What does the next government have to do to rebuild South Africa when it takes office in two years’ time?  

The horse-trading for jobs will start even before the results are in. Who gets the Cabinet seats? The committee chairs? What policy demands will be made as part of the coalition package? 

Long-time ANC stalwart, Bulelani Ngcuka, told the Franschhoek Literary Festival that if he had his way, he would remove the entire current Cabinet and change the Constitution to raise the ceiling to allow more than two non-MPs in Cabinet.  

Any new opposition minister in a coalition Cabinet may suddenly be in charge of a hollowed-out, dysfunctional department. They will be entitled to replace a couple of political advisers, but the permanent staff is likely to include the corrupt in key positions with an agenda to sabotage every reform.

Whoever the new ministers are, they will find their greatest power is on the day they take office. Some big changes will need to be included in the coalition bargain.  

Parliament, too, is hollowed out and dysfunctional. New committee chairpersons will need to inject an entirely new culture of oversight that is missing from Parliament, according to the Zondo Commission.

‘Government of all the talents’

Would the country’s mood not be lifted by a commitment to a “government of all the talents” — ministers chosen for their in-depth knowledge and experience in relevant fields? 

Even under the present Constitution, seats might be found for outsiders if party leaders are determined.

Who will eat the ANC’s lunch come 2024?

Thuli Madonsela involved with the justice department, Jonathan Jansen with education? The whistle-blower Athol Williams needs to be brought back from exile. 

South Africa is about to lose one of its greatest sons — University of Johannesburg vice-chancellor Prof Tshilidzi Marwala — to become head of the United Nations university in Tokyo. 

The commentary has been about how wonderful it is that a South African has been so prominently recognised. Really?  

South Africa is losing a man who has published 17 books on artificial intelligence, chaired the president’s fourth industrial revolution commission, and been an unusually innovative, successful university head.

There should be outrage that South Africa could not find a top spot for him. Can we afford such casual losses? Are our institutions so chock full of excellence that we can spare his talents? 

Government departments themselves need to be rethought. Ideally, every department should be subjected to a zero-based budget process, to see what needs shrinking, expanding or even closing. The results will astonish us.

Politically, this is unlikely. But opposition parties should be ready with demands around policies and institutions, as well as portfolios. In some cases it could do things an ANC-only government cannot, like streamlining or closing non-functional institutions.

It will be a major project for every new minister to understand the true capabilities of their departments. You can’t put in figureheads and think a DG will make the decisions. We have learnt that when you put in a place-holder because they have a political position, in three months they think they got there on merit.

Their greatest power will be on day one. Coming into government office, you assume you’ll have time to learn, but you don’t.

“High office teaches decision-making, not substance,” former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has said. “It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions, but not what decisions to make.”

You don’t have to like Kissinger to recognise the wisdom of that point. Anyone who has been in government knows it in her/his private moments. I sure do. 

If a coalition partner wants to undo the damage of the State Security Agency, an agreement to close it down completely and start again would need to be in the coalition agreement. 

Some in the ANC might be delighted if that decision is taken off their shoulders. The SSA seems too compromised, too unfit for the task, too rogue to save, and this may be the only chance to close it. A new intelligence agency should be started from scratch.

The 1994 unwritten social compact: Why the ANC made mistakes early on and still struggles to correct its course

Endless reforms

Other radical changes will need to be agreed in the coalition talks. Once the first Cabinet meeting has been run on the old lines, it will be too late. Reforms will get bogged down.

An effective 2024 social compact depends on cooperation between important players at the sectoral level. To get the trillion rand in investment the president wants, businesses — not business associations — will need to be confident that their legitimate requirements will be met and illegitimate ones refused.

The reforms needed are almost endless. The new government must prioritise, and show there is a new culture of action, of understanding the state’s relevant capacity, of correcting errors and of ending the blight of cadre deployment. 

Faced with the myriad crises likely — from domestic unrest, inadequate policing, extreme weather events, further fallout from Covid or Monkeypox, from Ukraine and future foreign disruptions — we need a far more robust assessment of our domestic and foreign policy requirements than we have. 

The military

For example, in Cabo Delgado in neighbouring Mozambique, 850,000 refugees have fled a serious conflict in which our forces are fighting and dying, yet we leave problems in our military festering. For example, we have continued to accept that most of the exorbitantly priced arms deal procurement is not operational, with much of it in long-term storage. 

This is how the defence budget game is played in Parliament. Every year, the ministry complains it has no budget for maintenance, and Treasury says there is no more money. Each has protected its turf, and the kit is not maintained or put into long-term storage.

The military will face new demands in Mozambique and United Nations peacekeeping missions. Latest reports show it is far from ready. Almost all the arms deal equipment itself would not be helpful for the crises we have, even if it was in perfect condition and had been kept in working order. 

We need to sell what is surplus, buy low-priced items fit for purpose, and budget to maintain what we have, while Parliament needs to keep checking that it’s done.

