voters didn’t bother to vote in 2019) while at the same time ensuring that the parties, should they secure a majority, have a presidential candidate. The first thing parliament does after an election is to elect a president.
It could be Jardine, though it would be catastrophic if he were to walk away in the event he does not get the top job. It could be Songezo Zibi from Rise Mzansi. It could be IFP leader Velenkosini Hlabisa. Or Mmusi Maimane.
Frankly, any of them would do. The ANC badly needs a time out of power to examine why the country and the economy have gone so wrong under its rule.
But the funders will make all the calls. Refusing to subsidise efforts, including from civil groups, to co-ordinate the complex battery of political options lining up to take on the ANC next year would be simply tragic. Too many funders want candidates to agree to a detailed list of policies, but that is just impossible, and the ANC has shown us what happens when you can’t deal with complexity.
The folks with the R1bn need to appreciate the complexity of the state of the opposition at the moment. But appreciate, too, that its intricacy is an opportunity, not a threat. The ANC is on the slide — its eventual death will draw the final curtain on apartheid. Patriotic funding should be alive to the telling moments we are living through. It’s time to be subtle, not dogmatic.
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