EDITORIAL
The Gathering 2022: Five more nightmarish years later, South Africa is in dire need of solutions
We are now teetering on the edge of the abyss. As our ruling party and its government face multiple failures, it is time for the people of South Africa to step in and offer solutions that could help us reclaim our future.
A few weeks ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered his plan on how to implement the Zondo Commission’s recommendations – and to echo my Daily Maverick colleague, Marianne Merten, he is indeed attempting to fix the system itself. Some points are definitely strong and well-intentioned.
But every system must rest on its pillars. Not only on departments and political power, but on the people and their decency, competence and commitment.
President Ramaphosa is still, all these years later, not moving on cadre deployment and not moving openly against his ANC colleagues – even as it is clear that the distribution of power and money within the ruling party has created a corruption feeding frenzy and, even more destructively, spread the virus of incompetence that in itself has the greatest potential to bring the whole country down.
Still, the people of South Africa refuse to give up. They have had enough of the incompetence, indecency and selfishness that defines the “leadership” of our country today – political and executive.
Next week in Cape Town, Daily Maverick will hold its signature conference, The Gathering 2022, with a special purpose engraved in our payoff line:
Update – The Gathering 2022 is happening now – watch live here
Because every problem has a solution.
South Africa’s top experts from a variety of sectors will gather to offer their knowledge, ideas and goodwill to light up the way out of the morass we’re in. They will discuss solutions for:
- Energy beyond Eskom;
- Economy and business environment;
- How to prepare for the next pandemic;
- How to fix the Security Cluster;
- How to deliver to the poorest of the poor;
- How to fight our common hopelessness, and, finally;
- How to transform our political system.
The participants are world-class people who are not looking to score tenders and move up on the Game of Thrones-type ladder. They just want to help, given that our government is not exactly brimming with expertise and good faith.
More than anything, they hope to live in a country where hope doesn’t die.
In a spirit of help and assistance that will permeate The Gathering 2022, we at Daily Maverick also have a proposal to make regarding the role media plays in the modern state we would all like to build.
But before we present our simple, and short, proposal, a few facts:
The Fourth Estate of South Africa – the news media – fought valiantly for truth in the days when lies were far more profitable. We stayed true to our mission when cynicism was a safer place to be. We didn’t flinch when threats were hurled at us and didn’t melt when things got hot. We were holding the line we knew could not be abandoned – our common future was being defended there.
I was astonished when President Ramaphosa told the gathered media representatives in 2018, soon after his ascension to the presidency, that he and other ANC leaders had become aware of just how badly the wheels had fallen off only after the breaking of the #GuptaLeaks (his choice of metaphor).
It was a clever statement to make inside a room full of senior journalists and editors – containing just enough flattery to make them forget how indefensible the decade-long ANC’s appeasement of Jacob Zuma was.
But, logically, only two reasons can possibly explain how the eyes of the majority of the ANC and government were closed so wide shut: blinding incompetence (they couldn’t see it, even as it was happening right in front of their eyes) or willful blindness (because they refused to see it).
I wonder which one it was?
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Almost five years since we as a country started dealing with State Capture, general corruption, homelessness and poverty are amplified by the spectre of hunger and the rise of openly xenophobic political players.
Large swathes of South Africa are run by parallel structures of organised crime.
State Capture perpetrators, and the new generation of corrupt criminals, are louder than ever. Some of them will even compete for senior positions at the ANC’s December conference. Some of them belong notionally to the opposition, but have been exposed by the media as corrupt and posing a systemic threat to our constitutional order.
In this chaos that is today’s South Africa, there is still a strong point of continuing strength and dedication to truth – the media.
The Zondo Commission report – a product of incredible work by dedicated professionals who truly love this country – has proven that what we’ve been publishing for years was true; that the state was indeed captured and precisely by the people the media fingered a long time ago.
And yet, we in the media are frustrated. Why did we have to lose so much time before even beginning to address the crimes that were long ago proven beyond doubt?
So, in the spirit of The Gathering, we offer a solution to help remedy this situation with a practical solution, described here in two short points:
- Media reports and investigations need to be taken seriously
We know what we publish and check our facts thoroughly. As witnessed hundreds of times, we are overwhelmingly right in our reporting. If we publish that someone broke the law, it is very, very likely that the law was indeed broken.
