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JEREMY MAGGS: Welcome to another episode of FixSA right here on Moneyweb – conversations that are committed to finding real solutions and approaches to the complex and multifaceted issues facing South Africa.
I’m Jeremy Maggs and I want to introduce you to Bonang Mohale. He’s the Chancellor of the University of the Free State, Professor of Practice at the Johannesburg Business School, chair of both the Bidvest Group Limited and SBV Services, and also a member of the community of chair[persons] at the World Economic Forum.
He’s a highly respected South African businessman, known for his patriotism and his active role in seeking to advance the country’s interests, and when it comes to fixing South Africa, I can think of no better guest.
Bonang, a very warm welcome to you. This is what I find interesting. Originally, I’m told, you wanted to be a medical doctor, so I’m thinking it’s fair to say that fixing things is probably in your DNA.
BONANG MOHALE: I think I did worse than that, Jeremy. I actually went and spent time at Wits medical school. Professor Phillip Tobias was our dean at that time. I spent four glorious years and in the fifth year – I remember it was on April 17th – it then dawned on me that I actually wanted to be a manager. But I’m glad for that initial experience. We had already delivered a few babies at Alexandra Community Clinic.
JEREMY MAGGS: What did your family say when you gave it up after all that time?
BONANG MOHALE: I think my mother wanted to kill me.
JEREMY MAGGS: But you’ve made her proud since then, I think.
BONANG MOHALE: I think I made my lovely wife, Susan, proud because on August 24th last year, Susan and I had been happily married for 42 years. I don’t know what she was smoking, but at 17 I looked into the centre of the pupils of her eyes and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ She said yes. At 17, what did I know? What did I have? That’s the best decision I ever made in my entire life.
JEREMY MAGGS: Just for the record, we are recording this podcast on Valentine’s Day. I hope that you’re going to spoil her tonight.
BONANG MOHALE: I’ll bring an electronic rose because the real one I can’t afford. [Laughing]
JEREMY MAGGS: They are so expensive these days! Bonang, you have an impressive track record of being involved in building and managing successful companies. I want to try and draw a link between what you’ve done in the private sector and the broader building blocks that are needed to fix the myriad problems in this country.
We don’t need to go over what the problems are, because we would spend an entire podcast. I think that is common cause. And, as I told you before we started recording, this podcast is dedicated to trying to find solutions.
So take me into your private-sector experience and give me a sense of what you’ve done there that could be replicated as far as the bigger build for South Africa is concerned.
BONANG MOHALE: As far as the country is concerned, I take a lot of inspiration from the former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, who observed that the moment we start speaking only about our history, that’s when we know that the end is near.
The second piece, I think, is the full appreciation that all our problems are known, but also all the solutions are well articulated. What we lack is the ability to do just the execution … it was General George Patton who reminded us that great wars are won by good execution, not great plans, because good execution will save even a mediocre plan.
Let me [explain] by saying when a country makes English compulsory and agriculture optional, it can only produce citizens who speak English fluently on an empty stomach.
So it’s between those two extremes that we need to find ourselves, as a people with great natural endowments. We need to realise that the solutions are within us. They’re not without us; they’re not exogenous, they’re internal.
JEREMY MAGGS: I’ll put the question to you a little bit later about whether you believe there is a willing majority in South Africa who are committed to wanting to fix things – and I know what your answer’s going to be. Let me reel back to that word ‘execution’ and the inability to execute. What’s all that about? Is it poor leadership? Is it capacity? Is it a lack of understanding and skill? Is it a combination of all of that? What precludes us from swift and accelerated execution when it comes to all of those problems that we know about?
BONANG MOHALE: [Former vice-president of Zimbabwe] Joshua Nkomo says: ‘This came to me late in my life – that it is possible for a country to attain its political liberation without its people being free.’
So what we have to ask ourselves is: ‘The people who call themselves our leaders – do they have our best interest at heart?’ Because you have to love your people to lead them.
We look back on 30 years of being free, and yet out of 60.02 million South Africans, half of us live below the poverty data line.
Ten million young people are not in education, employment and training. Six million boys don’t know their fathers.
