Another crisis but will SA learn the right lessons this time?

Now that the dust has settled after the recent violence, questions will linger about what lesson should be learnt.

The saying about never letting a good crisis go to waste has suffered from so much overuse that it has almost become a cliché. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

In business it is largely understood to mean embracing new ways of doing things that might be rejected out of hand in good times.

From watching the reactions in the past couple of weeks I’ve been left wondering if the same applies to the government, and whether it will lead to a different style of governing from President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Rightly or wrongly, a perception has been entrenched that having won the leadership of the ANC by the narrowest of margins, the president puts party unity ahead of national interests. And this has been cited as the reason that he’s reluctant to change his team, even when ministers stand in the way of progress, either through a lack of competence or ideological opposition.

Minerals and energy is one case, where an urgent environmental and economic need requires a speedy transition to less polluting sources of energy hits a brick wall when faced with a minister wedded to a carbon economy, something that Business Day’s Carol Paton has written about extensively.

Could the events of the past week be a catalyst to a different approach, especially with obvious weaknesses in the so-called security cluster that allowed the country to burn for almost a week?

Speculation about a cabinet reshuffle has been doing the rounds for months and the conventional wisdom is that it hasn’t happened due to the need to satisfy various factions within the party. In other words, while ministers serve at the president’s pleasure, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

If this is not the right time to reinforce that presidential prerogative, then it’s hard to see when another will come.

It’ll be interesting to see whether these events fundamentally change Ramaphosa ’ s view on the state’s capability and lead to an appropriate reassessment of what it can be expected to deliver on its own. It’s been a paradox of commentary in SA that while on the one hand the government’s loudest critics will complain about a weak and absent state, they will also see it as a solution.

The weak and incapable state is supposed to also design and implement multibillionrand infrastructure programmes to create and guarantee work for the millions of unemployed. In the midst of the violence, voices have been raised for a basic income grant, which will also be conceptualised, created and administered by the same state that can’t do simple things such as ensuring that hospitals have food for patients and schoolchildren can safely use toilets.

The sort of “big” thinking out of line with reality on the ground has long infected those in the government, and they refused to learn the right lessons from crises. Instead of being seen as a reason to limit ambitions to things that were achievable, the government saw its less than convincing handling of the Covid-19 outbreak as a reason to double up and claim it showed why it has to carry on and create a National Health Insurance (NHI).

Like his predecessor Aaron Motsoaledi, when he took over as health minister Zweli Mkhize also showed little care for fixing things that were broken and was rather obsessed with the idea of building this new bureaucracy, which coincidentally would centralise healthcare services in the government. As the country’s jump into a new welfare programme

— similarly with good intentions and not much thought about long-term costing and sustainability — seems irresistible, the experience with NHI so far might hold important lessons.

It’s an approach that has also been seen in the attitude towards state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Denel, SAA, Eskom and many others are not seen as evidence that perhaps the ANC government is not good at running companies.

The one SOE in which the government allowed private sector investment and pretty much left management alone to do its job has in some ways been outperforming its private sector peers. Under full state control and having to account to an interfering minister, it’s unlikely that outgoing Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko would have been allowed to cut jobs and transform the old inefficient landline operator running on copper wire into the country’s third-largest mobile operator and a big player in fibre.

But that is unlikely to see government ministers deviate from their view that not only should they hold on to the companies that they have, but that they should also create new ones. Despite everything they won’t let go of the idea that they can do a better job of channelling funding to SA’s entrepreneurs than the existing private sector players, who not only provided a lifeline to businesses during the Covid-19 crisis but also emerged as the government’s biggest source of funding after the country’s loss of its last remaining investment grade saw international investors reduce their holdings of local bonds. Now and again, there’s a cry for a state-owned bank. Except, of course, they never really do anything to make that a reality, so perhaps they aren’t really that convinced themselves.

That’s not to say Ramaphosa should stop listening or aspiring towards an entrepreneurial state next time the subject comes up in his economic advisory council meetings. He might just do with a dose of realism about what the state he’s in charge of today is capable of. And he might even make a habit of having a more constructive partnership with businesses, something that might have even rescued SA’s Covid-19 vaccination drive.