We are in a crisis moment – Justice Malala

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JEREMY MAGGS: Early on in his new book, The Plot to Save South Africa, journalist and commentator Justice Malala writes that he wanted to point out the dangers of extremism and hate, and the threats they posed in 1993 and even today. He goes on to say the forces of illiberalism now sit in parliaments around the world. He talks about the need for ethical values-driven leadership, as Nelson Mandela displayed during the week that Chris Hani was assassinated – and how close we came to a civil war. Now, by format design on this podcast, we are not going to delve too deeply into that tumultuous week but look at the lessons learnt from modern South Africa.

So a very warm welcome to this edition of FixSA. I’m Jeremy Maggs and our guests have been – and in coming weeks will be – asked how we can make things better in this country. How do we improve matters? How in the shortest space of time can we become a competitive and successful nation?

Justice Malala, a very warm welcome to you. Let’s start off with the book. How close did we come to a civil war in 1993?

JUSTICE MALALA: Very close, Jeremy. I loved what you said about solutions. For me, the key thing about that period of transition from 1990 to 1994 was that we reached out.

The peace-loving, the right-thinking people of this country reached out and averted these disasters.

In the book I deal with just one particular crisis, where one of the most popular leaders in the country was assassinated, where the nation was in absolute upheaval. It took leadership, it took people at the top and people on the ground – ordinary South Africans – to say actually we won’t be manipulated into war. They walked away from it.

I think this is a lesson not just about politics, it’s a lesson for business. It’s a lesson for nation building, which is the topic of our discussion today. It’s something for all of us to learn from – that we can reach across divides and we can do something extraordinary out of those circumstances.

JEREMY MAGGS: And in reaching across those divides, it’s absolutely critical to talk. I’ve just finished part of the book, during which Roelf Meyer at the time was watching television news, horrified by what had happened at Boipatong [massacre]. President Mandela at the time, if I recall correctly, had said talks were ‘now at an end’. As he was making that announcement on television, the call came through from now President Ramaphosa, because the two had established a back-channel of communication. What was happening then and perhaps what needs to happen more now, is that we do need to talk, whatever the odds. Conversation needs to continue in spite of how difficult things have become.

JUSTICE MALALA: Absolutely. If you think about the massacres of those days – Jeremy, you were working very hard, I think you were a news editor on one of the news channels – every morning there’d be reports of not one or two people killed in political violence, but hundreds of people killed in political violence. Between 1990 and 1994, 14 000 people were killed in political violence. So I think this is the thing that we need to realise about our country today, that more now than ever before we need these back channels, front channels, we need to talk to each other.

We need to talk to each other because there’s no other way. We are in this tunnel together. If South Africa implodes, if we allow the dire situation of unemployed young people to continue, the poverty to continue, it’s not going to just take Malala or Maggs down. It’s going to take all of us down. So this is the absolute key thing. We share this space, we share this country, and we share its future and that’s why we need to preserve it.

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JEREMY MAGGS: You also make the point, or it certainly comes across that that conversation – that constant conversation that you refer to – also requires a lot of courage. But let’s be honest, it’s also hard work to [have] that.

JUSTICE MALALA: It’s hard work. And along the way people get tired. Along the way many say, ‘What is the point?’ And many will say: ‘Oh, why should I do it when others are just going about their lives, enjoying themselves, squirrelling money away? Why should I be doing this?’ This is where leaders need to step up.

I think what happened in the 1990s was that we embraced – and by ‘we’ I mean people of privilege – people who came from poverty who were still very, very poor.

But the national interest was so overwhelming, and people embraced the fact that if one of us does well all of us can do well. That’s why we were so heralded across the world.

Jeremy, over the past four or five years I’ve had the privilege to travel a lot in Europe, in the US and people still say we did such an amazing thing by transitioning from apartheid, an evil, evil system, to democracy with minimal bloodshed; not without but with minimal bloodshed. I think it was because it was shoulder-to-the-wheel for the majority of us and by doing that we managed to get across and reach 1994 and begin a new future.

I think these are lessons for today because we face not similar challenges, different challenges. But we face serious challenges.

JEREMY MAGGS: We face serious challenges. At the time, though, the stakes were very high. Justice, you talk about everybody putting their shoulder to the wheel and working for the national interest. I wonder if we’ve lost sight of what that national interest is.