Thirty years into democracy we are talking about load shedding – which started in February 2008. Sixteen years later we haven’t been able to solve it – not because we don’t have Eskom engineers who know the root cause or who understand this notion of planned and preventive maintenance – but because:
I think, when we look back, whether we like it or not, we need to say: ‘Maybe our leaders don’t love us enough’.
Maybe, just maybe, they’re in it for themselves. Maybe, just maybe, this notion, the slogan every five years as we stare the seventh administration in the eye – that ‘a better life for all’ actually means a better life only for elected officials, not for us janitors. Maybe, just maybe, even the people that are in administration now are just as rotten to the core.
JEREMY MAGGS: So you’re saying to me that it’s just gross expediency when the ruling party says, ‘We are in it to give people a better life for all’. It’s a slogan.
BONANG MOHALE: When you look at everything that we’ve inherited – even from people who don’t like us – how did we let that die in our hands?
The lottery commissions. Three investigations say they’re running a web of corruption, bribery, stealing and cheating.
We get hit by Covid. The R500 billion response, the socioeconomic response to this pandemic to save lives – and livelihoods ends up being stolen. Even PPE [personal protective equipment] that is meant to protect us from the devastation of this virus gets looted.
We have 734 state-owned enterprises and state-owned companies that, had we appointed just African women and left them only for five years without political interference, with 20% of them failing, today we’d be looking back and saying we’ve got 30 000 women who know how to run complex entities like Eskom and Transnet, because 28 of those are bigger than most African countries’ economies.
Jeremy, let me end by saying I listened to the president’s State of the Nation Address [Sona].
Sona is supposed to set the tone for the next year so that a few days later the minister of finance can translate this long-term strategy into financial numbers – because that’s what the budget is. It says, I’ve heard what my boss has said, this is where I’m going to give you the resources to be able to execute.
And not once did I hear the word ‘tourism’ in that, and yet it is the lowest-hanging fruit.
One, because tourism has the potential to be the greatest foreign exchange earner, but also because when you put a hotel in [places like] Nkandla [and] Gugulethu in the Western Cape, the people who work there don’t have to take a taxi to work. They move from their village and they walk to the hotel.
Therefore it doesn’t help to talk about the ‘township economy’ when our total sum understanding of a township economy is that it’s okay for a bus full of Americans and Europeans to go to one [place] in Soweto and Sakhumzi in Vilakazi Street and spend R350 on a plate of food, but spend R10 000 at the Michelangelo per night, sleeping in Sandton, when we could, 30 years into democracy, have made sure that they don’t only eat in Soweto, but that they sleep in Soweto.
Lastly, Soweto is bigger than most of our trading partners in the South African Customs Union – Namibia, Eswatini, Lesotho and Botswana. Each has on average two million people. In Soweto unofficially we have 3.5 million people.
Soweto is bigger than Namibia, bigger than Botswana.
So it’s okay for these blacks to drive the BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes in Soweto, but when they’re involved in an accident, they must put it on a flatbed to take it to town, because in Soweto there’s not a single body-repair shop to fix it.
JEREMY MAGGS: Alright, you’ve raised the issue of disparity, and I understand that. How do you close the gap then?
BONANG MOHALE: First and foremost is to say if we are going to take the low-hanging fruit, and I used tourism as an example, let’s compare ourselves with a country that looks like us, Australia, because we are far from everywhere and we only look at tourists from people that are friendly to us – India and China.
So when you look at the six years from 2012 until now, we’ve attracted to South Africa a million tourists to this country. Australia doubled that number at two million.
But when you look at what Australia has done, every year they’ve been adding exponentially to that number. What South Africa has done every year we’ve been taking away from that number.
Every country in the world, once they capture the tourists, their number increases. Ours has decreased.
Had we increased that number, we would’ve banked R9.3 billion.
JEREMY MAGGS: I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole, though, but one of the reasons why that graph is splitting, as you put it, is that we have the problem of rampant crime and corruption. Australia doesn’t. We are not a desirable, safe place to go to. That’s the problem with tourism.
