#DevTalks: Can South Africa’s Government of National Unity Deliver?

DISCLAIMER: This webinar transcript was loosely edited and there may be inaccuracies.

Thabang MalaboMy name is Thabang Malabo. I’m a Harvard South African fellow at the Center for African Studies. I’m also a mid-career master’s in public admin candidate 2024-25, I’m also a Mason fellow at the Kennedy School. And in my work in South Africa, I work at the intersection of accountability, public financial management and service delivery. Working as a technical manager at the National Audit Office of South Africa, the Auditor-General of South Africa. These talks are a series of conversations with senior policymakers and academics who work in economic development. The Harvard Growth Lab, which is the frontiers of economic development and policy research, working closely with policymakers to create solutions and sharing our insights through teaching tools and publications, all to promote inclusive prosperity in our nations. We look forward to welcoming you to more of our events. Now back to today’s event. It is my great pleasure to welcome today’s speaker and Ann Bernstein, the executive director for the Center for Development and Enterprise, CDE for short in South Africa. For the past year, the CDE, the Center for Development and Enterprise, has been working on a major initiative called Agenda 2024. The priorities for South Africa’s new Government. Agenda 2024 sets out to end what is by far one of the most difficult, important, and compelling questions facing South Africa to date. And that is the question of what can the new government of South Africa do to get our country back on track after 15 years of stagnation and decline? Agenda 2024 builds on a project previously undertaken by the Growth Lab and supported, of course, by the CDE between 21 and 2023. Titled Growth through inclusive , sorry, Growth through Inclusion in South Africa. In this talk today, we’ll discuss South Africa. She’ll discuss the government of national unity that was formed following the May 2024 general elections and whether, indeed, they can deliver. We will start with a presentation from Ann, and then I will moderate with a few questions, and I’ll open up the floor for audience questions. Welcome once again to all of you, and I thank you for joining us today. Over to you.

