Relationship sacrificed on altar of votes
Just more than six years ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa ran a public mobilisation campaign aimed at encouraging citizens to work with the state in fixing the nation. Until the moment when he issued the clarion call for active citizenship under the theme of Thuma Mina, the relationship between non-state actors and the government had been fractured and fragmented in the decade of his predecessor’s leadership.
The fixation with cadre deployments and marginalisation of the clever blacks, alongside the embrace of the compromised, had led to many professionals and professional organisations maintaining a distance from the government and its initiatives.
The consequence of this cold war was a standoff that denied the state access to valuable insights and collaborations with non-state actors. For a country with multifaceted structural challenges, maintaining open lines of engagement is critical in ensuring that those who have been empowered to govern are able to consider all critical issues in the process of policy formulation.
Excluding market participants and end users from the process of developing regulations is likely to result in rules that are ineffective instruments of regulation. In a country as litigious as SA, creating rules and regulations in a vacuum and without substantive consultation with those affected inevitably results in them being condemned to the litigation pathway before eventual implementation.
The Mining Charter and preferential procurement rules and revisions that were initiated during that decade are examples of laws condemned to be stalled due to the isolationist processes adopted in developing them.
Ramaphosa’s clarion call aimed to re-engage citizens — particularly black professionals who had been sidelined in favour of the inappropriately deployed — and engage business formations to work closer with the state.
The result of the mission was an influx of hands being raised and organisations willing to reopen lines of engagement that found its zenith in the solidarity witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Businesses and citizens with access to resources committed to marshalling them towards the common good in spite of reservations about the state’s capacity to manage new resources. The oversight model applied in the Solidarity Fund managed to address longstanding anxieties about tentacles of mismanagement and corruption that have become associated with the state.
Beyond the pandemic, the formation of public-private alliances aimed at addressing the energy crisis and crime, corruption and logistics challenges allowed the state to benefit from the availability of technical and intellectual resources available across the nation rather than just within the civil service.
As the alliances worked behind the scenes to implement the national turnaround plan, the trust deficit of yesteryear was gradually reduced.
All of this makes Ramaphosa’s recent actions so remarkably surprising to witness. In recent weeks, as the intensity of the electoral campaign season reached fever pitch, Ramaphosa has yielded to the demands of his political party keen to remain a step ahead of its opponents on the campaign trail.
A long-standing commitment to National Health Insurance (NHI) was inked into law and followed immediately by a commitment to implementing universal basic income within two years.
BLIND SPOTS
These issues have been under deliberation for many years, partly due to the complexities of implementation, the trade-offs required and the funding questions.
Through these journeys, non-state actors like business organisations have used channels of engagement to advise and caution the state with an eye on addressing blind spots and consequences of adoption. As central actors in alliances such as the national energy crisis committee, business formations may have indeed laboured under the impression that this proximity meant that the president would seriously consider their advice in his decision-making.
His recent steps have indicated that this proximity provides no guarantees. The problem with gambling this trust relationship on contentious issues just ahead of the election is that sceptics within these alliances will wonder whether the trust relationship cultivated since 2018 was something so fragile the president was happy to sacrifice it all in exchange for political progress.
If that sentiment prevails, it will be back to the drawing board for a country that can ill afford to reset critical programmes already in progress.