BONANG MOHALE: You have hit the nail on the head. They need to feel safe at the moment. You’ve got these tourists going to Sun City and they get robbed on their way there, because of this web of crime. And lastly, if you look at China, China has 10 times more than the one million that we have; we would’ve banked R100 billion. So that’s lost opportunities and we don’t even talk about it.
Here’s where the solution for me comes.
Let’s start with business, because if business wants to look at itself as a leader of society, business first needs to fix itself and get its own house in order.
So I’m suggesting that from now on I think business must stop funding the political parties commensurate to their representation.
Imagine if they woke up one day and said, ‘We’ll fund only those parties that sign up to no more than five commitments that we demand as business’.
Number one on that at least has to be transformation, because this country must look like us. This economy must look like us. Secondly, ethical leadership. Number three, good governance. Number four is about service delivery because that’s the job description of these politicians. The last one is what you touched on – law and order, safety and security, because without law and order, who are we and what are we?
JEREMY MAGGS: What stops business from doing that is a fear of not getting business, of not getting contracts, of not getting work.
BONANG MOHALE: But you see, business does not get its business and contracts from government; it gets it from consumers.
It’s like saying, when president, that if you stop voting for us, we’ll stop the social grants.
If you’re an educated and aware and a woke South African, you’ll know that actually the money for social grants comes from yourself because you’re a taxpayer, therefore you are not going to accept that. It’s about saying, as a taxpayer: ‘We hire these politicians.’
Therefore instead of us standing up when they walk into the room, how about we sit down and they stand up, because they work for us, and we have the power of the ‘X’ in 2024 to choose who should be our next crop of leaders.
JEREMY MAGGS: You don’t think that business also needs to get off the fence a little bit?
BONANG MOHALE: I think businesses have been told through a variety of polls that this is science – that they’re trusted more than government. In 2021 they are more [trusted] than even the media. And for them to internalise that, they need to say, oh, now we want to be leaders of society.
I think a serious intervention is needed to steer business back.
And what is needed today is bold, incisive leadership, which only business itself can provide, having come to that conclusion.
JEREMY MAGGS: Business knows that but still doesn’t want to do it. It is still not prepared to take the steps that you are suggesting it takes.
BONANG MOHALE: Business actually needs only two things – bold and decisive leadership, which I wish our politicians had. That’s all it is. So for bold and incisive leadership business needs to say if the politics goes south it doesn’t matter what we do – we will never be profitable.
Load shedding is a good example. This phenomenon started in February 2008; 16 years later we are unable to fix it. So we start a strategic conversation that says when we look at ourselves in the mirror, if we can’t face load shedding, how can we then lead 60 million South Africans?
Secondly, it says, ‘But look at the devastating consequence of that load shedding’.
Each time we reach Stage 6, we lose R4 billion a day. Between stages, it’s R500 million. We’ve wiped off an entire two percentage points [from GDP] per annum in 16 years and yet the population growth is 1.5%.
So what it means is that you and I, in terms of discretionary purchasing power and disposable income, have been going backwards.
Therefore I think what load shedding has done to this economy has taken us back 20 years.
But let me end by saying, Jeremy, today this economy should have been 20% bigger than it was 16 years ago had we not had load shedding.
JEREMY MAGGS: I want to pick a little bit more at the scab around business, and I’m wondering to myself as you speak, and as you give me the solution, whether you think business has the appetite to be courageous – or do you think that we’ve got to the point now where it’s every person for themself, that we are in a climate of self-preservation, that it’s too late? Because when you talk to people in your exalted circles of business they must be expressing that frustration.
BONANG MOHALE: It can’t be every man for himself because then we are on a slippery slope to nowhere.
JEREMY MAGGS: That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that we all know that it can’t be every man for himself, but do you think that it’s got to the point where they’re battening down the hatches and just trying as hard as they can to survive, instead of taking those bold, courageous steps that you’re suggesting – like the political party funding concept.
BONANG MOHALE: I think I agree with you, actually. I really do.
So the first [thing] is an acceptance that politics determines economics. The impact of politics on the economy is tenfold what Naspers and Vodacom and Coca-Cola can do just in a year. Therefore the willingness to want to fix South Africa is actually the job of business because, if you ask me what the job of business is today in this country, when so many of us that hope that joint peace will prevail, number one will be to say business must be a trusted advisor; two, a partner of choice.