Ann Bernstein Well, thank you very much, Thabang. It’s great to be here. And with a South African. So what I’d like to do is not talk for all that long. Just provoke you with some of the questions that I’m wrestling with and other South Africans are wrestling with. And then we can have a lot more time for discussion. I’m going to raise four big questions. What is the GNU? What has it achieved? What are the challenges? Can it turn South Africa around? So let’s start with the first one. What is the government of national unity? Well, it has 10 or 11 parties. That’s the most important one. So the ANC at 40% of the election, the voting in 29th of May and the DA 21 point something percent together, that’s a comfortable majority. But these are. Historic opponents across the aisle in parliament. But there are a whole range of other parties as well. No, we’ll see. An alternative to the G and U. I just throw it out. I think there was there was a possibility of just the ANC, the DA and the IFP, which would have been the IFP didn’t do as well as many people thought they would in the general election. But that would have been a much more manageable coalition in my view. We have something very different now which probably suits the ANC. Lots and lots of different parties to confuse the issues and there’s a lot to debate about this, But there was an alternative. Let’s call it a three-man coalition, a three-person coalition. There was another alternative, which was a minority government, that the 40% of the electorate, the ANC, was the largest political party in parliament. They could have governed not very easily with getting support from the D day, but possibly others. If they had gone a different route, much less solid, much less stable. But who knows? There’s a lot to discuss. Of course, the most important alternative was that the ANC could have gone in with, if you like, its offshoots of one kind or another, which is the EFA from the AK Party, a dreadful option for South Africa. So that’s the G and you? It was. There was talk at one time that it would flow through to metropolitan government and provincial government. What in the most important province and metros it hasn’t happened. And that’s another story we could talk about as well. So what about the second point, which is what is being achieved? Well, the. There’s a lot to say here. In a way you could say we’ve gone from a Hitler Monarch majority rule. Government agency for 30 years to something very different. They have to compromise and they are often being reminded by the media or their partners in government that you only have 40%. Don’t behave as though you have 50%. The voters didn’t give you 50%. That is a big shift, both in terms of power and mindset. You can imagine some 70 ANC MP lost their positions, had to find other jobs. This has been incredibly disruptive for the ANC. I think it’s very healthy. But you can imagine what it means for that political party and it’s still being played out. So that’s the one thing. The second is. This is a far better option than getting into bed, than the ANC getting into bed with what you might call the anti constitutionalists. And I think it was important that President Trump opposed and his very first statement said, we accept the results of the election. Mainly white people for a long time said, What will the ANC do when they start to lose votes? Well, he immediately said, We accept the results of the election. We are going to put together a combination of people who are committed to a democratic constitution, South African constitution and the rule of law. Very important in theory, but at least statements of the pillars around which to build a new government. It could have been very different. And there is no doubt there is a battle within the ANC on was this the right thing to do? You’ve gone into bed with the enemy the day and there were other alternatives. You’ve had all sorts of debates that are going on which are important that make sense. So one of the questions worthy of thought is how is the effect of the G and U playing out in different political parties? I’ve talked mainly about the ANC and the DA, the two big players. If we’re honest about this, because without the DIA, the ANC doesn’t get 50%. So they might be able to somehow cobble together a better but they don’t get 50% unless they get into bed with the anti-constitutional. Us, let’s call it. So how does this play out in the political parties themselves? Very complex. And he’s divided about this. How many people on this side or that side, what is going on in highlighting major problems for the economy, where it’s quite clear that there is a very different approach by the leadership of the ANC in highlighting they don’t have a government of provincial unity and they certainly don’t seem to even want one. Now what does all that mean? So a lot of questions to explore. And so that’s the second thing. We don’t have a much worse government that could have really been disastrous for the economy, for everything. I think those of us who committed to the democratic ideal in South Africa would have wanted would have been disastrous if the ANC had got into bed with imoke of Jacob Zuma party or with the EFF. But there’s more going on. Now, you can argue about that. The DEA gets as much as they might have done in the negotiations. That’s the role of the master negotiator of 1994. Outmaneuver the d.A. We can debate that. But the truth is that now there is debate in the government. There isn’t just one party. And just talking about the D.A., there is another group with a very different set of views of how to think about economic growth, how to think about markets, how to think about the role of the state. Not that they’re perfect or thoroughly thought through all of these issues, but it’s different. So you’re getting debate within departments, within the government. The D.A. has six ministers of state and six deputy ministers of state. And that’s been that’s interesting. So there’s a new kind of conversation. And certainly for Kddi, a policy think tank, suddenly we’re finding we’re not just dismissed. That’s sort of. Well, yeah. Okay. Reluctantly, Would you come and talk at a strategic planning for this department or that department? This is a whole new world. And I can go into a bit more detail about that. Now, the markets have responded very positively. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the bond market, all sorts of people. I think a lot of this is hype and hope. Some people weren’t happy. When I told the Financial Times, I thought there was a lot of hype and hope going on. But that’s positive and sentiment matters. But you’ve got to deliver. So this has meant the country is richer. The debt we are reaping is is less because the currency’s been boosted a little bit. And for the first time, there is a feeling of a window of opportunity. We haven’t had this for 15 years, really. So lots to talk about in that area. Actual achievements. Well, some changes in visa policy and some efficiencies there. The Department of Home Affairs run by the DEA that’s been, I think, very well, got a lot of media coverage and some positive shifts there. Some things the government said they wanted to do but they didn’t really want to do and they didn’t actually get around to doing it. But now the DEA ministers made some things happen. It’s early days yet. The. So that would be one shift. It’s a bit more openness in the Department of Trade, Industry and Cooperation. I was invited to go and talk to the strategic Planning session for the next five years of the G and U and well, they talked about all kinds of issues for the rest of the day. After we were we left, they were talking about this mad woman with different kinds of ideas. That’s healthy. There’s at least some debate going on. It’s not just business as usual. Department of Public Works and Infrastructure potentially important. I was a keynote speaker there at the strategy planning session, about 40 of the top managers with the minister. And again, I got a message later saying, what you said shaped the discussion. They didn’t say if anyone agreed, but he agreed. I think with a lot of the things. So there’s a lot of talk going on. At the same time, the president is signing things and there’s a feeling in the ANC of we going to continue implementing the policies and the legislation of the previous administration. So there’s a battle, always a battle going on, and it’s not quite clear yet exactly what’s being achieved. So we can talk more about that. What are the challenges? Well, there are a lot The country is in deep trouble. The economy is stagnant at 1%, 1.2, if we lucky. The third quarter results have just come out. And even though we now have no loadshedding at a national level from Eskom for the last eight months, eight, nine months, this isn’t turning into enormous vim for the economy. In fact, the last quarter we went back a little bit. So the country’s in deep trouble and there are lots and lots of things to fix from the ports to the railways to the general cost of doing business. And to pick a state which is incompetent in the economy. So all of this is still weighing down. South Africa’s chances of growth. How long will it last? Well, who knows? Could be five years. We have local government elections coming up some way between the end of 2026, November 26th to February 27th. They’ve told us. I think it’ll be November, I bet. But that’s just my guess. November 26th, The ANC has a big conference in 2027 where they elect the leader of the ANC. Now, at this convention, I think that you can’t have more than two terms as head of the ANC. What happens to Cyril Ramaphosa then? Do they flout convention or whatever? And then whoever is elected head of the ANC, do they leave Cyril Ramaphosa as head of the government of national unity? So some big fundamental questions along the way. Who succeeds President Ramaphosa? Some people like him, some don’t, But they think the alternatives are worse. That’s a debate we could have. So quite a complicated look beyond two years or so. Now, President Trump was, in my view, his future depends on a successful JNU. We can debate what success means, but unless you start to improve people’s lives. With half the population at least living in poverty with probably the world’s highest unemployment rate, some 12.23 million people in the workforce. Yeah. Well, we can go into that. He has to deliver. Otherwise I think he’s out as ANC leader and the party could move to. I don’t know. I like to call them the forces of evil, but whatever. EFA From the think so. So the stakes are very, very high to deliver. So let me turn to my last question. Which Thabang was most interested in. Can the G and U turn the country around? This very big question. Some people are saying, I know some day people may saying in 2029 we have to have improved the economy and improved employment. You say, great, that’s a big ambition. What are we going to do tomorrow? So how do you get there? How do you get there? And that’s partly what KD’s been thinking a lot about in this project, Agenda 2024, which I’m happy to go into if if people want to in more detail. So let me in then see nearly sort of 20 minutes. I’ll end with. A conference I went to recently. Former President Kgalema motlanthe has an annual conference weekend and the draw comes back. And this is kind of the parts of the ANC, if you like. That aren’t necessarily members but supporters closest to. I don’t know where CDE would sit as a sort of market oriented constitution supporting body. And 2 or 3 of the speakers kept talking about these words, and I didn’t fully understand exactly what they mean and they didn’t explain. So I’ll leave you with this, which is if the GM knew a vehicle or a destination. I’ll end there.