Should this point be successfully implemented, the next one, also simple, should follow:
- Media reports and investigations need to be immediately considered by the investigating and prosecuting authorities.
Iron is cast while it’s hot. Our investigations often contain a wealth of data that could be used immediately or give a clear picture of where that data could be found.
We understand that the NPA and the Hawks are overwhelmed, and have thousands of cases that need to be investigated, and that it will take years and decades to investigate and prosecute them all.
But the SA government also needs to understand that the people of our country need to see justice done.
No one likes slow justice – the Matshela Kokos of the world will end up fighting for many years, possibly decades, as Jacob Zuma has shown how it’s done.
So, we propose that we all can walk and chew gum at the same time.
We propose that within the NPA and the Hawks, small but dedicated teams of top professionals are created to immediately check the media’s investigations and exposés.
There is no need for these task teams to comprise hundreds of experts: a few dozen energised officers who love their country and understand the “fierce urgency of now” would suffice.
Within a matter of weeks, they will be able to establish if there are grounds for prosecution or not.
This effort would cut the time needed to bring major criminals to book from many years (decades) to a few months – now, that would be the type of winning that the majority of our brutalised population would appreciate and which could perform wonders for our sagging morale.
We have wasted all these years. There’s so much time to make up. But we must start somewhere.
How about here, and now? DM
Get your tickets to The Gathering here.
The media has, without a doubt, been a firewall for morality (with a marked exception. Multiple births and all). and I’m really grateful to the bravery of our journalist. I’m just concerned that my cynicism may be infectious. And even if there were a vaccination available for cynicism in the face of such overwhelming greed and stupidity, South Africans don’t seem quite on the ball in understanding that vaccinations help in the fight back. Possibly because a real fight back is serious. Iran shows us just how serious you need to be, if you want to change things and fight back.
Not all media reports are as reliable as DM, some are nefarious propaganda or disinformation. Five years ago iol reported that the late Meshack Radebe observed a cabinet minister dishing out bribes to ANC delegates to the elective conference of 2017 in the lobby of their hotel. Upon being approached by Zondo Commission investigators Radebe denied the report.
While there is merit in the idea of taking serious work by serious investigative journalists seriously within the criminal justice administration as a temporary measure pending reform of the anti-corruption capacity of our criminal justice administration, there is no lasting substitute for reform that embraces the binding criteria set in the Glenister litigation. This is best achieved by establishing a Chapter Nine entity to prevent, combat, investigate and prosecute the serious corruption that is strangling SA. It will be difficult to attract the right personnel – properly trained specialists who demand their professional independence and secure tenure , if the new body is not urgently established.
Every day we read and hear more about the destruction of our country and society by delinquent and self serving civil servants. Today I heR of a 21 year old “grade 12 learner” shooting to death a 20 year old “grade 11 learner”.
I ask mysrlf: What are 20/21 year olds doing in our secondary school system??
They were not born when the New South Africa was liberated in 1994!
The fact us, that the lawless activities of the apartheid years spawned a nation of delinquent citizens. Sure, there were some admirable heroes who characterised “the struggle”, but it’s also spawned a nation of liars, thieves and murderers, even at the highest level of office!
Unfortunately there is no quick fix for a nation that puts self interest before ethics, law and order, and this is what our children are learning. Our GDP is fraud and criminality.
My comments below must be read against my strong support for the role DM has played in uncovering corruption. However, the Editor asks that South Africans generate solutions to the South African disaster. I have looked at the topics set out by DM for focus at their upcoming Gathering. Nowhere do I see any reference to the twin fundamentals that are driving the country’s slide into anarchy, namely grossly unequal education which is driving a steady increase in what is already extreme inequality. I am very disappointed in DM’s failure in this regard. Unless South Africa starts on the long and very challenging road of improving both education and skills development, it will continue to slide further into anarchy and swim in never ending swamps. No society can survive hundreds of thousands of young people leaving school each year with minimum education and certainly no skills. Their options are dismal. South Africa has the resources and intellectual capacity to formulate strategies to address these problems but, when DM does not even give them mention, I give up hope.
There are of course other issues contributing to social disintegration such as the shortage of serviced land for self build housing. A hopeless education system is however the lynchpin of increasing inequality. Until South Africa invests in its people, investment in bricks and mortar will not solve the problem.
our problem isn’t inequality; it’s poverty. at the current rate we’re all heading for equally poor. we should get the issue of “inequality” out of the discussion and focus on the real problem: general incompetence and criminality.
The only reasonable hope to turn SA around in the next decade is for the DA to be in charge. I know it’s offensive to many, but the ANC is hopelessly corrupt and irredeemable and we’re already seeing the coalition-chaos unfolding on a municipal level.
Sam i agree wholeheartedly with you. SOLUTIONS. The ANC is CORRUPT and ROTTEN to the core, do we just sit and talk without offering any solutions? Grossly unequal education, many teachers poorly educated, ill disciplined( NOT ALL), no responsibility and overly protected by UNIONS even for obvious repeated wrong doing. We are Doomed Finished. I work in the Eastrand Township, there’s a young White principal, he lays down the law, unafraid, unapologetic, pulls no punches, demand discipline and accountability from his staff and learners. His school is so popular in the area every parent want to enroll his or her children there. He is SAFE bcos the community will do anything to protect him. SOLUTION. Villages all o ver the country, broken families (Migrant Labour System), raising children as an ageset gone, every one for himself, hopelessness, deprivation, substance Abuse and drug addiction. Serious repercussions for all us. You hit the nail on the head, Social disintegration like SHORTAGE of serviced Land to SELF build housing. The question is Sam where is the land going to come from? We need SOLUTIONS. Am glad you also own up to our past which is NOT common here.
Thank you for your good news story. On the question of availability of urban land, the reality is that our old metrop0litan areas cannot cope with both massive urbanization and old collapsing infrastructure. We need to identify four new metropolitan areas and plan for low-income friendly layouts. They should be close to former homelands so that economic linkages stretch out into those marginalized areas. The following spring to mind as future cities – Mbombela, Newcastle, East London, Polokwane.
I absolutely agree that education is critical. I think we missed a great opportunity to change our education industrial complex which measures itself on 7 data points that are checked through your ability to rapidly copy stuff from your short-term memory to a piece of paper (the matric certificate).
This is not a local phenomena by any means – globally there is an awareness amongst educationalists that teach-to-test and classroom learning does not equip our children with the skills they need, but also an understanding that it is a highly complex and nearly unsolvable wicked problem.
So how do we give people the skills they need to create and contribute to prosperity, growth and wealth? Lets start by admitting that the momentum of the education industrial complex is so big that the bureaucrats, politicians and corporates trapped inside it cannot slow it down, nevermind stop or turn it around.
In my opinion the answer lies in parents, communities, small businesses, etc taking ownership followed by intentional action to do better in their local addressable community and create small pockets of excellence.
Just as massive changes in corporate culture (the collection of accepted behaviours) and business models almost never come from the top because of entrenched momentum and fears, the education system is not going to go away on its own. We should enhance it at the level at which we can impact it, and the big change will emerge (hopefully in the next 3-5 decades)
Branko, I love your article. I think the keywords are “they hope to live in a country where hope doesn’t die”. I’m not going to interrogate the facts, I’m going to simply say, we cannot give up hope. History was not made by people who only aligned with the ‘facts’. History was made by people who didn’t care about the facts, they believed, they had hope, and they strove for that which was deemed to be unachievable and unassailable. If you want a layman, inexperienced in journalism and criminal investigations, but passionate about this country, curious, highly intelligent, and eager to help, you could always set up those task teams with a mixture of experienced professionals and not-so-experienced people who have not given up hope.
I am sure there are many experienced retired or semi-retired people that will be eager to help?
Very true: a wealth of talent and energy and people who can mentor nd train young people.
Fiona: I have to disagree. History is not shaped by people that hope or believe or strive or demand. History is shaped by people that act. Our problem is not even a shortage of people that take action or naive people that hope. Our problem is that 9 out of 10 people expect or demand. Our entire nation was twenty years ahead of the era of entitled millenials.
South Africans, by our nature, are problem solvers. It’s the political ideology, low levels of education, meddling, inefficiencies and a lack of countability that stops the solutions from being put in place. We have plenty of solutions!
