South Africans are tired of plans to fix things, they want action

After the 2019 national elections, which the ANC won, President Cyril Ramaphosa used his first State of the Nation Address (Sona) to make his now famous New Dawn/Thuma Mina speech.

The theme of the speech was centred around servant leadership, using Hugh Masekela’s classic hit, Thuma Mina, as the theme. For a short while, the nation felt positive again.

When he declared that “our problems are real but not insurmountable”, the country once again believed that this was indeed a new dawn waiting to break into beautiful sunshine bringing prosperity, stability and corruption-free government.

And the country gave Ramaphosa’s new government truckloads of goodwill when they begged, “please send us to go and fix the country for you”.

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Four years and several corruption scandals later, that goodwill is gone.

When the president mentioned that the government was considering declaring a state of disaster to deal with the crippling electricity blackouts that are destroying the economy, the overwhelming public response was declaring a national state of disaster would be cover for his comrades in the governing party to loot public funds like they did with the health funds that were meant to deal with Covid pandemic during the last state of disaster.

So it is not as though the president and his government woke up one day and South Africans had abruptly withdrawn the goodwill they had given them, they eroded that goodwill through looting Covid funds, failing to arrest the perpetrators, the decline of state-owned enterprises, failing to deal with the power crisis and general corruption that continues, despite the president’s promise to “watch this space” during his promise of a new dawn.

When it is was leaked to the media that the SA Tourism board was on the verge of closing a deal with English Premiership club Tottenham Hotspur to market South Africa by wearing a sort of “Visit South Africa” slogan on their shirts, the uproar that followed was not unexpected.

It didn’t matter that the SA Tourism’s acting CEO Themba Khumalo came and tried to make sense of the deal, which would see the department of tourism spending around R900 million sponsoring the team over the next three years.

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The uproar over the country spending close to a billion rands on foreign soil just to market the country comes from a place where goodwill has been completely eroded.

The president must move away from the notion that it is his own party that he must keep happy first in order to stay in power.

The ruling party knows that the power dynamics have changed since the last local government elections. It is not only their branches that determine the direction that the country must take. It is ordinary South Africans, some of whom have never attended an ANC branch meeting.

These are the citizens who gave the president and his team the goodwill when they needed. And they can still give government time and space to fix things. As long as they use that goodwill effectively, for the good of South Africa.

The last thing the president wants to do when he presents the Sona on Thursday is to make grandiose promises on the level of Thuma Mina/ New Dawn.

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The goodwill that the government has squandered over the past four years can only be restored by presenting a clear and logical plan of action, with measurable timelines, to try and fix what they have failed to fix in the past four years.

South Africans are tired of plans to fix things, they want action with tangible results.