Thabang Malabo Thank you, Ann. Thank you so much. I think one of the most striking things that you said was around hype and hope. And I’m hoping we can delve in a little bit into what some of your research says about how we move the country forward. And I want to speak a little bit more about the agenda 2024. So having read the documents which are publicly available and I encourage everyone to go have a look at on the CDE website. There are five main areas that you believe that the new government should focus on. You speak about fixing the state driving growth and development by freeing up my kids in competition. You speak about building a new approach to mass inclusion, tackling the fiscal, the fiscal crisis and then strengthening the rule of law. I just want to get your initial reflections. It’s you know, these are areas that you say it should be focused on in the initial 180 days of cabinet. It is now day 153 today since the new cabinet came into office. And I’m interested on your initial reflections of the new government, the cabinet, its composition, its size. And I’m asking specifically in the context of two specific questions and actions that the c, d, e says the government needs to take. You speak about government needing to reorganize the presidency and the Cabinet. And there you were advocating for the appointment of two ministers that would be outside Parliament. Then you speak about appointing the right people in mission critical public sector jobs. So when you look at what we have in Cabinet in office, what are your initial reflections? Big G You.

Ann Bernstein Whoa, that’s a lot of issues. Great, great question. And. Okay. Let me start with when a country is in deep trouble, as South Africa is today, we could make a list very quickly, all of us, of. Crises that goes on and on across the whole blackboard. And but the challenge is to find is to discipline yourself, speedy as much as anyone else. If the government has to discipline itself and everyone trying to influence it on what are the catalytic priorities. If we get this right, a whole lot of other things will flow from that. So we say to ourselves, We should have started this March 2nd years ago, three years ago. But we didn’t. We got the funding for this agenda 2024 at the end of last year and we underestimated how long it would take us. And we have slowly moved away from the first hundred to the first first phase. We now vaguely say of the new government because we haven’t finished and change takes time. Reform takes time. I don’t think they are moving as fast as they should, but that’s easy for me to say sitting outside. So the first challenge, I think, when a country’s in trouble is where do you start? You want to start with the growth strategy. All of us would want to start there. The problem is you can’t. And if you read Ricardo’s report. From last year. He would talk about a number of things you have to do. So what we decided was you can’t develop a growth strategy when the ports don’t work. And so who’s going to invest then? You’ve got to say you’ve got to send some big, bold signals that there’s a new sheriff in town. That’s the first thing turning the Titanic around. And we chose five areas, partly coming out of the work Ricardo had done and our own work as well. The first is you’ve got to fix the state. And there are two documents on that. I’ll come back to the detail in a moment, which was one of Ricardo’s very And the growth labs. Big conclusion the state has has very little capacity. It’s not everywhere. They’re all pockets of capacity. But this is a very hard thing to think about when you don’t have a state that can actually do things. Who are you talking to? If you want reform and everyone in the country, business, everybody else would keep saying, the state with state is weak and corrupt. The state must do this. Then the next thing and you say, Well, put the two things together. It’s very difficult. So that was the first challenge. We said, fix the state and I’ll talk about what we chose there. Part of that is, well, everything’s part of that, the fiscal crisis. You’ve got to we spend more than we take in in revenue and we have a massive debt and the biggest, fastest rising item in our budget every year is debt repayments which instead of paying for better schooling or roads or whatever we’re paying. Update back. So that’s got to fix that. And you can’t be on the edge of euro if your country can’t manage its finances. Investors are going to say, should we go? B, what’s going to happen? Let’s go somewhere else with logistics. So it’s a big factor in growth. And then the third thing was, so that’s the second sort of big area. The third big area was the rule of law, which. Essentially the entire criminal justice system that isn’t working well. But if you think of state capture, this was all about these very clever crooks and elite looting the state. They were smart. They said we must deal with all the institutions that could catch us. We must weaken them. So the Revenue Service had a very effective unit to go after rich people and their ill gotten gains. They smashed that. The National Prosecuting Authority, which is the key body that can actually prosecute you in court. They smashed that. So what do you choose? We decided to choose two institutions, which I’ll come back to. The fourth area was. A very big area. We couldn’t just leave our growth and we said, well, the state is weak. You’ve got to free up markets. More business can do more markets, competitive markets, not particular companies. Competitive markets can do more. How do we do that? So that was not a growth strategy. And then the fifth thing was very important was basically employment. How do we get not 100 or 1000 or a hundred thousand more people in jobs, but millions of people into jobs, which is the quickest route out of poverty? So those are all five areas that we chose and why? Now, to answer that difficult question, we the new government, election 29th May, middle of June, they had two weeks to form the government of national unity government, very little time. A failure of our Constitution was much too little time. Most other countries do have more time. My board, police them, said you have to get out to documents and we’ve got a new government. And so we the week before the new government, we brought out the first document on. Kind of streamlining the cabinet talk about. And then ten days later went on what we called mission critical jobs. So the first is we lost. The cabinet is very big and it’s very expensive. And our first report was, A, you could cut it. And we we’re not going to fight on this hill, but we cut it down to 18 and we suggested how to do that. But it could have been other ways. But cut it. It’s very hard to imagine you trying to be a reformer. To get 30 people to agree is a lot harder than getting a smaller group. And so there was a logic to why you’ve got to cut it besides costs. And then the way in which the cabinet and the presidency works is things are coming to cabinet that are ill thought through, which is being polite according to people who’ve been in the cabinet previously, it’s not working the way it did for release in the first 15 years where there were clusters of cabinet ministers, they were serious conversation and you would be told to go home and do more homework, Department X or Y before you come with some proposal to the cluster of ministers before it came to Cabinet. This is not working at all. So we had a whole range of suggestions to go back to some things that worked well in the Mbeki era essentially, and then some adaptations to operation voluntarily to cut things dramatically the last. So that was the first document which is there also, these are action reports which have to end with. Yeah, or our recommendations do this, do that to the next thing in a short period. Stop saying what we mean by short, but do these now was the sort of injunction and how we pushed it in the media. The second document comes out of a conversation I had with a donor friend. Funnily enough, when Cyril Ramaphosa was first elected a donor in New York, the South African who gives us money and who supports all sorts of things, including a rugby team in South Africa and Siya kolisi. He said to me, I assume that Cyril has identified the mission critical jobs and is going to put good people there. Well, we didn’t. And I’ve always been thinking about this. So what our second report was. Look, we know there’s been cadre deployment. We know there’s been state capture. What we should do is hypothetically take 120 top positions, CEOs of big state owned companies, Transnet, CEOs of, I don’t know, critical ABA institutions, the NPA and departments, the top official, the minister identify all mission critical jobs and have a fair process that is quick, that asks all these people to reapply for their job and in some fair way. You you assess are you the right person for this job? Because the future of the country depends on us. So we’ve developed this notion and how to do it. And. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s certainly it’s in people’s minds. I went to a conference on Operation Full and Baylor just after we brought those documents out full of government people. And as I drove into the hotel, I thought, I don’t know how popular I’m going to be today. Well, let’s see what happens. And I walked in and there were two people very close in the presidency, and they just laughed when I came in and they sort of said, come over to me, hugged me, and they laughed and they said, we’re reading your documents. Very interesting. And a number of people came up and said, yeah, this is you make some good points. And so we were being read and heard. We certainly didn’t win on the size of the cabinets, but this will take time. I can tell you some more stories of where we are getting some traction with just the last six weeks, getting starting now to get some traction from our proposals and the seven documents we released, the 3 or 4 more to come.

Thabang Malabo And I want to be able to come back to that a little bit later around. You know, the composition of the cabinet, the appointment of people and what that means for us, because those are quite foundational, you know, to the other issues that you bring up around growth, opening up markets and so forth. If you don’t have the right skills in those key positions that impact. I’ll come back to that later on. What do we do going forward? But I want to lean in a little bit on Project Vulindlela or Operation Vulindlela. I think there is a need for clarity on what it is and how it differs from some of the proposals that you’re making in your research. So if you could spend a lot of time clarifying what it is and how it differs, and I’m going to ask one additional question afterwards and then I’ll open up the floor.

Ann Bernstein So Operation Vulindlela is a good thing. Essentially, it’s a very small group of people in the presidency and the Treasury that helped push ministers to adopt reforms and kind of try and monitor what’s happening. This is a case of rewriting history because they now describe themselves very differently from how they describe themselves at the beginning and its confidence. And so this is a good thing. They’re good people. They that’s tiny. They very few people. But it’s they were very important in getting. The decision through the cabinet, let’s just say, to allow private producers of energy to produce as much as they could possibly do first was 30 whatever megawatts or whatever. And then then it was all that 100, then the prisons to just produce as much as you can. They were instrumental in that. Now they too got very murky and confused. The president in 2022 forms. Well, maybe the three working groups, the business and the president. And they’re working on three issues electricity, getting an electricity, markets, getting supply transmission, everything you can think of, electricity, logistics, which is essentially Transnet Ports, Rail. Commuter rail as well, which has dropped phenomenally. I mean, we used to have I can’t remember the numbers, not in our documents, but maybe commuter rail, which is different from my cargo rail. So that’s the second area. They call it logistics. And the third area is crime and corruption. So business and government chose those three areas and they tried to focus on those three areas and. Operation willingly is intimately involved in. It’s not clear, but helping to make this happen. Now, what has happened? Well, yes, we now don’t have loadshedding, although if you live in Johannesburg and I imagine other cities, not Cape Town, you get what we now called load sharing. So every now and then, once a week, I don’t have electricity in Johannesburg and it will get worse. So the supply is much better and we don’t have loadshedding. This is, of course, with a stagnant economy. Or if it were to get to 3%. What will happen then? And there’s a whole lot of questions about electricity. You should listen to the interview I did recently with the chairman of Eskom on our website. You know, is is Eskom a utility in a death spiral? They’ve lost customers, the prices going up, etc., etc.. So lots of questions. But they’ve made a difference there. They would claim this is where hype and hope might come in, but logistics, I don’t think they’ve made progress at all. This is debatable, but that would be my assessment, or certainly completely insufficient. Crime and corruption vary. They would say it’s the slowest of the three. So there’s this thing going on, which is one level you could say good and another level you could say. This should be more transparent. I don’t know what’s going on. I would like powerful people meeting in closed rooms outside Parliament not to question. They’d like to hear. But anyhow, that’s just me. And operation for that really sort of involved an operation for little is now going much more public debate in government. Good idea bad idea. And they’re saying phase two. I haven’t finished phase one, but phase two, should we get into local government reform? And the urban spatial issue, which we’ve talked about for a long time in South Africa, recurrent talk for thinking deeper on that of a growth lab report. But it’s not crystal clear what they’re going to do and how effective all operations will be when they start. Yeah, it’s one thing to say we’re going to fix that, but if you’re going to save local governments, that’s a really big and hard topic. So this is again, more talk. It’s not crystal clear exactly where we are.

Thabang Malabo Okay. So what I’m hearing from you is some of the proposals that the CDE has made tend to be a lot more broader in scope in terms of, you know, helping the government turnaround plan as project building is still finding its feet, but tends to focus on one needs areas like electricity.

