You must trust your partner. But your partners must also show that they are trustworthy.
That was the world view of the esteemed business leader Anton Rupert, who built a global empire with his philosophy of partnership. In today’s South Africa, that approach of his is as relevant and important as ever. For after the hopeful transition of 1994, a Government of National Unity (GNU) will now be obliged to pull the country out of the past fifteen years’ slough of decline, corruption, service delivery collapse and appalling unemployment, and restore confidence.
Such a government in fact constitutes a partnership: partners with divergent views who simply have to learn to trust each other and be reliable so that they can govern together in the best interest of the inhabitants of South Africa.
Regarding trust in a business context, Rupert once remarked in a conversation about the lack of integrity on the part of some businesspeople that ‘ . . . a person who is himself a crook cannot trust others’. And that ‘. . .if you want to succeed in business, you must be prepared to not only rely on people but also to trust people’.
He personally regarded trust as the most significant thing he had learnt from life: how to gain it, create it and retain it. ‘It is built over a long term, it’s a long-term investment in quality. It includes self-confidence, which is so important for the survival of our young people today, a humble self-confidence.’ You have to sustain trust, he continued: ‘No big international businessman will be successful in the long term if he shakes people’s confidence in him. It takes long to build trust, but one slip and it’s gone.’
That which he advocated for the business sector is equally imperative for public life in a country where trust in politicians has reached a low, as evidenced inter alia by the voter turnout in the recent election.
In 2023 the Edelman Trust Barometer showed that in South Africa the business sector and civil society are trusted much more than the ANC government. Among those surveyed, 62% of the respondents trusted business, as opposed to only 22% who trusted the government – which an increasing number of critics have labelled a ‘kakistocracy’ (government by the worst people).
The necessity of the creation of trust also became strikingly apparent in the past few weeks’ political toing and froing about the composition of the new cabinet under President Cyril Ramaphosa. What took centre stage was the interpretation, often misinterpretation, of the Statement of Intent (SoI) of the participating parties which had been signed first of all by Fikile Mbalula and Helen Zille as representatives of the ANC and the DA respectively.
Zille, who is after all the one politician who had managed to put together a successful coalition and rescue the Western Cape from further ANC decay, pointed out to Mbalula that according to the SoI he had signed on behalf of the ANC, existing parties have to be consulted before new members join the GNU.
She was subsequently attacked from all sides. The vilification continued as she set out their demands for the new cabinet, on behalf of the DA’s negotiating team, based especially on the already adopted Clause 16 of the SOI. She was even derided as a ‘gogo’ who should be exiled to Orania. When it was leaked to the media, presumably by the ANC, that the DA was insisting on key portfolios in the GNU cabinet, the ANC labelled the demands ‘outlandish and outrageous‘.
Yet this was an understandable negotiating position. Because the said Clause 16 stipulates explicitly that the GNU ‘shall be constituted in a manner that reflects genuine inclusiveness of political parties that are party to this Statement of Intent and are represented in the National Assembly broadly taking into account the number of seats parties have in the National Assembly and the need to advance the National Interest. The President shall in constituting the executive, take into account the electoral outcomes.’ This was what the ANC had agreed to in writing, hence its reliability regarding power sharing was at stake.
Amid the political dustup, it has also been apparent that many ‘experts‘ and others in the media do not have a proper grasp of the SOI and are not informing the public adequately about such a core document. Hopefully, this may serve as food for thought for media bosses who close down newspapers and fire journalists chop-chop nowadays.
If they truly believe in democracy and are not only interested in making money, they would have to see to it with great care that a tradition of quality journalism is continued robustly. Hence particularly in the electronic media where social media teems with fake news in the dark caverns of cyberspace. For a genuine democracy, the credibility and authority of the Fourth Estate indeed remain crucially important.
Voters know full well that corruption and mismanagement have been rampant under the thirty-year-long ANC regime, facilitated by members of the political elite who operated like a crime syndicate. During the Zuma administration’s ‘nine wasted years‘ since 2009, ANC cadres time and again opposed and voted down parliamentary motions of no-confidence in Jacob Zuma.
Throughout his term of office, he was a fugitive from justice who should have been charged with high treason long ago because he had sold his country to snake oil salesmen from India. (Wags have quipped that if the Guptas were still here, the country would have known a week ago who all the new ministers were).
Under ANC rule, South Africa has become a country with one of the highest crime rates in the world. On the Global Organised Crime Index, which measures levels of organised crime, South Africa has risen from the 19th position in 2021 to number 7 among 194 UN member states in 2024.
As part of its basic programme of priorities, the SOI stipulates that law enforcement agencies must be strengthened to combat crime and corruption. Nonetheless, former minister Zizi Kodwa, who had appeared in court on corruption charges a few days earlier, was sworn in as an ANC MP on 14 June. It is beyond one’s comprehension that the ANC can think confidence can be built when it embraces suspects like that in its ranks. Indeed, the heaviest onus in restoring and building confidence rests on the ANC, which considers itself the most important party in a GNU.
Furthermore, job creation remains one of the major challenges for the new government. Up to now, the ANC has basically believed that the party controls the state, and the state controls the economy. Despite Ramaphosa’s promises of a New Dawn, the party persisted with the outdated model of centralisation of power and social engineering.
