Hard bargaining, not another magic plan, will get South Africa's economy growing

South Africa’s Finance Minister, Malusi Gigaba, needs more than the 14-point plan to revive the economy.
REUTERS/Rogan Ward

Finance ministers in today’s South Africa should be judged not by whether they have plans to rescue the economy themselves, but by their plans to get others to help them to do it.

South Africa’s new finance minister Malusi Gigaba recently unveiled a 14-point plan to revive the economy. He did this as part of his campaign to restore trust in the economy, partly damaged by the cabinet reshuffle in which he replaced a minister respected in the market place.

The plan has not achieved the desired effect – credit ratings agencies and commentators have rejected it, labelling it a restatement of existing government commitments which will do little or nothing to grow the economy.

On one level, the complaint is accurate. Gigaba’s plan, like the governing African National Congress’s economic discussion document, fails to move out of the rut which currently hobbles the economy. It, too, assumes that the solution lies in doing what is currently being done better rather than in doing things differently.

In particular it has nothing to say about how to include millions who are shut out of the mainstream economy. It’s difficult to see how South Africa’s economy can achieve sustained growth until and unless this problem is addressed.

On another level, the complaint that Gigaba did not come up with a plan which will rescue the economy misses the point – that, given the balance of power in South Africa, no government plan could rescue the economy on its own. Government promises to revive the economy should be judged not on whether they tell the country that the government – on its own – has come up with a cure, but on whether it has a credible plan for ensuring that all the key economic actors play a role in negotiating change.

Bargaining is the key

Those who expect the government to solve the economic problems on its own believe, of course, that government created them on its own. In this view, South Africa’s economy worked well until politicians came along and damaged it. All that’s needed is for politicians to behave differently and the economy will again function as it should.

But growth levels are too low to offer a better life to all, and other obstacles which ensure that South Africans do not all enjoy rising living standards, didn’t emerge when the current president took office or even in 1994, when the governing party took over the reins. To take one example: unemployment began rising in the 1970s, a quarter century before apartheid ended. The economy has always excluded most people – what we see now continues patterns set decades ago.

The government obviously does have a role in addressing these problems. But it’s not the only source of the problem and so it cannot be the only source of a solution. Some of what business or labour or the professions or educational institutions do is also responsible for the problem. And so they all need to become part of a solution by changing some of what they do.

While this picture of all the parties coming together to work out solutions sounds attractive, getting them to the table is difficult. And finding solutions will be even harder because they are deeply divided on what the problems are, and so on what the solutions may be.

Any particular idea for change will force one or other party to give up something in order to reap dividends later. Naturally, they all think that the others should do the sacrificing.

So a process which placed the economy on a sustainable path would require some hard bargaining and would need to continue for quite some time. It’s this bargaining process, not a magical government formula, which will place the economy on a new growth path.

Rebuilding trust

The government clearly has a key role in triggering the process of bargaining. This is precisely what the National Treasury seemed to be doing under Gigaba’s predecessor, Pravin Gordhan.

Its attempts to stave off a downgrade by ratings agencies began an exchange between government, sections of business and labour which may have developed into a negotiation about change. The chief priority for Gigaba – or any other finance minister – is to revive the process which ended when the cabinet reshuffle destroyed the trust which made it possible.

Gigaba’s plan does contain two points which might begin the revival. One is a commitment to a financial sector summit, the other a promise to resume talks on a mining charter.

Both may well fall short of what is needed. The summit idea repeats a flaw in government thinking on bargaining with business which has been evident for decades. It assumes that deep –rooted problems can be solved, and deep divisions healed, by a grand summit which gets the parties into a conference venue for a few days to hammer out a joint declaration.

This has been tried repeatedly and, each time, the declarations sounded good but were ignored. This is hardly surprising: precisely because the divisions are deep, they cannot be bridged at one event. Change is likely to need a process – not a summit. This should take as long as needed and concentrate on reaching agreement on what can be agreed, and building from there.

It is possible, however, that both initiatives could be the start of a productive process in which parties will be willing to negotiate changes which entail giving something up provided they get something in return. This is far more likely if this process too is not left to government alone.

Gigaba’s plans for negotiation may be improved, and so may move the economy towards growth which includes many more people. But only if commentators and interest groups treat them with the same seriousness they now reserve their hopes for a magic government plan to save the economy.

Steven Friedman, Professor of Political Studies, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The end of South African universities?

South Africa needs reflective leadership at its universities.
Brett Atherstone/flickr

Jonathan Jansen, vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State in South Africa until a year ago, has written a book on the country’s higher education sector. As by Fire – The End of the South African University is one of a number of recent books that set out to make sense of the current crisis in South African universities.

The crisis began in early 2015 with the #RhodesMustFall protests and gained momentum over the course of 2015. These protests fuelled, and eventually overtook the national #FeesMustFall movement. The underlying economic, cultural and political issues that drove the protests remain largely unresolved.

As by Fire is structured around three main questions: What in fact happened? Why did it happen? And what does the protest crisis mean for the future of South African universities?

Jansen draws on his own experience as well as interviews with 11 vice-chancellors in the country. His conclusion is:

In a nutshell, there is no future, and

What we are witnessing is a full system meltdown.

There are several problems with Jansen’s apocalyptic thesis.

An irresponsible thesis

Firstly, for a scholar of Jansen’s calibre, the analysis lacks a broad comparative perspective. His main reference point is the story of failing universities on the rest of the continent.

Jansen doesn’t make any comparisons to student protests across the globe – in Hong Kong, Canada, Chile, the UK, the US and Turkey, to name a few. These were also characterised by occupations of leaderless movements, threats of violence by police and militant students, reassertion of identity politics in curriculum and political stalemate.

A more thorough comparative analysis of what is happening in South Africa in relation to continental and global trends could have led to a more constructive conclusion that posed a range of future scenarios instead of a single “no future” story.

The more serious problem with Jansen’s “no future” thesis is that it’s irresponsible. Someone of Jansen’s profile has tremendous power to shape the narrative. And how South Africans interpret the events of the past two years shapes how the sector will go forward. In other words, his conclusion has consequences. Why would academics stay if they believed Jansen’s predictions with the certainty that he projects them? Why would students apply? Why would donors invest?

In the final few paragraphs Jansen attempts to wave a small flag of hope by appealing to civic action under the banners of free education for the poor and the right to education for all. This is an unconvincing attempt to end the book on a happier note.

An important perspective on leadership

What the book does offer is a view of university leaders under crisis – a close-up, zoomed-in, largely unedited perspective of 11 VC’s “under fire”, in some cases, literally. This is why the book will be of interest to anyone in higher education management.

The extensive literature of higher education leadership and management needs more of this kind of “in the trenches” study – leaders describing in their own words what it feels like to be flattened between a rock and a hard place, managing competing and contradictory demands from all sides while always under the watch of an unsympathetic media.

The book presents a view of leaders in a lose-lose situation, required to make on-the-spot judgement calls. The reader gets a close-up view of the ways in which they worked tirelessly to defend their institutions and were battered from every side. And Jansen is right to expose the extreme pressure and the personal costs that the VCs and their families paid. The accounts expose both their vulnerability and their resilience.

Jansen concludes by arguing that what’s needed more than ever before is

university leadership that is both compassionate in speaking to the student heart and competent in leading our universities in a demanding world of teaching, research, and public duty.

The missed opportunity of the book is that Jansen doesn’t explicitly extract from his interviewees what that compassionate competence looks like. In retrospect, what do they think they did right? What do they regret? What did they learn as leaders in crisis about the complexities of leading a university community at this stage of South Africa’s democracy?

Rebecca Solnit, American activist and author of Hope in the Dark, writes of the times we are living in that

this is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.

What South Africa’s universities need from their leaders now is not prophecies of doom, but deeper reflection on the transformative potential of this difficult historical moment.