Ann Bernstein And so I’m very flattered. But no, the comparison is flattering, but what we’ve tried to do is come with very specific recommendations. Let me give you an example, because it’s slightly different from what you’ve said. So the recommendations we’ve made on the state-owned enterprises, an enormous topic, are big. There’s a lot that could be done tomorrow if you were serious. We made recommendations on the National Prosecuting Authority, which has caused quite a lot of controversy. And then last week, I was invited to talk at the National Prosecuting Authority strategic planning session for the next five years, which was they were really angry, it seemed. And what we were saying and we were saying two things. One, there has not been one major politician or very senior person the Zondo Commission told us, was involved in state capture who has been successfully prosecuted. I didn’t like that. They said, Look at our annual report. We are so busy with all sorts of things when we say things, but we’re interested in the big guys, the big fish, which would send such a big signal to the country and investors, you’re not really making progress there. So we had some recommendations, the most important one of which was a retired, the president should appoint not a commission but a retired judge to do an inquiry on why is the NPA not successfully prosecuting big and powerful people and rich people who can hire the best lawyers? And what’s the problem here? Now, there’s a lot of people saying, this reason, that reason, they all sorts of allegations. A retired judge could look into it. Think of the Nugent Commission into saws in six weeks. He said, father CEO, do this, do that. And then the report came in another two months or so. And so was is well on its way to being a world class institution. Again, we’re saying let’s it’s different, but get an objective, impartial kind of retired judge to look at this. What do you lose by that? So that’s one thing. But what became clear to me was that the NPA is not getting sufficient support from the executive. So in August 2023, the head of the NPA or this is the legal process, asked the president to get rid of a very senior official in the NPA, the Johannesburg Head of Prosecutions. The president has yet to respond 15 months later. Who did former deputy minister minister sports this record apply to? A few weeks ago to have his charges of corruption set aside. That very man now I’m I don’t know anything. I’m just raising the question. But why hasn’t the executive replied? Why is the Minister of Justice not made sure that the NPA has full unhindered access to the files and the archives of the Zondo Commission? What possible reason could you have? So we’re making very specific, practical recommendations. This is an area where there is a crime and corruption working group, but they’re doing other things. And this is one of the things. We’re looking at, You know, and the question you can ask with business working with the president and ministers on specific areas of government policy. I like to say they’re an emergency repairman, but this is not how you run a country. All, they’re keeping quiet on certain other issues that are as fundamental. So there’s some very big questions here. But I wouldn’t sort of I wouldn’t talk of operation for us in the same breath. We’re an outside thinktank. They’re inside government and very close to the presidency. And it obviously is a think tank where we’re choosing issues that other people avoid. If something’s working and it’s going well, you don’t need us. So it’s a very different kind of thing.

Thabang Malabo All right. I want to open up the floor to some questions. I have some additional questions, but I don’t want to monopolize.

Guest I’m Emile, I’m a public policy student here, and I’m writing my master’s thesis on climate climate adaptation finance in Cape Town. So very interested. Could you speak a bit more to corruption, what role it plays in society in December 2024? And specifically, I think corruption played a major theme in the news coverage of the election and how people voted. So I’m curious if it is mainly a political problem or if it’s also a policy problem. When you talked about state capacity and so forth, like how seriously should we take the issue of corruption? And if you have time to come at a bit on the role of climate change more generally. I’d be very curious to hear that, but that might be overstretching. Thank you.

Thabang Malabo How about the gentleman over there.

Guest Thanks so much. I’m a post-doc researcher at the African African Immigrant Center. My question is about Jacob Zuma. You didn’t talk about too much, but he is very interesting figure. In fact, maybe he is the the second famous after Nelson Mandela in the South African history. And during the this the latest election, he actually played a key role. And during his presidency he also mentioned he underlined too much on ethnicity. I mean, so in the feature, do you see an ethnic zation of the politicians? I mean, the political parties because he. Yeah. The last election we saw so much about Jacob Zuma’s clan and the Zulu and another region and so on and so forth. It’s actually rather different from the Nelson Mandela’s legacy. So it’s more ethnic orientation from the part, the policy. Thank you.

Thabang Malabo Do we have another? Yes.

Guest Hi Ann, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I’m Chanice Ghanem, a South African entrepreneur working in the healthcare space, and I’m currently one of the fellows doing an MBA at the Harvard Chan School. So I’m curious around. My question obviously is, are on your thoughts around health care. I’m curious to know what what do you feel are the practical steps for this new JNU that we have to approach health care reform in terms of increase access, sustainability, all of those things that we should have been seeing in our healthcare systems many, many years ago. Like you said, there’s a lot of hope, but there’s also a lot of hype. And I’m hoping that some of this hope can really translate into practical steps. I’m curious to hear from you what you believe those might feasibly be. Thank you. Thank you.

