PROFESSOR SIPHAMANDLA ZONDI
Durban — Last Thursday, the newly elected premier of KwaZulu-Natal Nomusa Dube-Ncube, the first woman in this position in the province, announced a reshuffle of the provincial executive to little surprise.
Thus, she suggested what sort of legacy her premiership will create for people facing worsening living conditions, declining quality of life and growing anxiety about the basics of life.
Now more than ever since 1994, all development indicators are pointing downwards. Even the rich are feeling the pinch of shrinking economic opportunities and rising costs of mere living. The poor are reeling from the economic decline after the Covid-19 pandemic. Poverty is cruel, it is deadly and creates conditions where death and desperation become even more widespread.
Grinding poverty is dehumanising, forcing the poor to live a dog-eat-dog survival like animals.
It creates conditions where violence, crime and neglect, especially of kids, the elderly and those living with disabilities, increase.
But poverty can also be useful for elites who live on the exploitation of the poor, for some advantage in tough times.
The business elite will find in this poverty able-bodied men and women forced to sell their labour for slave wages. This includes the poor among immigrants from poorer countries.
The political elite know that the poor are desperate and want first to survive and then thrive. To them, the messages of radical socio-economic transformation that the ANC sends frequently mean unlocking income opportunities for the poor.
It offers hope that is not realisable in a short space of time and within our constitutional and macro-economic framework.
If leaders such as those who have taken over the ANC understand this, then they are selling dummies to the hungry masses.
When our leaders fail to maintain a clean capital city, a functional rates system, a smooth pothole-less regional road, a predictable supply of water and energy, a timely delivery of housing and sanitation, how do they hope to bring a much more complex process of radical socio-economic transformation, which requires a visionary and theory-sound leadership and an efficient, capable state?
When our political leaders are still celebrating the very basic clean audit attainment, how ready are they for qualitative change?
As the new premier who has been part of the leadership of the ANC in the province for about two decades announced her executive, history was inviting her to reflect on why previous similar signals of change became a whimper. She has an unenviable task because we are already in pre-poll time.
Like all incumbent parties, the ANC’s credibility in the province will be measured not by the velocity of new promises come 2024, but by the record it creates between now and the next elections.
She and the new ANC leader, Honourable Siboniso Duma, will either be credited with turning things around observably, or will be blamed for maintaining the legacy of unremarkable performance when measured by the quality of lives on the ground.
The premier appointed her party boss into the portfolio of Economic Development, Tourism and Environment Affairs, exactly the same position Honourable Sihle Zikalala took after his election as ANC provincial leader on his way to the premiership.
This was not about Zikalala’s experience, training or expertise in economic development that forced premier Willies Mchunu then to make this appointment, but calculations about what was strategic for the new leader.
It is not clear what record of success the former premier had. He created for himself a position to justify his elevation to the premiership that followed.
This is the risk Duma has chosen, a ministry that requires a lot of bold leadership, strong social compacting and skilful prioritising for results to come.
Often results take long or never come. Even harder is to have results affect employment and social transfers on the ground positively.
For instance, under his leadership, incoming tourism figures could pick up to pre-Covid-19 levels, which would be truly remarkable, but this would have a negligible bearing on the poor due to the low numbers of those employed in this sector and the casual nature of employment.
What is radical that is to be pursued in this portfolio depends on what we theorise it to mean.
Yet so many of our challenges have to do with the structure of the economy that we inherited and continue to maintain.
This portfolio is therefore critical for undertaking such efforts as shifting power to small and medium enterprises and increasing economic participation, rewarding and growing social enterprises, and structure a compact with social partners that make employment creation and entrepreneur support the main purpose incentivised.
This requires building relations with businesses where resources are – while shifting them in a direction that they are not keen on.
Unable to expropriate things right now and having not prepared the alternative class to expropriate to, this means Duma’s room is limited to building relations of trust necessary for him to persuade, cajole, beg and convince capital.
This can be done while focused on radical change.
In the ANC, it is said power is in the branches, in the economy power is with capital. Even black capital is not necessarily pro-poor, pro-black empowerment or transformation; it must be recalled.
Capital is capital, profit maximisation is the name of the game and this game gambles on the vulnerabilities of the poor. State resources are meagre. In our system, this is because the state catalyses clever change and resources are sufficient for financing small changes that trigger bigger and broader change.
What are those catalyses that Duma and the premier will use weekly or monthly? We will know.
While the failures of the premier will be excused by society, as we have seen before, on the basis that she is a caretaker, the rest of the new MECs will be damned for being unremarkable if they do not show boldness to operate like project managers who want performance data changing every month in areas near the masses.
Duma is the new leader of government business, meaning he has a big hand in how well the machinery of the state functions to do catalysis. If he and the premier co-ordinate smoothly, intensely and intelligently, there are a lot of reportable successes they can make that are not hollow and imaginary.
The year 2024 might be one when their record speaks for itself, or will be one when they will need to make even more dramatic promises to fool voters.
Now Dube-Ncube is premier, a strategic position in which to persuade society that women can succeed where men have been unremarkable.
Some worry that power is not in her hands as a de facto caretaker, but they don’t realise that the power to change the performance of the government in areas that matter to social partners and the poor masses is in her office.
If she did the simple task of identifying tangibles to be achieved in each portfolio monthly and got to measure what is done, like a good old school principal, she will have a good story to tell in 100 days, a story about real lives changed.
The change in leadership creates an opportunity for real change on the ground, but it can also be a mere façade of make-believe. KwaZulu-Natal deserves radical change a lot more than the rhetoric of radicalism.
Prof Siphamandla Zondi is the Director of the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation, at the University of Johannesburg
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