Suellen Shay, Dean and Associate Professor, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Disclosure of party funding: only if it’s relevant, says DA

Not all funding information is useful to voters, argues opposition party

By Ashleigh Furlong
16 August 2017

Advocates for My Vote Counts and for the Democratic Alliance in court before the hearing on Wednesday. Photo: Ashleigh Furlong

The Democratic Alliance argued in the Western Cape High court on Wednesday that political parties should only have to disclose funding information if this is highly relevant for voters, and then only if a request is made through the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA).

This was one of the arguments put forth by the DA’s counsel, Advocate Ismail Jamie, during the second day of arguments in the case brought by My Vote Counts about the disclosure of political party funding.

On Tuesday, My Vote Counts had argued that all information regarding funding of political parties should be available, and that PAIA is constitutionally flawed because it did not allow for this.

Today, Jamie said that while the DA accepted that certain types of information relating to the funding of political parties may be “reasonably required”, there were other types of private funding information that were “almost certainly not required”.

Jamie used the example of a “Mrs Bloggs” signing up to donate R50 a month to a political party. Criticising the argument by My Vote Counts that “in order to cast an informed vote or make an informed political choice, all voters need to know, on a blanket basis, every bit of information about private political party funding”, Jamie said that knowing that Mrs Bloggs contributes R50 a month to a particular political party did not aid in the voting process.

“It is inconceivable that Mrs Bloggs’ R50 influences a party’s policies,” said Jamie. He said that the application by My Vote Counts application was “devoid of facts”.

Jamie said that the “kind of donation that does impact” would be a donation from a foreign government of a large sum of money to a political party, particularly the ruling party. However, Jamie said, PAIA could be used to access this information.

This would be “highly relevant for any voter to know” because it would be “unusual” and “most odd and suspicious.”

Jamie said the relevance of the donation would depend on who made it and how big it was.
He said he was sure the average voter would be interested if the Chinese or Russian government were donating to the ANC.

In these cases, said Jamie, any claim to anonymity would be overruled by the “express public interest”.

“It is not enough to say it would be nice to have this information … That may in a general sense be so, [but] what the law requires, is that access to that information must confer upon you a substantial advantage that you would not have otherwise,” said Jamie.

He said the situation would be the same if it were a company donating to a political party.

Jamie differed from Thabani Masuku for the Minister of Justice, who argued yesterday and today that PAIA was not the correct legislation to govern the right of access to information about political party funding and that My Vote Counts should rather focus on the Electoral Act.

Jamie told the court that the request by My Vote Counts would “seek in a most dramatic way” to infringe on Parliament’s powers. “We know funding is the lifeblood of political parties, more especially of opposition parties,” he said. Even if there was a gap in PAIA, this would be up to Parliament to remedy, he said.

Referring to the founding affidavit by DA Federal Executive Chairman James Selfe, Jamie said Selfe had stated that “almost all donations” to the DA were unconditional, meaning that they did not come with any strings attached. “Because they are unconditional, they do not influence party behaviour and do not contain information that would be useful to voters,” said Jamie.

He said people did not donate to a party to try and influence the party, but because they wanted to see that party come to power, gain traction or because they believed the party would create a better life for them.

“My submission is that the vast majority aren’t going to be swayed by anodyne information about funding,” said Jamie.

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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What the lack of accountability for Marikana says about Zuma's government

The scene of the Marikana massacre in South Africa that some have named the “Hill of Horror”. Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko

Five years ago this week 44 people were killed in the course of an industrial dispute at a platinum mine in South Africa’s North West Province owned by Lonmin. It became known as the Marikana massacre.

For many observers, Marikana was a turning point in the presidency of Jacob Zuma – who came to power in 2009 – and in the history of democratic South Africa. Even more so, it gave an early indication of the abuse of state power that’s been the hallmark of the Zuma government.

Thirty-four miners were shot dead by members of the South African Police Service in a single day, 16 August 2012. Seventeen were gunned down by heavily armed members of police tactical response teams as they left the small hill (or koppie) they’d been occupying. Others died at the hands of the police in the course of a brutal mopping up operation that followed.

Five years on, and two years after the official Farlam Commission of Inquiry into the Marikana tragedy, no-one has been held to account. Ministers have moved to new portfolios, police commanders have retired on ample pensions, or been replaced in a blaze of litigation.