Lastly, it must do everything in its power to make sure that this ANC-led government is a capable state, because in the nine wasted years we have learned that it’s easier to deal with a capable state than one that is not. Therefore business is not our second chance; it’s our last chance.
JEREMY MAGGS: The second part of my question is do you think business has the appetite to step up to the plate, or do you think it’s afraid?
BONANG MOHALE: It should have the same appetite – that when we were at our lowest ebb during the referendum, business agitated and orchestrated for every single soul to one of their employees to vote yes, and we got a resounding 75%. They were not being party political, but they were being patriotic.
The same way that when we became free, business said: ‘You know what? We are going to have an investment fund. We are going to put a billion rand aside.’ In three days they banked R750 million.
The same way that business said, during the height of state capture, when a sitting president would go [under] the protection of parliament and say: ‘They are saying state capture, so where is state capture?’
Business marched in their suits to go to the east wing of the Union Buildings and said, ‘not in our name’, and they rooted out and defeated state capture. And at that time they said, ‘Sitting president, you must go’. And they killed Bell Pottinger. The target was to kill it in six months; we killed it in three months.
JEREMY MAGGS: Bonang Mohale, you’re a difficult person to read. I cannot work out whether you are very despondent and you are proposing great ideas, or whether in this vein of criticism there is a degree of optimism. What is it? Help me understand here.
BONANG MOHALE: I’m an eternal optimist.
JEREMY MAGGS: But it’s difficult to be optimistic these days.
BONANG MOHALE: Impossible. And the reason is because we have been through much. Number two, our leaders have demonstrated that they can spend 27 years in Robben Island and still come back and preach reconciliation.
We are a resilient bunch because, with everything that has been thrown at us, when we put our shoulder to the wheel we can overcome it.
I think we give disproportionate power to the politicians who have dropped us at every single turn.
Lastly, I think as business we need to say, ‘But our colleagues in the rest of the continent told us that you’re going to be like us, and we laughed at them and said it’s not going to happen’.
There are three lessons that we learned from that:
Number one, that presidents who are in power for 40 and 50 years are not good for Africans.
Number two, even the good guys left on their own for far too long eventually become the bad guys.
And lastly, what we need is a viable opposition just to keep the good guys in check.
JEREMY MAGGS: Alright. So, apart from the funding of political parties idea, which I think many people would say is a good idea – maybe impractical because there’s also real politic attached to that, but let’s park that for one side – what is your call to business on this podcast? Give me three things that you think business needs to do now in order to start facilitating that fix.
BONANG MOHALE: The first is for business to regain its integrity, reputation and credibility, because you need to have the right [to act], and the right to speak.
So the practical thing that business can do right now in this country, in this moment, is imagine if [business] was the embodiment and emblematic of transformation, because business employs 16.5 million South Africans and government in all three spheres 1.3 million. So if business is transformed, South Africa will be transformed.
Number two, imagine if business said: ‘Because the lifeblood of business is small and medium enterprises, imagine if we pay them in 30 days because to them that’s the difference between life and death, and we start measuring among themselves those who pay SMEs in seven days.’
Number three, imagine if business said: ‘What we are going to do is when you get into our boardrooms, we’ll be broadly reflective of the demographics because we are not only talking diversity, equity and inclusion, but we demonstrate it in deeds, not just in words.’ I think if we did that, it would be alright for us to speak.
Lastly then, for business at every platform to say the people who want to stand up for political leadership must themselves be ethical. They must be transparent, because it’s public money. And then there must be the notion of final accountability.
How many people have been found guilty by a court of law and yet have been promoted as members of parliament?
And some of them are chairpersons of portfolio committees in parliament.
JEREMY MAGGS: I asked you a little earlier – and I didn’t get an answer – whether you think there is a willing majority still of ordinary people in this country who want to fix things. Or again, aside from business, have they given up hope?
BONANG MOHALE: A resounding majority of people are very hopeful. We saw this when we –
JEREMY MAGGS: You can’t build a country and fix a country on hope.
