In the days before tonight’s (Thursday’s) State of the Nation Address (Sona), the Presidency released a 32-page document entitled, ‘State of the nation 2022 commitments: One year review’. The strapline is “Leave no one behind”. Similar newspaper advertisements appeared on Sunday.

The document provides an update on the “bold, decisive actions” set out in last year’s Sona. These were designed, we are told, to “address the urgent challenges we face… and it was about leaving no one behind”. It tracks the progress made to “restore the promise of our democracy”.

Eight areas are covered:

• Building a new consensus;
• Growing the economy and jobs;
• Protecting lives and livelihoods;
• Ensuring a just transition;
• Accelerating land reform;
• Fighting corruption;
• Making communities safer; and
• Making government work.

On building a new consensus, the hairy goal was: “Within 100 days, finalise a comprehensive social compact to grow our economy, create jobs and combat hunger.” The actual progress: “Social partners are considering a draft Social Compact framework to guide a common programme.”

On Operation Vulindlela, we are told, “Bid Window 6 capacity has been doubled to 5 200 MW, agreements have been signed for 26 renewable energy projects with capacity of 2 800 MW and around 100 potential projects with a total of 9 000 MW are currently in the pipeline.” Here the emphasis should be on “potential” and “in the pipeline”.

And so the document goes on, listing what has and has not been done. It’s an impressively glossy document, but also a reflection of this Presidency: governing by task teams, committees, spreadsheets, red, green and blue ticks and incremental progress. While in parts technocratic, it all makes perfect sense. It is, however, a document for the head, not the heart.

Reading through the document, one hopes that this is not the precursor to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address to the country tonight. If it is, it is striking the wrong, flat tone. Perhaps one of the President’s advisers will help him “read the room”.

While accounting for promises made is obviously important and necessary, death by detail is not what the majority of South Africans want or need, given our objective daily realities.

For Ramaphosa will speak to a country worn weary by his obsequious smile, his fealty to a corrupt ANC and his inability to govern with conviction. And he will speak to a country worn down by the devastating economic impact of rolling blackouts while government ministers enjoy a 24-hour supply of electricity at our expense. Towns and cities are buckling under the strain of it all, coupled with decades of local government failure in most parts of the country.

Ramaphosa also comes to Parliament after a political victory at Nasrec in December, but with the allegations surrounding Phala Phala still swirling. Quite what kind of session we can expect, remains to be seen. Will the EFF disrupt proceedings, demanding accountability from the President, and will Ramaphosa need to seek the protection of the Speaker of the House, herself accused of corruption? (Julius Malema is disruptive and a maverick, yet also a shrewd political player and will have at least one eye on the 2024 elections and coalition king-making prospects.)

A distant and disinterested President

Part of the problem of course is that we have not seen much of the President. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he was keen to speak to us via his “family meetings”. Yet despite unprecedented power blackouts, he has chosen to hide behind newsletters and his spokesperson. He has however deemed it fit to spend much time explaining to his own party, the ANC, what he is doing. This has only served to heighten the lack of trust citizens have in the President, who appears more distant and disinterested with every passing day.

His presidency has also been marked by timidity, as has been written about copiously. Tonight, Ramaphosa has an opportunity to show us that he wants to lead in the best interest of the country and not only his party. So, will he be the “cowrin’, timorous” President we have come to know or will tonight’s speech set the stage for a year of bold action on the things which ail us?

All around us is a sense of crisis. In fact, Ramaphosa’s own office referred to the “crisis of confidence” gripping the country.

In modern parlance, we do tend to use the word “crisis” rather loosely. The early Ancient Greek root of “krisis”, meaning “to sieve, discriminate or distinguish”, is instructive. It also assumed a rather more legal definition as a “dispute, a lawsuit and judgment about a lawsuit”. And still later, as a “point of time of deciding anything, the decisive moment or turning point” to “times of difficulty, insecurity and suspense in politics or commerce”.

While “permacrisis” was the Collins Dictionary Word of the Year in 2022, 2023 is all about “polycrisis”, the term first coined by French philosopher Edgar Morin in 1999. As Adam Tooze reminds us, “A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”

But let’s forget the neologisms, as Andreas Kluth reminds us here, and stick with “krisis”.

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

If South Africa has reached what is now commonly called a “crisis” of a political and economic nature, or rather a moment to “sieve” or “distinguish” truth from lies, solutions from obstacles and the rule of law from lawlessness, then the President may be best served to use his Sona to tackle one or two of the most important issues South Africans care about.

Electricity and the economy are top of mind for South Africans. Our unemployment rate sits at 33% with the SA Reserve Bank predicting growth at lower than 1% due to the impact of rolling blackouts. Pretty sobering numbers.

In November 2019, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was challenged by her staff to record a clip of what her government had achieved in its first two years. She was challenged to do so in less than two minutes. Eventually, Ardern finished in two minutes and 56 seconds. She rattled off what had been done in simple language and with facts and figures, for instance, “creating 92,000 jobs”.

South Africa is not New Zealand, obviously, and our challenges are structural, historic and complex, yet this video provides a lesson in simplicity and accountability. Both are in short supply in the South African government. Instead of yet another yawn-inducing and lengthy Sona, perhaps Ramaphosa can follow Ardern’s plain language report-back? It would serve to focus all our minds and also allow the President to finally dispense with the clunky, uninspiring rhetoric of successive years. Ramaphosa, with the power of the presidency, could try to set the tone in a short, sharp speech dealing with electricity generation and the economy (jobs) and education.

The rest of the death by detail can be left to ministerial briefings which will follow next week.

Ramaphosa must address these matters in a way that reignites confidence in his government and indeed in him — because both are at an all-time low. He needs to convince us that his government will do as it says and that he still has the stomach for the job and the desire to lead.

He needs to reshuffle his Cabinet

If we are at a “decisive turning point” of a time to sift the proverbial wheat from the chaff then things cannot remain as they are. Ramaphosa needs to leave the City Hall and then reshuffle his Cabinet (there have been rumours about this happening before Sona, but at the time of writing, Ramaphosa’s Cabinet remains unchanged), which is, in large measure, unfit for the purpose of leading a modern state. Gwede Mantashe, Lindiwe Sisulu and Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma are a few names which spring to mind. The latter two women have deliberately undermined the President publicly. It would be a fool’s errand to think they could be trusted now.

The President also needs to rise above his party, which has run out of ideas to such an extent that it believes that declaring a National State of Disaster to deal with the energy crisis is a good idea.

The objective conditions which Ramaphosa inherited are well known and we should not be glib about the difficulties the President faces, but the recent “crisis of confidence” is mostly of his own making.

History has lessons to teach us. The Roman Republic’s decline, for instance, was preceded by a series of social and political crises before it came to a bloody end. These lessons, including ones from our recent past, should not be lost on us today and in the year that lies ahead. Ramaphosa’s wars are figurative ones, yet they are for us at this point in our history as precarious as any. DM