First published by Daily Maverick 168 newspaper

Yet we must try, for all kinds of reasons. It must be better to have a plan and be forced to adapt it than to have no plan at all. As the flight director Gene Kranz, who was played by Ed Harris in the movie Apollo 13 is reputed to have said, “Let’s look at this thing from the standpoint of status”. 

The real flight director at the time of the Apollo 13 disaster was Glynn Lunney who was later credited with an amazing act of leadership. Astronaut Ken Mattingly, who was replaced as Apollo 13 command module pilot at the last minute by Jack Swigert, later said Lunney was simply a hero. 

“ … When he walked in the room, I guarantee you, nobody knew what the hell was going on. Glynn walked in, took over this mess, and he just brought calm to the situation. I’ve never seen such an extraordinary example of leadership in my entire career. Absolutely magnificent”.

To reflect this leadership, the script gave Kranz (or Lunney) some classic lines, including the oft-quoted “Failure is not an option” which has been massively abused since. He did not say “Houston, we have a problem” either,  (and neither did the astronaut in reality, by the way). But the script gave him this rather cryptic line about proceeding from status. What does it mean? 

I think what he meant was, you have to ask yourself where you actually stand, and for that, you need to know what works, as opposed to what is broken or doesn’t work. The trick is not get distracted or lose courage over all of the myriad things that don’t work. You have to work with what you have, not what you wish you had, and make that work better. 

The most obvious recent change to the world’s “status” has been the advent of workable, cheap vaccines. This is clearly a game-changer, so working forward from that, it’s worth asking, how much of a difference will vaccines make for South Africa?

The quick answer is that we need to temper our hopes a bit. As Virág Fórizs, Africa economist for Capital Economics points out in a note to clients, African policymakers have “mountains to climb to access and distribute vaccines”. 

Many countries around the globe have placed large Covid-19 vaccine pre-orders and some vaccination campaigns have already started, but vaccines are likely to reach Africa later than most other emerging markets. Most countries will have to rely on the multilateral COVAX facility, which will probably distribute doses at a later point. Poor infrastructure and cold storage facilities also make the distribution in Africa more challenging than elsewhere.

As a consequence, the “vaccine bounce” in economic recoveries is likely to be delayed as the slower roll-out of vaccines inevitably holds up any boost to activity from a lifting of containment measures. On the other hand, Africa has somewhat surprisingly been less affected than many feared. Taken together, Fórizs says he expects that GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa will grow by around 4.9% in 2021.

That’s actually pretty high – substantially higher than the average over the past decade for the continent according to IMF figures (which incidentally put African growth for 2021 quite a bit lower) and just slightly less than emerging markets in general. It’s worth noting too that outside of China and Vietnam and a few other Asian countries, a whole bunch of African countries are likely to grow this year too. 

SA is scheduled to bounce too, but we have been disappointed time and again by these predictions, although there are some reasons to be more hopeful. There is obviously some bounce-back in these numbers and the world tries to pick up the pieces, which applies to SA as much as anywhere else. 

The bounce-back better be big though. SA has lost around two million jobs through the crisis, of which about half have been regained. Some of SA’s support measures have been fabulous, mainly those aimed at distributing cash to the needy. But others have been just disastrous, including all the business and particularly small business support measures.

In retrospect, this was not impossible to predict. SA has now a long history of providing cash support to the population, and it equally has a long history, at least in the current government, of being absolutely unable to support business of all types. Worse, SA’s system of wildly onerous labour regulations, government officials who simply have no knowledge of how business actually works, a culture of high-interest rates, enormous suspicion between business and government, a banking system which is hopelessly innovation-suspicious, corruption now going rampant, high tax rates and red-tape up the wazoo – all of that came brutally home to roost during the crisis. 

My award for the most revealing aspect of the crisis was the abject failure of the business loan guarantee scheme, technically the largest portion of the R500-billion recovery package. This is what happened: South African banks were unable to lend to businesses even in a situation in which the bank loans they were dishing out were guaranteed by the government. I mean, really. And the problem is not just the banks. It’s that business is so dejected, they would prefer to close than borrow, even at interest rates so low that you could almost make money by depositing the money back into the bank that lent it to you. If there ever was a WTF status situation, it is this. 

So, that is what we learn from status. In 2021, SA collectively needs to focus intensely on one thing that already sort-of, more or less, works in SA: how do we make business really work and really work for all of us.

That is my wish for 2021. Don’t hold your breath.

BM/DM