‘Many mechanisms’ to help the willing thrive

PRAVIN Gordhan’s struggle credentials are as good as they get. From the Natal Indian Congress in the 1960s to the South African Communist Party, apartheid’s prisons and the ANC’s underground Operation Vula – our Minister of FInance has his roots deep in the battle for democracy.

He is now also a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee assigned to the Buffalo City region and he never misses an opportunity to offer credible praise for President Jacob Zuma, such as for his efforts to repair South Africa’s economically important relationship with Nigeria.

And yet when Gordhan came to East London as a guest of the Dispatch Business Club on Monday, his message went down as well with business as it did with the Eastern Cape government delegates who turned up to pay their respects.

The message also was aimed as much at business as it was at Bhisho and the two Eastern Cape metros, Buffalo City and Nelson Mandela Bay, which he said had significantly underperformed during the first 19 years of democracy.

Gordhan, like Trevor Manuel before him in the Treasury portfolio, is thin on rhetoric and strong on responsibility. He addresses his audience as South Africans, regardless of political affiliation or even political history. As he said in response to one of the many frank questions he took: “I am only interested in what party you vote for on election day”.

The Dispatch collaborated with the Eastern Cape government to bring Manuel to East London recently as part of the Dispatch Dialogues programme and with the Eastern Cape Development Corporation to host Gordhan under the Dispatch Business Club banner.

It was not deliberate, but nor was it surprising, that the two men brought similar messages, which it would be fair to summarise to include:

l We South Africans, including the media, are too often negative about our achievements, our performance and our prospects. As Gordhan repeatedly said: We have so much to celebrate and yet we continually criticise;

l We are weighed down by a culture of entitlement which has too many of us looking to the government for answers. We ask too often: What will the government do for me and when will it do it?

l Doing business with government is a short cut to wealth for too many people who should be out there creating new wealth, new resources and new markets. We need to innovate more and spend less time chasing the Treasury’s chequebook;

l The country, including even the eastern Eastern Cape, is awash with wasted opportunities, particularly in agriculture, agro-processing and tourism. We are not making the most of what we have and we are failing to retain skills in the region;

l Corruption is a cancer, but not only in government. The paid-for short cut, the illegal diversion of funds and kickbacks to officials and politicians involve and often are initiated by the private sector; and

l The culture of elected office bearers and civil servants doing business for themselves, often with government, is wrong and must end. Public service should be a calling, not part-time job.

Gordhan’s life must seem surreal sometimes. He recently returned from a week each in the US and the UK where he led so-called roadshows promoting this country as an investment destination.

There he would have been rubbing shoulders with avarice and ambition on a scale South Africans can scarcely comprehend. These are people who think big, fly high and crash hard.

Gordhan reminded us that it was US bankers who caused the 2007 meltdown that has dragged global growth to the pedestrian levels that make our development so much harder than it should be. But it is the US government that moved with speed to repair the damage and get its economy back on a growth path.

Then he spent a week with the political and business elite of Africa at the World Economic Forum’s Cape Town meeting where the talk is of billion-dollar projects, transnational infrastructure and eye-watering profits.

Philanthropy would not have been high on the agenda, wealth would have been on everyone’s mind, but at least it was a convention of hustlers trying to do something new and different, to sell grand ideas and to produce things that other people on other continents will buy.

And then he came to East London, a sleepy hollow compared even to neighbouring Port Elizabeth.

Gordhan explained the global and national contexts as a Finance Minister must. But his exasperation seemed to grow in the conversation that followed and he slipped into coach mode, trying to motivate a losing team to believe in itself, to get out there and win.

The session was captured in a question from one guest who asked, in essence: When are you going to bring job creation to East London? And Gordhan responded in essence: What about you, what are you going to do to create a few jobs?

Manuel is typically testier than Gordhan. In response to a similar plea at his earlier development seminar, he told one demanding questioner that unless he accepted personal responsibility for his own life, he would die hungry, poor and alone.

From both these men, to whom we owe much of the economic success we have achieved, the very sound advice is that the government has many mechanisms to help those willing to take an initiative.

But those in business, those in government and the able unemployed must accept that the first responsibility is our own, that business and wealth must be founded on productivity, that having a job means having a responsibility to do it as well as you can and that the public and private sectors need to work together with equal honesty and equal commitment to their clients, whether they be voters or spenders.

Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch