The more I think about it the happier I am that the DA is pulling out of the national dialogue. I’m not so sure withdrawing as a form of political retribution would have been my ideal route but it is what it is. There shouldn’t be a political party within a mile of this thing.
The loss of the DA is, anyway, a minor hurdle. The two biggest threats to the dialogue are President Cyril Ramaphosa and former president (and eternal rival) Thabo Mbeki. The two can’t keep their hands off it.
On Friday Ramaphosa met the vast group of “Eminent Persons” he, without consultation, appointed as dialogue “ambassadors”. Most will have little idea what they are supposed to do but Ramaphosa likes to wrap himself in the trappings of an imagined unity of purpose. When South Africa faces policy resistance or diplomatic difficulties, he turns them into all-of-Africa or “Global South” difficulties.
What he has mastered is keeping a straight face through it all, much like he did throughout the many damaging and miserable lockdowns he needlessly imposed during the pandemic.
He’s a real and present danger to the national dialogue because, as always, he wants it to do too much. Every time he speaks about it he wants it to be about poverty and inequality and unemployment, about inclusive economic growth, about corruption and crime and gender-based violence. All of these are ANC tropes, a cut and paste of repeatedly failed manifesto promises over 20 years.
Mbeki, meanwhile, is on a trip of his own. “Given what has happened over the past 30 years and given where we are today, it’s going to be very important in my view that there must be a national dialogue ... that our people for the very first time since 1994 can discuss the South Africa they want and the South Africa they don’t want,” he told the SACP last year.
“This is the very first time that all our people will be coming together in all their echelons to talk about the future of South Africa, because it is about the people deciding where their own country should go. When we met in Codesa in 1990 or whatever, it was the political formations. This time, it’s political formations plus the people.”
Echelons? What could possibly go wrong? Someone once said if you want the wrong answer, ask everybody.
Ramaphosa routinely credits Mbeki with coming up with the national dialogue idea in 2024. But I first came across it in 2023 in a fabulous book, Soul of a Nation, by Oyama Mabandla. If anything it was a bitter attack, a black man’s lament on what the ANC has done to the South African economy, particularly since 2009 when it made Jacob Zuma president.
We need, first and foremost, to grow this motherf***er, to create new wealth rather than merely redistribute what we have, to create new businesses and let them employ people. Anything else is pure nonsense
Mabandla wrote, “50% of our productive capacity remans idle because of joblessness. And 18-million of our people are on social grants, with only about 4-million paying taxes. This is a recipe for failure.
“I urge that we go the route of a broad, inclusive conclave that brings together the best minds in and out of government: academics, civil society activists, faith communities, unions, business, the youth and political parties ... in a Codesa-like forum ... to lay out ways and means to avoid the approaching calamity.
“I believe that in moments of difficulty and emergency, bringing a group of people together to design our economic architecture, rather than particular policies, would be an acceptable and warranted intervention ...”
That makes lot more sense than spending R700m and trying to include the entire country. This is not an election, nor a referendum. Let’s also prevent it becoming a circus. Take 1,000 people, the best and the brightest, 2,000 if you must, with one gathering in each province, to hear argument and ideas and to draw up an economic charter for the future. No holy cows and no shouting.
There’s no need to be scared of ideas. We need, first and foremost, to grow this motherf***er, to create new wealth rather than merely redistribute what we have, to create new businesses and let them employ people. Anything else is egotistical nonsense.
Watching politicians like Ramaphosa and Mbeki grasping for the limelight is deeply unsettling and the foundations that have driven the dialogue idea so far need to tell the two to please be quiet and to hand over the process entirely to them. And if they won’t then the foundations should walk away.
Ramaphosa intends to “convene” the start of the dialogue next month. The foundations have just a few weeks to make this safe.
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