Lack of accountability

Only last week Zuma survived a vote of no confidence in parliament in the wake of a series of scandals. These included compelling evidence that he and his government are in thrall to the influential Gupta family.

Zuma’s reputation as the “Teflon President” – able to shrug off charges of everything from bribery to rape and allowing the South African state to be “captured” by the Guptas and their acolytes – dates back well beyond 2012. But, when it comes to Marikana, Zuma is not the only one with non-stick credentials.

In March this year, the country’s Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the police oversight body, announced that it had identified 72 police officers to face charges. These ranged from murder to perjury and defeating the ends of justice. Since then, no further action has been taken.

Important though this is, the responsibility for the massacre doesn’t stop at those who pulled the triggers. At the outset of the Farlam Commission’s public hearings, Dali Mpofu, counsel for the miners injured at Marikana, blamed many of the deaths on ‘toxic collusion’ between the police and the mining company Lonmin.

As the inquiry progressed, Mpofu and others made strenuous efforts to blame Cyril Ramaphosa, deputy president of South Africa for the bloody denouement of 16 August. At the time Ramaphosa was a shareholder and non-executive director of Lonmin as well as a member of the ruling ANC’s National Executive Committee.

The commission itself uncovered evidence that collusion went some way beyond the police commanders and Lonmin executives on the ground. At a special briefing two days before the massacre the police commissioner for the North West province, Lieutenant General Miriam Mbombo, told a senior Lonmin executive that police were planning to move in to “kill” the strikers’ protest.

Mbombo revealed that she was acutely aware of the influence wielded by Ramaphosa. She also admitted being alive to the risk of allowing Julius Malema, who had been expelled as leader of the ANC’s Youth League, to make political capital out of the dispute.

Based on the transcript of this briefing, the Commission found that both Mbombo and the then National Commissioner of police, General Riah Phiyega, were complicit in raising political factors in their discussions about policing in Marikana. It found these discussions to be “inappropriate” and inconsistent with the constitutional requirement that

policing should be conducted in an impartial and unbiased manner.

The Commission also determined that the fatal decision to forcibly remove the striking miners from the koppie they were occupying was taken by Mbombo and not by tactical commanders with expertise in public order policing. It was then endorsed at an extraordinary session of the South African Police Service’s national management forum late on 15 August.

The commission did not find a direct link between anyone in political authority having ordered the police to take action. It did, however, conclude that the decision to remove the strikers from the koppie

was at least partly the consequence of the senior police officials feeling the need to act and to be seen to act.

This idea that the police commanders at Marikana did not need to be told what to do, or how to do it, is consistent with the social theorist Steven Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power and the ability of the powerful to secure the compliance of those they dominate without either making decisions or giving orders. The generals knew what had to be done to end a costly and politically damaging protest. They knew that it had to be done without further delay, and, if necessary, with the use of force. The result, as we now know, was the loss of 34 lives.

The way in which power, subtly but with far reaching consequences, was used at Marikana may also tell us something about how it’s used in contemporary South Africa more generally to control, perhaps even to capture, not just the police but other state institutions far beyond the criminal justice system.

Bill Dixon, Professor of Criminology, University of Nottingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The withdrawal of the Mandela book was nothing short of censorship

Posters of various newspapers paying tribute after the death of former South African President Nelson in 2013.
Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

“Mandela’s Last Years”, written by retired military doctor Vejay Ramlakan, has become a sought after commodity since the publisher, Penguin SA, withdrew it from the shelves in July. Ramlakan was the head of the medical team that looked after Nelson Mandela until his death in 2013.

The withdrawing and pulping of a book represents a huge expense for a publisher, as well as a source of some embarrassment. So why did the publisher do it?

Soon after the book was published, members of the Mandela family, led by his widow Graça Machel, threatened legal action. It must be admitted that the basis for any legal action wasn’t clear, although it was probably linked to defamation. The book, Machel argued, constituted “an assault on the trust and dignity” of her late husband.