I wonder if this deeply held view of our culture is still true? Is this something that us privileged white people told ourselves in the 80’s and 90’s about our own subculture? Does it apply across the spectrum? I am seeing a lot of cancel culture, dismissing and dehumanising of “the other” and entitlement that are spreading from the politicians to our young people – who are rightfully frustrated that the promised land of opportunity has not arrived yet.
I know there are a LOT of South Africans from a broad spectrum of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds who are really trying to make things better. Some of us believe in building a human culture (globally as well as in our immediate community) where equality and inclusion, social justice and/or a focus on the urgency of dealing with atmospheric cancer are valued above all other petty politics of division and grabs for power and loot.
This does not mean that South Africa can by any means typify itself as culturally behind equal rights and decisive climate action. In the same way I no longer feel a deep sense of connection to the idea that we are problem-solvers, and would propose that if culture is the reflection of the behaviour of the majority of our citizens, we are greedy, lazy whiners that want other people to come and give us things we want.
I fully support the remainder of your comment about putting solutions in place though! As long as we don’t rely on government and big business to do it for us.
Great stuff Branko! There is one thing that I find strange, When we read the DM and other SA publications it is all about what is wrong with SA. Murders, cash-in-transit-robberies, rapes, schools in chaos etc, etc. Also, all the chaos and lies in the opposition party soup. What is NOT reported are the successes of the opposition parties in towns, cities and the province that they run. This is supposed to be a democracy where every party gets reported on in a fair manner. The DA runs the Western Cape, Cape Town and various towns well. No one says that they are perfect, they are without a doubt the best in SA. THAT success does not get the credit it deserves in the media. Another publication agreed with me, but said that success was not news! No wonder the ANC keeps getting in!
I applaud everything that you and your colleagues have done to expose the diabolical mess that the ANC has allowed to plague South Africa, which will continue to drag the country downwards. These exposures may perhaps slow down the corruption and enable a few prosecutions, to make the effort worthwhile.
From my perspective, the rot is so deep, so entrenched and having seeped into the very fabric of the country, it is impossible for me to imagine anything that could rectify the situation.
Hope is an emotion which keeps people going, in anticipation of improvements occurring. It is not a firm strategy with planned resources and the skilled force of substantial manpower, equipped with the necessary means to effect the changes required.
I believe that the political battles and deaths in clamoring for the largess of the State, will continue unabated and I will leave this mortal plane traveling my last kilometers on rutted, muddy roads littered with debris, past decrepit buildings with darkened Eskom windows and broken pavements with sewerage in the gutters, then finally departing with a few puffs of smoke, signalling my last sigh at what might have been.
Thanks Branko! And others of the press who have helped inform the public truthfully and expose much of the rot.
Clearly it’s up to each of us to rebuild our country from the mess of the past two decades and more. Today’s story of the brave member of the public and Prasa whistleblower is the example demonstrating that democracy is each of our responsibility. Like it took people power to overthrow apartheid, it requires people power to reject the corruption of recent years and rebuild the future we wish to see. The parochial attitudes more often displayed are not helpful in fostering democracy and a better future.
I have long thought that if anything can save South Africa, it is our free press. I am hoping that there are contingency plans for when the ANC realises this and muzzles it.
I applaud the DM and other media for its never-ending engagement in laying bare the horrific corruption and other social ills this country is suffering from. It is through these efforts that many South Africans have not given up but staying with the present trajectory is not the answer.
The hope that still prevails needs much stronger inspiration for it not to wither.
There are, in my opinion, two ways that will make this possible. Our education system is a crime against humanity, and needs immediate attention. We are releasing millions of young people into a life of hopelessness which, ultimately, will lead to anarchy and destroy SA. Unfortunately, solving this crisis will take time.
The second possibility can be implemented immediately and might contribute to building a more positive future within a relatively short time.
Branko appeals to the people of SA to step in and offer solutions, doing that these people need a forum through which these solutions can be made known.
This is a golden opportunity for the DM to create “Maverick Solutions”. This could be a forum that brings people together that are already working on solutions, but which are unknown to the majority out there and a place where new solutions are being born.
It would also shift our focus where it should be. We ALL know of the morass we are stuck in, not too many are aware that we can get out of it. Maverick Solutions could become the compass for determining the direction Towards a Better South Africa.
Excellent idea.
What fantastic day,thanks Daily Maverick