Ann Bernstein Great, Great question. No free lunch. So corruption’s very serious. In a whole lot of ways. So firstly, you stealing from the poor. I couldn’t pay for a whole lot of services myself. The middle class and above the poor can’t. So when you steal public money, you’re stealing from the poor. In the main. Corruption is going up in South Africa, not down. And that’s partly why I feel so strongly about the criminal justice system. And for example, the NPA. And it said every level of government, local government, provincial, national and the ESOs. No. What happens if you don’t put the big fish in jail? The risk reward relationship is that also you’re not going to get me. So I’ll carry on doing what I’m doing. And your brother says, Yeah, look at cousin. I don’t know Uncle Jack, uncle, whatever. He drives a nice big car and I’ve got a big house and nothing happens. And yes, the Zondo Commission fingered them, but nothing’s happened. How do you start to turn this around? So it’s not just words. The presences on the post, the corruption and whatever, that’s too slow. And you’ve got it. We’re saying that the president and the minister of Justice should not just once, but often stand up and say we back the NPA. And in a democracy, everybody is subject to the law. If a powerful or rich you are, you will go to jail if you still commit fraud, whatever. But they don’t. And it doesn’t happen. So. Yes, we had the Zondo Commission. Yes, the president spent two days there, which is unusual for most countries. Might work well here, but but. And least some people sitting in jail. That’s why the big question about the NPA is how come no powerful policy politician has successfully. Been prosecuted. So I could go on and on about corruption. Imagine being a civil servant when you this all sorts of talk about your boss and your boss comes in and says, I want you to do X, Y and Z. The minute he walks out, you think, well, who benefits from you going to sit under your table and hope nobody ever sees you again because you don’t know who’s corrupt and who isn’t? What agenda are you on? So it’s it’s like a cancer eating through the heart of Big E, So each and every part of government and there’s a lot that has to be done. So corruption is very serious. Do not underestimate it. And it takes two to tango. You’ve got to have a corrupt party and a corrupt all. And just generally it becomes, well, it’s okay, you get away with it. And whether it’s not paying your traffic fines or bribing the police guy, the traffic policeman, all the way up to what was the president doing with hundreds of millions of dollars in the couch? And how come I can’t do that? It’s illegal. But this, you know, no consequence. So it’s corrosive of a society and it’s bad. And investors. A put off, you need a bit of corruption to oil the wheels. I think in many developing countries, I’m not in favor of it, but that’s how it works. But you might come along and bribe somebody to change the law. And then I’ve got a 30 year investment in a mine. Then what happens? So do not underestimate the sort of many tentacles of this. That’s the first thing. I’m the wrong person to ask about climate change. I’m ignorant. Jacob Zuma is, in my view. An unbelievably corrupt politician. And he doesn’t. He neither. The ports. He wants to destroy the constitution. He doesn’t believe in the rule of law, doesn’t believe that parliament should be accountable to the Constitution in any way. Doesn’t like the idea that judges can say, I’m not allowed to do this back to parliament kind of thing. He’s very smart. I think he’s one of the most clever politicians we’ve seen in South Africa in my lifetime. Is playing. He is reintroducing ethnicity there. Just when he was president, 100% Zulu boy is appealing to an ethnic audience. He hopes he can go wider than KwaZulu Natal. I hope he’s wrong, but he’s certainly reintroducing ethnic politics into the country. It’s very worrying. So I think this is contrary to what Mandela tried to do and the spirit of our Constitution. And it could be very dangerous for the country. And unless we. Yeah. So let me leave that there. I agree with you then. Health care is not an area I’m a specialist in at all. And my center doesn’t do work in this area. We have the same ministers we had previously who didn’t manage to change anything. In fact, I imagine health care got worse under his watch. You know, health care is all about people. It’s who should run the hospital? Who should run the housing health department? Why does nobody ever get fired? So, you know, there’s a pooling level of service again, for poorer South Africans. Unbelievable levels of service in many places. Probably not all. It’s just incompetence. So if you put people who, you know, just because you’re a doctor doesn’t mean you know how to run a hospital, which the school would tell us very quickly. And. I’m not very hopeful on health care. You’ve got the same players shouting Health department’s terrible. Nothing ever happens. People don’t get fired. There’s terrible corruption and incompetence and a lack of care. That’s what’s so there’s just a lack of sympathy and empathy for patients. So I’m not very optimistic about health care at the moment. It’s an ANC ministry, same person. Why would you appoint the same person when he did a rotten job last time? And then this obsession with the national health insurance. Is not helpful. Everyone deserves we want a country where everybody has access to a decent level of health care. Absolutely. Shouldn’t you start with what’s working and build out from there rather than trying to kill the private sector? So this would have massive economic implications if they did introduce. They in H.R. as they’re proposing now, the president just before the election, sun in a tribal country took over objections. There are people I don’t know if they can prove this that say he forgot that almost all civil servants have private health care. And private health insurance. And that there was a big opposition to this bill that would destroy the private medical aides. And you would the middle I don’t know. The professional class. Firstly, doctors, nurses and others will leave the country because they don’t want to serve it. Especially when the health care system is falling apart, the public health cases stop. And many professionals would go if they couldn’t have access to their desired health care professionals. So this is a really important. Like hidden issue. And the Minister of Health is not listening to anybody. Can you find a compromise? That’s one of the red lines in the G and between the ANC and the DIA. I don’t know where we’re going to end up there. It’s going to be a big battle.