Consequently, the unemployment rate has reached record levels – 42% by 2023 if discouraged work-seekers are included, while the percentage of unemployed youth (15-24 years) has increased to nearly 60%. The economy has shrunk, with a growth rate of barely 1% while the country is deindustrialising. Manufacturing as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) declined from 23.1% in 1993 to 13.2% in 2021.
Ramaphosa declared in a state of the nation address: ‘Everyone knows that the state cannot create jobs.’ Still, he announced recently that the government would create 2½ million job opportunities. But job opportunities are not permanent jobs, rather piecework which is in many cases remunerated with only half of the minimum wage.
Anton Rupert, too, believed that the state could not create jobs. In 1979 he put his words into action and at the instigation of his son Johann founded the Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC), which empowered thousands of black entrepreneurs.
Government interference after 1994 inter alia resulted in the name of the SBDC changing to Business Partners, while the ANC government established a department of small business development. Whether that department, with its minister, deputy minister and bureaucrats, has achieved much is highly debatable, as unemployment has only worsened and failing government institutions have destroyed numerous small businesses.
The entire department would have fared much better if they had tried to eradicate the state’s ‘capacity problems’ (incompetence, notably on the part of highly paid deployed cadres with little knowledge of governance). And attempted to do away with the plethora of laws and regulations and red tape that discourage employers and investors.
The failure, even bankruptcy, of state-owned enterprises such as Eskom and Transnet has been accompanied by the collapse of infrastructure and service delivery, with the result that hundreds of thousands of people in informal settlements or even formal residential areas often have to get by without sufficient water and electricity while having to brave potholed roads and sewage flowing in the streets.
Deteriorating government finances, with debt-servicing costs that have increased to more than R1 billion per day, have sparked fears among economists that the country is heading for a fiscal cliff. Contributing to this are government grants for 26 million people, derived from the contributions of fewer than 6 million taxpayers. The decline has been the worst at the level of local government: in 2022, only 38 of the 257 municipalities received clean audits from the auditor general.
Last week it was revealed that the crisis in South Africa had worsened to such an extent that 12 to 18 months ago the country barely avoided tumbling over the cliff without many people knowing about it. Kuben Naidoo, former Reserve Bank deputy governor, related that it was only due to a small elite team that this disaster and others were averted.
This could only happen because the private sector, which is so often mercilessly reviled for ‘white monopoly capital’ and ‘exploitation’, has come to the government’s rescue. Specialists from the private sector have been a critical component of Operation Vulindlela, a joint initiative of the Presidency and National Treasury launched in 2020 to accelerate the implementation of structural reforms and support economic recovery.
Parties that join the SOI undertake to provide sustained support to Operation Vulindlela. It ranges from the initial focus on the crises in water and electricity supply to digital communications and visas while going forward attention will be devoted to the stabilisation of local government.
Another hot potato awaiting a GNU is the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act Ramaphosa signed shortly before the election amid political fanfare as a ‘Rolls-Royce model’.
Instead, it entails the nationalisation of private health care. Affordability and staff shortages were not taken into account for this Rolls-Royce. Besides, the deterioration of various state hospitals was accompanied by so much corruption during the COVID-19 pandemic that Ramaphosa declared the ANC Accused Number One.
He also seems to have forgotten that Nelson Mandela returned from Davos with the message that the atmosphere against nationalisation, even on the part of the Chinese, could be cut with a knife.
The NHI scheme is precisely the kind of interference in private initiative to which Rupert had such an aversion and that led to his fierce clashes with then prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd. The renowned American economist Thomas Sowell strikingly corroborated Rupert’s view: ‘It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.’
Private education has likewise started to make an important contribution to the improvement of the deficient education system, the consequences of which for a modern economy were highlighted by the 2030 Reading Panel in 2023: 82% of grade 4 learners could not read for meaning in any language. In 2021, South Africa was ranked in the 135th position out of 173 countries on the World Bank’s Human Capital Index.
The destructive role of the teachers’ union Sadtu, as in the case of other trade unions in the public service, would have to be transformed into one that serves the citizens of South Africa in the first place, not the trade union aristocracy.
In July 2023 Dr John Endres, CEO of the Institute for Race Relations, stated in a briefing to the Cato Institute in Washington that private initiative was increasingly bypassing the incapable state. The country’s ‘greatest opportunity for the future’ was to be found in its ‘innovative and resilient public sector and civil society’ that were successfully solving problems in many fields in the growing absence of the state. ‘In years to come, South Africa may well become a case study of how private initiative succeeds where states fail,’ he remarked. The resolute response of private initiative to South Africa’s many problems would probably have heartened Rupert as well.
Regardless of what a GNU looks like, it is certain that intense opposition can be expected from politicians with atavistic feudal views like Zuma and Malema and other redistributors such as the Communists, who have never risked testing the voters’ support (or aversion) in a general election. But if a new government genuinely intends to modernise and doesn’t want to lag further behind other countries who have already embarked on this task, they can only benefit from Rupert’s faith in the free market and the ability of private initiative to create jobs and wealth. Success in this regard will strengthen the confidence the country so desperately needs.
Ebbe Dommisse is the author of “Anton Rupert – The Life of a Business Icon”, the updated third edition of which has recently been published.