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Parliament

So Parliament, too, has to be fixed. Sadly, nobody in our Parliament has experienced Parliament run by anyone but the ANC, and the best ANC office-holders will tell you they had scant-to-no training. 

New committee chairs need to break the routine of pro forma meetings and replace them with the proper use of informed experts, and nimbly anticipate problems instead of leaving it to the expensive and clumsy processes of the court system. 

Courts are being asked to do too much, resolving problems that either departments or parliamentary oversight should have picked up. Judge Zondo only touched the tip of the iceberg. The court was right to stop the switch-off of analogue TV, for example, because millions of households would have lost their nightly broadcasts. It should not have got to court.

Before the horse-trading begins, we need to start to rebuild a culture of service. Winning parties — whether the DA, Rivonia Circle or ASA — will need to instil the value of knowing your field; of being able to contribute and get results in both the executive and legislatures.

The Parliament that will assemble in the second half of 2024 may well include some combination of Songezo Zibi, John Steenhuisen and perhaps Herman Mashaba, as well as many current ANC ministers. 

Cyril Ramaphosa will likely be in his second term as President, unless Farmgate or some other crisis intervenes. The patronage networks will be calculating the post-Ramaphosa order.

Events

From the moment they take office, they will face headwinds. “Events, dear boy, events,” former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan explained when asked about the toughest part of being Prime Minister. 

And what events will await them in the ensuing five years!

A new US president will take office early in 2025, almost certainly someone whose name we have barely heard of today. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping will likely be reaffirmed as presidents, though Putin may be newly vulnerable.

Europe will not have settled down from either the tsunami of the Ukraine war, sanctions, inflation, refugee infusions or the disruption of Brexit. It’s far from clear that the plagues of Covid or Monkeypox or something else will be off the horizon. And extreme climate events will continue to disrupt communities as the world tinkers at the margins of this planet-changing syndrome.

Those are just the outside influences that will affect us. But the jobs, security, government service breakdowns and extreme weather events at home will be on this new Cabinet’s desks too. 

Pressure on our constitutional order will have accelerated. As government authority fails to reform, the rich and middle classes pay for private security and the poor turn to vigilantism. 

Will there be real education reform? Will the government address the crisis of quality education identified by local and international experts, and which is perhaps the greatest domestic threat to the future of an inclusive, effective and growing country?

Will the municipalities function properly? Many local governments are almost completely dysfunctional. But will a new government be able to break the hold of the corrupt, rent-generating networks which dominate them?

Do we get real value for all our embassies? The first draft of the National Planning Commission report made clear that the country did not, and that major change was required. The second draft removed the criticism. The problem is well known, as, for example, in the case of the poor quality of representation in major export markets. Can we remove the political appointments, or cut them to a minimum, except where the choice is exceptional and will enhance our diplomacy?

Economic growth

Government must set the goal of job-creating, rapid growth. But does this mean in substance rather than rhetoric? The unemployed demand no less. With around ten million jobless — an unemployment epidemic — can we honestly say we have done everything to create every job we could have? 

Of course not. In fact, with the exception of a few years under Mbeki from about 2003 to the global financial crisis starting in 2007, we have never done well enough to put more black South Africans to work than we added to the jobless queues. Our best was never as good as it needed to be and could have been.

Job creation will come less from the Treasury or Reserve Bank and more from the other economic ministries. I cannot agree with Zibi’s recommendation that we close Trade and Industry because that department can help or hinder multiple job-creating sectors.

Asia’s first economic “miracle” in Japan would not have happened without the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. But I welcome Zibi opening the discussion. Perhaps the DTI cannot be fixed, but if you close it, you will have to open something that does what it is supposed to do.

The Cabinet

The Cabinet is too large — larger than successful cabinets elsewhere. A start must be made, cutting ministers and deputy ministers. The ANC will be facing enough patronage loss anyway, but a beginning of reprioritising resources is urgent. The parties and the public need to focus on the importance of parliamentary committees, for informed scrutiny and contribution to sound policy and implementation.

Facing up to the state of our country in 2022, the picture is dire. 

Townships overtaken by violence, a police force used to “rounding up the usual suspects” after major crimes, then sluggish performance at trials and in securing convictions.

There is one man who predicted this. I thought at the time that he could not be more wrong. Dr Frederik van Zyl Slabbert feared that South Africa was too ambitious in creating a sophisticated, rights-based constitutional order before we had stabilised reliable, non-partisan security forces. The next few years may prove whether he was right or wrong.

There is cause for optimism. Solutions are available. There are viable investments and jobs all over South Africa waiting to be exploited. But it’s not a job for time-servers. We had better find people with courage and humility — the kind of people with the commitment and imagination we found almost 30 years ago. DM

John Matisonn, a former senior official in the United Nations in Afghanistan, returned to South Africa to write Cyril’s Choices, An Agenda for Reform. He is executive director of Ideas for Africa (Pty) Ltd.

Read Part One and Part Two.