BONANG MOHALE: We saw this when we elected President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa. He singularly came in with the biggest goodwill, better than that of Mandela, because some thought he’s a communist – they couldn’t really suspect – better than Thabo Mbeki, because they thought, okay, economist from Oxford but maybe Pan-Africanist. Labour, civil society and business put everything behind him.
And I think he [Ramaphosa] has disappointed all of us by his indecisiveness, but also by keeping the thieves that he found in parliament at that time.
So out of 30 he ‘dis-appoints’ only 10, and he leaves the 20 and goes on to promote the other 20.
Now the sixth administration is probably going to be remembered as the one that did absolutely the least of all the other five administrations that came before.
JEREMY MAGGS: Yet, Bonang Mohale, you still say there’s room for hope.
BONANG MOHALE: The reason why people commit suicide, on an aggregate basis on their own [they] think that tomorrow can’t be better than today. We know that in South Africa, that can’t be true.
This is God’s own country. We are so blessed with opportunities. We have every mineral that the world needs, not as number 17 and 19, but as number one or number two.
And what we need to be asking ourselves is why we are allowing the customers to set the price when we are the ones taking the risk to go to the [bowels] of the earth and come up with the gold and the diamonds. And then the London sales organisation tells us at what price we need to sell it.
We need to ask ourselves what the Organisation of African Unity is doing, when we were the first continent in the world to talk about the United States of Africa and a single currency called the Afro, and yet the 28-member EU executed on it and they have a currency called the Euro. After Brexit, there are still 27 of them, and they helped Hungary to come out of the self-perpetuating vicious cycle of abject poverty.
JEREMY MAGGS: Alright, you’ve laid a number of solutions on the table. I want to tell you a story now. Many, many years ago, I came to visit you in an office in Randburg. I think you were the chief executive officer of Drake & Skull.
BONANG MOHALE: Correct.
JEREMY MAGGS: If I’m not mistaken. I was editing a magazine and I came, asking you for advertising, and you kindly supported the venture at the time. But you also said to me that, ‘I want proof, Jeremy, that my money is going to be measurably used’.
It’s that old business cliché. If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it – which I think you agree with. I think that’s what you were saying to me.
So let’s assume that some of the solutions that you’ve put on the table are implemented. What, going forward, is the measurable definition of success? What are the flags? What are the landmarks that you would look out for so you could get bang for your buck, because that’s what you wanted all those years ago, and I’m sure you still do?
BONANG MOHALE: Jeremy, if you came to me again tomorrow, I’d still give you the money because you accounted fully for it. But also the impact was unbelievable.
JEREMY MAGGS: So on a national scale, then, how do you measure impact?
BONANG MOHALE: To the politicians, the first [thing is] to say: ‘I’m a politician, I wake up to do what? To deliver service that’s needed by our people.’ This is water, this is electricity. Electricity is the fourth means of production. Without it there is no economy.
We need that to say, if we can provide the services that people are paying for, it’s a tick.
Secondly, we need to say we went to war for the land. The Constitution, Section 25, article 3A, gives us the land-reform tools for land restitution, land redistribution, and this notion called security of tenure. Why have we not executed on it?
Therefore the measurement must be whether the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry has the biggest budget, because that’s the priority. Today it has the smallest. Even the land court is the only one that doesn’t have a permanent judge – all of them are acting, [which] shows that we have not really prioritised it.
Here’s the last one for me. It is about saying if every slogan was ‘a better life for all’, can we look back and say we have been able to provide just three things …
One, a roof over the head of the majority of our people – not RDP houses that disintegrate quicker than even the four-roomed houses of Soweto.
Number two, we need to say, ‘When my children are ill, can I send them to a hospital where they can get help?
And then lastly, can I give them the education that will be the surest way in which one can transcend social classes, born poor in Alexandra, but after 20 years able to afford a house in the leafy suburbs of Bryanston — not because you got a tender, but because you have earned it, you deserve it and you can afford it.
JEREMY MAGGS: Bonang Mohale, thank you so much for joining us. My name’s Jeremy Maggs and thank you for listening to the FixSA podcast here on Moneyweb.
Listen to previous FixSA podcasts here.