Soon afterwards, the author’s employer, the South African National Defence Force, distanced itself from the book, suggesting that it may have contravened doctor-patient confidentiality.

The publisher bowed to this pressure and withdrew the book, stating that no further copies would be issued out of respect for the family. This is almost unprecedented, anywhere, and needs to be teased out more fully. After reading the book, I’ve considered how and why the publisher may have come to this decision.

Reasons for pulping a book

The decision making process for a publisher in a case like the Mandela book revolves around balancing the potential costs against reputational damage. The costs can be extensive – in publishing, all costs relating to editing, design, production, printing and distribution are made up front. It is relatively easy to make a decision to withdraw a book after publication when it may have contravened the law, mostly due to defamation of character.

Books may also be withdrawn after allegations of plagiarism, or because the accuracy of the content has been called into question. Publishers sometimes cancel contracts with their authors based on the standard waivers dealing with defamation and inaccuracies.

Publishers try to avoid these kinds of situations by performing due diligence to see if manuscripts contain anything defamatory or that breaches privacy. They employ fact checkers to avoid inaccuracy. And they require authors to warrant that their work is original and accurate.

This doesn’t mean that errors don’t sometimes slip through. But it is very unusual for a book to be withdrawn simply because it’s controversial. In fact, publishers usually support controversial titles because they create publicity, and publicity generally leads to sales.

So what happened in this particular case?

The first set of questions would relate to the credibility of the author, and the publisher’s relationship with him. Ramlakan was the head of Mandela’s medical team and had unique access to the former president over a long period of time. This means that he certainly had the access and authority to write the book, and as far as I know nobody is questioning its accuracy.

The cover of ‘Mandela’s Last Years’, which has been withdrawn.

This is important, because truthfulness is one of the main defences against defamation, as is the issue of public benefit or interest. It seems highly unlikely that a publisher would allow a nonfiction title to include material that is patently untrue or that would harm the reputation of a man like Mandela. Is there really still a need to protect the reputation of a man of such global stature?

Family permission

Linked to the question of authority is whether the work was authorised. The author has repeatedly claimed he wrote the memoir at the request of family members, and with their permission. In such a large family, it would be difficult to obtain permission from every family member, and it is quite common for family members to protest their treatment in a biography of a famous public figure.

Family members often argue that there has been a breach of privacy or that embarrassing private details have been made public. But the truth is that their authorisation is not actually necessary. Many authors write unauthorised biographies or memoirs, and while they may prove controversial, they certainly do not contravene the law. The broad variety of books already available on Mandela shows that there is ongoing public interest. It seems unlikely that each one of them was authorised by the family.

What complicates this scenario is that, as a medical doctor, Ramlakan is also expected to uphold ethical standards that an ordinary writer wouldn’t be subject to. I am not an expert in medical ethics, but there are very few medical details in the book that are not already in the public domain.

In fact, one of the purposes of the book was to counter the rumours and speculation around Mandela’s medical condition in the last years and months of his life. It does this by quietly countering inaccurate statements and setting out the bare facts. It appears that the author made a deliberate effort to avoid breaching confidentiality, and ended up writing a very respectful book.

Some have suggested that the publisher and author were simply attempting to cash in on the Mandela legacy. Whatever their motives, they shouldn’t be the basis for withdrawing a book from public circulation. Taste and motivation are not legal issues.

Censorship

Given that there is no apparent material basis for a legal attack on the book, its withdrawal reveals self-censorship on the part of the publisher. South Africa no longer has censorship laws in place, but an influential family can bring pressure to bear that amounts to the same thing. But also given that the book was already on the market, it should be asked what the effect of the withdrawal will be.

While fewer copies will be sold in bookshops, and fewer people will have access to it, it’s not possible to entirely withdraw a book from the online market. The book reviews already mention all of the most controversial parts of the book, and the action of withdrawal only serves to highlight them. The best course of action would be to allow the book to circulate freely and to stand – or fall – on its own merits. Anything else is censorship.

Beth le Roux, Associate Professor, Publishing, University of Pretoria

This article was originally published on The Conversation.