I love being a South African. It’s hard to imagine a country so divided and yet so interdependent. We are all passionate. We all have a solution to our problems, and we can’t stop telling each other what we think.
One of my favourite citizens is Bonang Mohale, president of Business Unity SA (Busa), chancellor of the University of the Free State, chair of the Bidvest, SBV and ArcelorMittal groups. He can really talk. I watched him making a soaring case for forcing investors to make 30% of their companies available to black South Africans to the Black Management Forum recently, and just this week he had an impassioned interview with Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh.
Bewailing President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC’s addiction to dozens of “priorities” every time he wants attention, he told young Sizwe “our problem is only one: it’s not a triple challenge problem, it’s jobs... If we give people an opportunity to regain their self-worth and their self respect and they have jobs we have solved all our problems.”
That’s by now such a common observation it is almost trite. Grow the economy and create jobs. But it may not be true, and it struck me how much we take for granted here when I read the front page lead in Business Day on Wednesday. It said transport minister Barbara Creecy wanted to table a new bill this year to “lock in” reforms of the railway system. “To give certainty on the future of the reform programme it’s very important to enshrine that programme in law,” she said.
But both she and Mohale miss a point. Our biggest problem is surely, before all the policy and solutions talk, the complete lack of accountability at all levels of government here. A neglectful mayor can ruin a village in a few months and stay in office; a thieving cabinet minister can get caught with a hand in the cookie jar and still keep their job.
Equally, politicians can promise jobs but nothing happens to them if the jobs don’t appear. Policies might get protection from the law, but nothing protects policies from politicians. The Bill of Rights, the heart of our constitution, says the state “may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender...” yet the Labour Laws Amendment Act exists, enforcing racial quotas at all SA companies.
Absolutely nothing beats being directly accountable to an electorate yet so distant have our political parties become from ordinary people who have to live with the lies they tell and the promises they break, that they don’t care. The mayor of Joburg is appointed by centralised party officials or fellow politicians; anything but the people. And the city dies.
The same would go for Mthatha, where dozens of people were left to drown in flooding because the city’s leadership isn’t directly accountable to them.
But with local elections approaching next year we are going to be swamped with promises from left to right to “grow the economy” and “create jobs”, almost none of which will be remotely plausible. It isn’t a job that gives you dignity. Your right to remove a rotten public representative who promised you a job and then forgot about you after his election does that.
But no SA party has thorough electoral reform and the introduction of more direct elections, and much less proportional representation, at the top of its agenda, and that is surely the key to all other reforms.
If you can’t sack a bad government or incompetent ministers, MPs or councillors, they’ll never take you seriously. They need to go to bed frightened of what voters think. That’s the kind of country you want to put your money in.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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