Thabang Malabo Thank you, Ann. And I’m just watching that time. We only have two minutes left. I’m having such a good time here. I have so many questions. But before we close out to everyone and the two specific issues that I wanted to follow up on, the first one is your call for regionalization and consolidation of specific centers of government departments. So you’re talking about rationalizing Treasury, the Department of Cooperative Governance, potentially looking at consolidating the Department of Women, children and people with disabilities, as well as the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation. I just want you to share a little bit more about how do you push back and worries and concerns that, you know, consolidating and rationalizing in this way may take away from or may dilute focus on the critical issues that these departments specifically deal with? I think that is one of the arguments that I can bring up. And then finally, sorry. And just in closing.

Ann Bernstein Let me answer those quickly. Firstly, we are not calling for rationalizing the Treasury at all again. Secondly, the Department of Women. What is that?

Thabang Malabo Women, children, and people with disabilities.

Ann Bernstein It’s a ridiculous department that should have been closed down yesterday. Every department should be thinking about women. What are they talking about? What is the point of this? So it’s either a great big insult because it’s a tiny department with a tiny budget or women are more than half the population. I don’t understand what this is, and I’m a totally opposed to it. So women’s issues are really important, and I think every minister should be charged to think about them, whether it’s in health or education or anything else. But to think that you can have a little department that deals with versus generally somebody who’s very ineffective is insulting. So that one’s easy. Okay. There are too many ministries. The presidency has expanded. Enormously. There’s a security minister, there’s a minister monitoring, planning and evaluation. Nobody knows what she does. They all these things. So why don’t you think about the function and then how you’re going to deal with the function. And there’s too much politics. And finding somebody a space somewhere that is not rational and is expensive. So that’s how we were thinking about all of this. Monitoring, planning, monitoring and evaluation. We used to have quite a good department. Unfortunately, the minister then died in a car crash and it’s never been much ever since. They. I don’t know exactly what this department is supposed to do. Does it have its own budgets? It’s very misty and sort of unclear. So that was part of it. You know, trying to get the cabinet down to 18. You can cut this cake any way you want. You’ve got to choose your priorities and then work ups, you know, where you want to put your, you know, kind of focus. And the presidency is to be parliament, much to the chagrin of the ANC, I think. And the presidency has just decided that like other departments, we will have a parliamentary committee to supervise the presidency. It’s a lot of money. Growing amount of money. They don’t like that at all. I think it’s a jolly good idea. Let’s find out what people are doing and let them come to Parliament. So I think there are a whole lot of areas you could rationalize and suggest examples, but I’m certainly not calling for the Treasury to be rationalize at all. Much bigger than me. I’m not taking them on.

Thabang Malabo Okay, great. And my last question is about what you call is to everyone and everyone in South Africa. I know a lot of your work was on influencing the Treasury, but I’m wondering how the public gets involved with using your reports to influence how you check the nine institutions. Use this information to influence in the spaces where they work.

Ann Bernstein Well, this year we’ve spent all our time trying to develop our proposals and get them out. And we sent our documents to some just under 20,000 South African decision makers. The last two months, we starting to get traction as ministers are having strategy sessions and whatever. We’re starting to get invitations, which is fantastic and an opportunity to be in the room. I would like next year to spend a lot of time. Taking our documents and our recommendations and looking for allies, sort of trying to talk to more people, to get more people in civil society and business to back our recommendations and to sit outside ministers doors or digs doors if they won’t talk to us to say we’ve got something to offer here in a constructive way, can we come and talk to you? The same with Parliament. So it is early days. I do think there needs to be much greater urgency in government. But when you sit and look at the department, as I did recently and you look at 250 people around the room and you think, you have to be a really decisive leader to change direction here because you’ve got this empire around this policy and you’ve got that empire around this policy. How are you going to move this? So change management, we have to be more urgent. South Africa’s challenges are urgent. But I think what we’ve learned this year is that. That takes a bit more time than we realize. And this 100 day notion from FDR. It’s very appealing, but it’s quite hard to do when a country is in such deep trouble as we are.

Thabang Malabo Thank you so much, Ann. Thank you to everyone for joining us. Please a hand of applause for Ann.

Ann Bernstein Thank you. Good questions.