The state of the nation speech by President Jacob Zuma on Thursday evening was his best since 2009. There, I’ve said it.
Much of the analysis of the president’s speech has found him wanting.
He has been condemned for failure to grasp the enormity of the crises the country faces.
At some points he was contradictory, and most of the time he pretended to be committed to cost-cutting whereas many of the measures are mere fiddling while the country burns.
All this is true.
The biggest problem with the speech is that it lacked credibility.
That is because it was delivered by a man who has squandered his opportunities and done himself no favours over the past seven years.
Who can believe any of Zuma’s pledges when he has proved himself adroit at dissembling on so many occasions?
Perhaps the problem was not the speech but the man who delivered it.
In the week preceding the speech Zuma had displayed his callowness by throwing all his praise-singers under the bus to save his skin.
For more than two years now, ministers Thulas Nxesi and Nathi Nhleko, and deputy ministers and MPs such as Cedric Frolick and Mathole Motshekga, have swanned about the country defending Zuma’s unconscionable expenditure on Nkandla.
Like a mindless herd, ANC leaders defended Nkandla from the rooftops.
Yet, last week, when Zuma realised he faced the real and present danger of impeachment, he sent his lawyer to the Constitutional Court to beg that a declaratory order not be made to the effect that he had knowingly failed to uphold his oath of office, in which he swore to respect the constitution.
He essentially said that everyone from National Assembly speaker Baleka Mbete to all his unthinking praise-singers in the ANC were, well, loco.
This is the man who read the speech on Thursday night.
He taints his own words. His person is unfit for the podium he stood over.
And so his words lose meaning no matter how truthful they might be.
The terrible thing about that speech was not only what was on paper. It was also that it came from a man who the country can no longer believe in.
But try to look beyond all of this and there were elements that are worth mulling over.
First, Zuma acknowledged for the first time that we are not just a country buffeted by the global economic milieu.
We are masters of our own future and have the ability to take ourselves on an upward trajectory.
“We cannot change the global economic conditions, but we can do a lot to change the local conditions,” Zuma said.
That is a truth that many of us have been banging on about for years.
Since he took over, Zuma has blamed global conditions, business leaders or some other scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong with our economy.
He has failed to look inward and this has been a major failure of his tenure. Until now.
Zuma also listened (not to all of South Africa, but to parts of it). Remember that only two days before his speech he met about 100 CEOs and accepted an eight-point plan proposed by them.
It was amazing just how much the first part of his speech mimicked the concerns of those business leaders. Indeed, to my mind the first half of his speech was written with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and the business community hovering over him.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
We need policy certainty and we need decisive action, as the CEOs had said.
We need a coherent narrative for the country, not an empty “we have a good story to tell” that is full of holes.
So, for me, the key to Zuma’s speech was that it acknowledged that we have a problem – that the country will be downgraded to junk status and that this will have serious consequences for everybody.
The crisis we have has finally been acknowledged.
But he did not acknowledge the entire crisis: poverty, unemployment and inequality haunt the land.
As usual, Zuma did not do enough to show his appreciation of the depth of this problem.
Zuma also chose half-measures instead of going the whole hog on some issues. Take cost-cutting.
Belt-tightening measures such as taking fewer foreign trips and scrapping parties will go some way towards reducing government costs, but these measures did not come with bolder pronouncements such as reducing the size of the cabinet (currently a staggering 34 ministries) or even considering privatisation of some state assets.
It is also nonsensical and insulting to talk about making state-owned enterprises efficient and world-class while not addressing head-on the scandal that hangs over SA Airways, where Zuma’s close friend holds sway in the most extraordinary governance situation (there is no board, no CEO, no finance chief, just Dudu Myeni).
That said, there were many silver linings in the opening parts of Zuma’s speech.
Sadly, it is unclear whether these were just words or if implementation will come through.
And so we wait for the real state of the nation – Gordhan’s budget speech on February 24.
Real problem of Sona was the man making it
Much of the analysis of the president’s speech has found him wanting.
He has been condemned for failure to grasp the enormity of the crises the country faces.
At some points he was contradictory, and most of the time he pretended to be committed to cost-cutting whereas many of the measures are mere fiddling while the country burns.
All this is true.
The biggest problem with the speech is that it lacked credibility.
That is because it was delivered by a man who has squandered his opportunities and done himself no favours over the past seven years.
Who can believe any of Zuma’s pledges when he has proved himself adroit at dissembling on so many occasions?
Perhaps the problem was not the speech but the man who delivered it.
In the week preceding the speech Zuma had displayed his callowness by throwing all his praise-singers under the bus to save his skin.
For more than two years now, ministers Thulas Nxesi and Nathi Nhleko, and deputy ministers and MPs such as Cedric Frolick and Mathole Motshekga, have swanned about the country defending Zuma’s unconscionable expenditure on Nkandla.
Like a mindless herd, ANC leaders defended Nkandla from the rooftops.
Yet, last week, when Zuma realised he faced the real and present danger of impeachment, he sent his lawyer to the Constitutional Court to beg that a declaratory order not be made to the effect that he had knowingly failed to uphold his oath of office, in which he swore to respect the constitution.
He essentially said that everyone from National Assembly speaker Baleka Mbete to all his unthinking praise-singers in the ANC were, well, loco.
This is the man who read the speech on Thursday night.
He taints his own words. His person is unfit for the podium he stood over.
And so his words lose meaning no matter how truthful they might be.
The terrible thing about that speech was not only what was on paper. It was also that it came from a man who the country can no longer believe in.
But try to look beyond all of this and there were elements that are worth mulling over.
First, Zuma acknowledged for the first time that we are not just a country buffeted by the global economic milieu.
We are masters of our own future and have the ability to take ourselves on an upward trajectory.
“We cannot change the global economic conditions, but we can do a lot to change the local conditions,” Zuma said.
That is a truth that many of us have been banging on about for years.
Since he took over, Zuma has blamed global conditions, business leaders or some other scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong with our economy.
He has failed to look inward and this has been a major failure of his tenure. Until now.
Zuma also listened (not to all of South Africa, but to parts of it). Remember that only two days before his speech he met about 100 CEOs and accepted an eight-point plan proposed by them.
It was amazing just how much the first part of his speech mimicked the concerns of those business leaders. Indeed, to my mind the first half of his speech was written with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and the business community hovering over him.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
We need policy certainty and we need decisive action, as the CEOs had said.
We need a coherent narrative for the country, not an empty “we have a good story to tell” that is full of holes.
So, for me, the key to Zuma’s speech was that it acknowledged that we have a problem – that the country will be downgraded to junk status and that this will have serious consequences for everybody.
The crisis we have has finally been acknowledged.
But he did not acknowledge the entire crisis: poverty, unemployment and inequality haunt the land.
As usual, Zuma did not do enough to show his appreciation of the depth of this problem.
Zuma also chose half-measures instead of going the whole hog on some issues. Take cost-cutting.
Belt-tightening measures such as taking fewer foreign trips and scrapping parties will go some way towards reducing government costs, but these measures did not come with bolder pronouncements such as reducing the size of the cabinet (currently a staggering 34 ministries) or even considering privatisation of some state assets.
It is also nonsensical and insulting to talk about making state-owned enterprises efficient and world-class while not addressing head-on the scandal that hangs over SA Airways, where Zuma’s close friend holds sway in the most extraordinary governance situation (there is no board, no CEO, no finance chief, just Dudu Myeni).
That said, there were many silver linings in the opening parts of Zuma’s speech.
Sadly, it is unclear whether these were just words or if implementation will come through.
And so we wait for the real state of the nation – Gordhan’s budget speech on February 24.
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