JUSTICE MALALA: I think we may have, Jeremy. What has happened over the past 30 years? You think of the so-called ‘struggle generation’. Many people came back from exile, from prison, from the yoke of apartheid and said, ‘let me build a life for myself’. Part of ‘building a life for myself’ is being selfish with your time, selfish with your contribution, selfish with the nation in many ways – and building your own little portfolio by yourself.

I think that many who came from very privileged backgrounds said, well, democracy is here and let me live my life and continue. I don’t need to contribute.

So, instead of working together and rebuilding this broken entity that is South Africa, many of us went our separate ways.

From it we took the privilege of being people of the New South Africa, but we didn’t give as much or as generously as we could have. We went into knee-jerk mode.

I will [relate] an anecdote from my own life in the late 1990s. There was a big debate about what we should do about dealing with the poverty of the past, the inequality of the past. There were debates about a ‘wealth tax’ at that time, and I believe if Nelson Mandela and his cabinet at that time had moved on such a wealth tax, many of us working South Africans would’ve agreed to such a tax. But we never did.

I think that was part of the walking away instead of dealing with the problem. So we kind of forgot that democracy is hard work, that building or rebuilding a nation from the devastation of the 1980s is hard work. I point to the 1980s in particular, because those were the years when Bantu Education had devastated black communities, and policies of the ANC such as ‘liberation now, education later’ had led to many, many people missing a year, two years, some three years of schooling. The confluence of all that needed some way to heal, to get people back into quality education, and I don’t think we did enough of that. And that’s where I think things have come back to bite us.

JEREMY MAGGS: So part of what you’re saying, if I’m understanding you correctly, is adopting the pay-it-forward philosophy. In other words, those of us who were able at the time – and are still able today – to make a better contribution towards fixing things need to step up and do it. You’re not the first person on this podcast who has said that. The question, though, Justice Malala, is have we left it too late?

JUSTICE MALALA: No, I don’t think it’s too late at all, Jeremy. I think that we are in a crisis moment. I think that it’s becoming clearer to all of us just how deep our problems are now. Yet I don’t think we’ve left it too late. I think that this time of despair is the right time for us to say we can turn this thing around. We all need to do something in our small spaces, in our big spaces.

Those of us who have a microphone, like you and me, who can speak to more people than many other people can, are lucky to. These are the times when we need to focus on the solutions, to put forward some solutions, to elevate people who have solutions, and to essentially say to those we’ve put in power, our leaders: ‘reach out to other sectors, to business, to the teaching profession, to professionals who want to do something, who want to give of their skills and expertise – use them and use them quickly and assiduously and we can turn this thing around’.

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I’ve heard the expression so many times in South Africa: five minutes to midnight. We use it a lot. But we’ve used it before.

We used it in 2007 when a new administration came in and Thabo Mbeki was kicked out. We used it frequently in the 2010s. Those were troubled moments, but we managed a way forward.

We managed to get rid of the state capture gang, if you will – and some of them are still facing all kinds of sanctions for what happened then. So I think we can turn it around. Too late? No, not at all.

JEREMY MAGGS: Leading on from that let’s pivot back to the book. Your argument is predicated on what you termed, when you were describing Nelson Mandela at the time, as ‘having ethical values-driven leadership’. So two questions. What is that, first of all? Do you have a better definition than others, perhaps, and are we in short supply when it comes to that particular quality?

JUSTICE MALALA: I think the right values, values that we instil in our children, such as basic hard work, are in short supply. I think what has been eroded in our society over the past 30 years has been the idea that you put in and you get out [but now it is] that actually my connections are what will get me a leg-up and will give me profit.

I think if we define some of these values and begin to put them in a box – asking ‘what are we, what do we want?’ – we want a country that works on honesty, on merit and is driven by values of service, of kindness, values that are implicit and sometimes explicit in our Constitution. I think these are the things that, whether it’s in elections next year or in appointing people to leadership positions in the civil service, in the private sector, the basic [postulate] is that you don’t steal as an executive or as the chief financial officer of an organisation, and so forth. These [principles] are what should embed the people that we put forward in our leadership positions …

JEREMY MAGGS: So, assuming we’ve got that type of leadership in place – and it does exist in this country, make no mistake, not everyone is bad – how do we then prioritise the problems that we need to fix?

JUSTICE MALALA: I think this is where South Africa is actually in a very good space. It’d be, in my view, very easy to list the things that we agree on. Right now, Jeremy, all of us can agree – rich and poor, young and old, black and white, all of us – there need not be a debate about the fact that the crisis of energy provision and the crisis of Eskom absolutely need a solution right now. So we can take that and say, ‘number one’.

Now this cannot be something that gets solved only by the government, because at the moment, for example, the solution provided by government is to appoint the minister of electricity. So Jeremy, I think that we can pick up and make a list very quickly as South Africans, all of us, that these are the priorities that we need to focus on. Energy provision is an example.

We all agree there is no one in South Africa who doesn’t think this is an … existential problem for South Africa. If we don’t fix this we won’t be able to fix many, many other aspects of our economy, of our country’s challenges. So you start there, and then you tackle the others. Some are multifaceted and you’ll need to tackle them from many, many different points, but I think we can prioritise five key things to fix. We can prioritise how quickly we do that. This is where we need to be open; it is not something that can be fixed by one sector. Business cannot stand on a patch somewhere and say, ‘oh, if you could take government out of it we’d do it in a week’. Or that the DA stands there or the ANC stands there saying, ‘oh, those ones are this and that’ … We all need to get into this and fix this problem. Otherwise in a year from now we’ll be in an even worse position than we are in right now. So I think we can agree on a set of priorities.

Fixing the civil service is another one.

Why should it be such a harrowing, harrowing experience to go to the Department of Home Affairs?

Why should it be such a big issue to get your child get a driver’s licence, for example? These are things that we could smooth out, make work better, and so forth and so on. This is where collaboration comes in – that we could do all these things working together without saying ‘this is my patch and don’t come and step on it’.

JEREMY MAGGS: Justice, on paper in theory that sounds perfect. But you know well that we have to overcome problems of political polarisation within government itself and an increasing amount of territorial possession. Again, need I point you to the issue between public enterprises, minerals and energy and the new electricity minister’s office? None of them seem to be talking to each other; they’re talking beyond each other. So it’s a question of perhaps a little more maturity when you’re looking for a solution, when you’re looking to fix things.

JUSTICE MALALA: Jeremy, I think that we need to recommit ourselves to political maturity, to political cooperation, no matter the differences. The crime problem, for example, affects everyone – the poor more than anyone else. Surely a party that stands for the poor would be saying, let’s fix this problem, because it’s the people of Khayelitsha, the people of Alexandra Township, who are suffering.

The same thing with businesses. You know, attacks on business premises have shot through the roof. There are many, many examples of how this affects business and is driving away business.

Political maturity means saying there are some things that are not about my party, only about this nation. Let’s do something about them very quickly.

JEREMY MAGGS: Justice, part of what you’re suggesting also requires a lot of national stamina and I guess durability if we’re going to embark on this path of fixing the country. The key difficulty for all of us, no matter what contribution we’re going to make, is to guarantee that we stay the course. How do we do that without becoming despondent – as so many South Africans are right now?

JUSTICE MALALA: I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that it’s not going to be easy. Solutions are not just going to come and it’s ‘voilà, all is good and happy’. It’s going to take sacrifice; it’s going to be bumpy. I’d make an example of one big decision we didn’t make over the past 15 years, and that’s to say we are giving civil servants increases that are too big.

If you go back to the period after Thabo Mbeki stepped down in 2008, and go from there, the types of increases that were being given to civil servants were way above inflation, way above the norm in the private sector, and we now sit with a very big problem as a country – that we have too big a wage bill in the public service. That needed, early on, for the government to say: ‘we can’t continue like this, we’ve got to tighten our belts and not agree to these increases.’ But we’ve done it increasingly every three years, with every negotiation round. We are going to now have to face the problem that we cannot afford the civil service that we have, that we may have to trim the civil service, that we may have to give people far [lower] increases than we have over the past 15 years. That will take time, and that will be a huge challenge for the country because it’ll come with protests, it’ll come with pushbacks and so forth. But it’s a tough decision that we have to take.

If you go back to the 1990s, we did this when Nelson Mandela came in and the civil service, which was bloated, was trimmed and largely transformed. Political will on the part of the nation will be needed but it won’t be easy.

I think we should be honest with the nation from all sectors that rebuilding, getting this country to work, is going to take hard work.

JEREMY MAGGS: It’s going to take hard work. It’s also going to take a lot of compromise, as you suggest. I wonder sometimes if we haven’t as a nation lost the art of compromise. Previously, again referencing back to your book and how that tumultuous week was eventually solved, there was compromise on both sides. That doesn’t happen as much now as it used to.

JUSTICE MALALA: It doesn’t happen as much, but it should. South Africa is a perfect example of what can be done when people step back and say: ‘is my position really that hard line? Am I really drawing a line in the sand here? What does it mean to draw that line in the sand?’ And I think we know that many lines in the sand are not as hard when you look back at them with hindsight and you say, ‘why did I fight for something I could have found a way to accommodate others across the aisle on?’ So, I think the art of compromise is still there. We need to sit around the table and fix it.

Jeremy, can I put it a different way? Here’s my view. I think that there’s a lot of posturing, that Justice says, ‘I stand for the poor’. And then it becomes, ‘No, Jeremy is a business person, and he doesn’t stand for the poor’. But Jeremy happens to be a business person who employs a thousand people who every month on the 25th or the 15th or on the first [of every month]get a wage paid into their bank account; they feed two children, three children; the family goes to school, gets clothed, gets fed, and so forth. That is a massive, massive contribution. If, on the political side, I stopped and said, ‘I need Jeremy because he’s given me seven jobs or eight jobs, and actually Jeremy and I are aligned. The better I make it for Jeremy, the better for those seven people and the better for their kids and the better for the future of South Africa’.

So instead of compromise and being able to step back, we’ve become so ideological that [we tend to say] ‘no, I’m the only one who stands for the poor. You can’t stand for the poor, although you are alleviating [them] in your everyday life, in your business.’ I think we need to show each other a little bit more that we are actually so interconnected – whether it’s business or the SA Communist Party, whether it’s socialists in red berets – with the billionaires and billionaire business people of this country. I think that we have so much more in common than what divides us. But in the public lair, in the histrionics, in the posturing of politics, sometimes that gets lost. That is a tragedy because together we can do so much more.

JEREMY MAGGS: This is a final question to Justice Malala, and it’s one that we put to every one of our guests. When you talk to young people, say, in 20 years’ time, when you talk to your two daughters – if I can name them, Ayanda and Fraire – because you mention them in the book – and you are talking to them about the early 2020s and the role that they have in continuing to build a South Africa which is hopefully a little more fixed than it is right now, what is their role? I wonder what you will say to them as the baton-holding generation, because we are coming to a point now where it’s time for people like you and I to move on. It becomes their responsibility, doesn’t it?

JUSTICE MALALA: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I wish our generation had done was to remind ourselves that we are not here for ourselves, but that we need to build a fantastic country, a great country, for those who come after us, that I’m not just Justice Malala and I’m on television with Jeremy, or I’m on a podcast with Jeremy, or we are launching our books for ourselves, but that we are – you used the expression earlier – ‘playing it forward’. I think, in the moment you do things and you achieve and so forth it’s important to think about legacy.

One of the things that we didn’t do enough of as a nation is to leave something for our children. As the world, we didn’t do enough to start talking about climate change, for example, early on. So if I were to say to my kids, ‘this is what you have to think about now,’ I would say: ‘do it for yourself, but constantly think about doing it for the country and particularly for those who will come after you.’

Quite frankly, Jeremy, I’m a bit ashamed about the kind of country and world that I bequeath to my kids. As I walk off the stage I feel that we could have done so much more and that we frittered away so much opportunity. I would say to these young people, ‘I trust South Africa’. The opportunities are so vast, still, in these hard economic times. In these very terrible times in many ways there is still so much opportunity and, when you do get the opportunity use it to play it forward a little bit, because there will come a time when you hand over and it’s better for the keys to be intact than for, like us, like me, to be a bit ashamed of the bunch of keys that you’re handing over because many are rusted over and can’t open the door for them to move into the next step of this game, into the next room in this house.

So that would be my thing that we need to do a little better about building for the future. I think the opportunity right now for South Africa is that things are very challenging – but when things are at their most dire, when things are most challenging that’s when people of goodwill, people of good character, people of outstanding values can step up and do extraordinary things. It’s not at the time of huge abundance that we are all needed; now we are all needed. And I think all of us can be leaders and can leave something a little bit better than what I leave professionally in our country for the next generation.

JEREMY MAGGS: I like the analogy of leaving our children a shiny set of keys.

Justice Malala, thank you very much indeed. It is a book of political reality, but it really does read like a thriller. It’s called The Plot to Save South Africa: The Week Mandela averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation. It’s published by Jonathan Ball and is available in South Africa right now.

My name’s Jeremy Maggs, and thank you for listening to the FixSA podcast on Moneyweb.

Listen to previous FixSA podcasts here.