The way to get SA back on track

In the days leading to Wednesday’s budget speech by Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, the output from the speculative industry was near unanimous in predictions of gusty winds that would mature into a hurricane at once to sweep the country into the Atlantic.

But despite the odds, Mboweni managed to communicate a message of hope to the effect that although the country is in dire straits, it is possible to extricate ourselves from the mire.

Using the metaphor of the Aloe ferox, a resilient plant which also has purgative medicinal uses, Mboweni refocused the nation by giving pointers to what needs to be done for the country to turn the corner.

It was a delicate tightrope. Undoubtedly, some of the minister’s proposals will, for different reasons, earn him the scorn and ridicule of business and labour alike and, may one dare add, others who have not the faintest of a clue about the responsibility and implications of managing a state as broke as ours.

So, whereas we breathed a sigh of relief, for instance, about a positive that did not happen such as the increase in value added tax (VAT) as had been predicted, it does not mean that we are out of the woods.

Mboweni began his speech by reminding his audience that: “Our economy has won before” and asserted that “it will win again”. For the obvious yet crucial, he added: “Achieving economic growth and higher employment levels requires a plan.” Later, he referred to his department’s much publicised document: Towards an Economic Strategy for South Africa.

Government cannot but return to formulating a comprehensive economic plan to achieve greater levels of growth and reduction of the interdependent socio-economic phenomena of unemployment, poverty, and inequality. The National Treasury’s document addresses short-term constraints to the economy – not the long term.

This is not to subtract from what Mboweni said or gloss over the controversies that will follow in the weeks and months ahead.

No sensible person would quarrel with Mboweni’s suggestion that government “must also deal decisively with the excessive high cost of leasing government buildings” or that “the currently fragmented system of national and provincial development finance institutions” must be consolidated.

If a government department can lease a building for 10, 20 or 30 years at a cumulative cost of upwards of R1 billion, what prevents it from purchasing one, entering into a tailor-made rent-to-buy agreement akin to a build-operate-transfer contract or even better, build one at less the cost? The larger issue is the tenderisation of the state than its expression in this or that aspect. It too requires a comprehensive review as part of a progressive political and economic trajectory which appreciates the fact that we are, after all, a developing country, and a hugely unequal one at that.

Part of our national challenge since 1994 has been our fitful attempts at social pacting. For a polity with a divided history as ours, its many enduring consequences and the disaster that awaits failure to resolve our problems and challenges, we should be more united in our approach to construct a better future than our wont for retreat into sectoral, party-political and intraparty factional laagers.

To achieve many of the measures stated in the budget speech – for example, the contentious issue of the public sector wage bill – the role players will have to find one another for the benefit of the country as a whole.

The less ideologised the discussion, the better it will be. If we do not summon the requisite wisdom and temperament, we might, to paraphrase a famous text, end up in a situation in which the “constant opposition to one another, [carries] on … uninterrupted, [as a] hidden, [and] open fight, [which] end[s], either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contend[ers]”.

We require more than politicians desirous as they all are of returning to office at the end of their term, business people whose singular focus is the bottom line and unionists who are only concerned with the welfare of their members.

The country desperately needs patriots who permanently agonise about what they will bequeath to future generations.

Given our recent experience, the additional R2.4 billion budget allocation to the National Prosecuting Authority, the Special Investigating Unit and the Hawks which will also enable the appointment of 800 investigators and 277 prosecutors who will assist in clearing the backlog of cases such as those emanating from the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture is to be welcomed.

But one has to wonder whether the country is doing enough to reassert issues about society’s moral hygiene into the nation’s thinking processes. What has happened to the Moral Regeneration Movement, for instance?

And so, a no less essential ingredient to the achievement of Mboweni’s purgative Aloe ferox measures will be inter and intra party politics on the one hand and civil society initiatives on the other. Alongside civil society commissions and omissions, inter and intra party politics have played a significant part in post-apartheid successes and failures as they did during the apartheid period.

Truth be told, South Africans do not live in that province alone. The destiny of nations is always invariably determined by politics.

Over and above the ongoing commissions of inquiry into the excesses of the recent period, we need an inspired discussion about the politics of how we got where we are so as to avoid repeating past mistakes.

For this, we will require a patriotic activism which re-asserts the humanism, thoughtful prudence and circumspection which informed the struggle against apartheid and the cerebral pursuits which once made us stand erect in the period after 1994.

To a large measure, we need the Catholicism of Mr Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’ novel, Hard Times: “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Mukoni Ratshitanga.

• Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator. (mukoni@interlinked.co.za)

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