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JEREMY MAGGS: Hello, and welcome to another episode of FixSA here on Moneyweb, with conversations committed to finding solutions and viable approaches to the complex and often multifaceted issues facing South Africa. The programme is brought to you by the IDC, the Industrial Development Corporation.
I’m Jeremy Maggs, and today we welcome Bobby Godsell, former chief executive officer of AngloGold Ashanti. He was the non-executive chairman of Eskom for a year and has been part of the National Planning Commission. He espouses a philosophy that good leadership requires a belief in the equality and the dignity of every human being, and that businesses have a social responsibility beyond their immediate profit motives. On his retirement Godsell was described as a visionary who has done much to shape the destiny of South Africa’s labour relations landscape.
Bobby Godsell, this is a series about rebuilding South Africa. Welcome to you. What needs fixing?
BOBBY GODSELL: A lot of things need fixing, Jeremy. But for me a starting point is that South Africans need a realistic perspective about their country – its past and its future. I say this in big-picture terms. Black and white came together 300 years ago. They came together in a context of military conquest.
As we think a lot about Gaza, we think about a country that has effectively been under military occupation since 1967. I think that’s 76 years. That’s a long period. It has a mixed history, by the way.
I wish that we knew more about the Trekboers when they left the safety of Cape Town – the unreality, I must say, of Cape Town – and ventured into the hinterland of our country. They engaged in wars but they also did a lot of negotiating with local indigenous peoples. I wish we knew more about the negotiation.
Read: AngloGold will pay Sars R4.5bn to walk away from SA
I wish that Jan Hofmeyr had sat down with the leadership of the ANC in 1948 in the Native Council. I think that an agreement could have been achieved on a qualified franchise and a gradual expansion of democracy in South Africa as it has expanded in many other democratising countries around the world. So it’s a long and complicated history.
Firstly, I don’t think the country is entirely broken. It’s captured by that famous Martin Luther King phrase that ‘We aren’t where we want to be, we aren’t where we’re going to be, but thank God we aren’t where we were’. To forget the last sentence is I think not to equip yourself to have the courage and the energy and the vision to fix what needs to be fixed.
JEREMY MAGGS: You talk about the need for us to have a realistic picture of what is happening in South Africa right now. Do you think that we have our heads in the sand, that we just are unable to come to terms with what that realistic picture is, and either we default to absolute gloom and doom or we live in a bubble – maybe something like the Western Cape, for instance?
BOBBY GODSELL: [Laughing] Well, what I think is true is that countries are complex. Let me relate a conversation that my wife had with a friend yesterday. She has a sister who attends municipal clinics, and she was relating the story about how a municipal clinic had phoned a patient who hadn’t collected their Aids medication for two months in a row.
Here’s the thing. There’s a clinic that has Aids medication, there’s a clinic that has a list of the people who need it, there’s a clinic that after the second month of non-collection phones a family member and asks them to intervene and get it right. That’s success.
Then of course, there are any number of failings – and we could talk about the state-owned enterprise in which I had in fact a 15-month encounter, and which I see a lot of because I serve on the board of the Industrial Development Corporation now.
Read:
Godsell had a better vision for Eskom [Nov 2009]
Eskom’s biggest union backs Godsell, wants Maroga out [Nov 2009]
Yes, there’s a great deal that needs to be fixed with the state-owned enterprises. There’s a great deal that needs to be fixed with water and energy.
Again, there is a need to have a perspective. The latest census indicates that the population of Johannesburg has increased fourfold since 1994. Now, what we haven’t had is a fourfold increase in water infrastructure – not dams, not major piping. So we haven’t had new infrastructure, and quite a lot of the old infrastructure has been poorly maintained. It’s absolutely true that maintenance has been very poor. These things are eminently fixable.
Next year we’ll have a major provincial and national election, the most unpredictable election since 1994, because after 1994 the only question was whether the ANC would get a two-thirds majority or not.
Now it’s quite possible that at national level and in some provinces no party will get a 50% majority, and we’ll need coalitions. It’s a completely different context.
We went to the polls, black and white South Africans, I think in the belief that the country truly belonged to all. I think for white South Africans there was a recognition that there were black South Africans, and that they weren’t going to go away. [Chuckle] I mean, we should recall the promise of Hendrik Verwoerd of ‘White by night’. You could have domestic workers during the day, and they could go to the homelands at night. I think there was a realism that blacks weren’t going anywhere.
I don’t actually think, by the way, that black South Africans ever wanted the whites to go anywhere. There was this kind of mutual recognition of here we are, we’re standing in the queue, we’re voting for the first time for a fully democratic government. I think there was also a perception that for this to work we needed to cooperate.
What people forget is that we voted in ’94 under an interim constitution, which incidentally promised every party that got 3.5% of the vote a seat in cabinet, and promised any party that got 20% of the vote a deputy president. So we voted for a Government of National Unity.
This is one thing we have to fix, because since that time competitive politics have descended into people playing a race card between the parties, saying, ‘If you’re black you should vote for me’, and actually another party saying, ‘If you’re not black, you should vote for us, because they don’t look after your interests’.
I think that we have a chance in 2024 – and a need – to have a different kind of politics that’s focusing on growing the economy, building the society, addressing youth unemployment, doing all of those things which, by the way, are very well analysed.
I indeed spent five years of my life on the National Development Plan. It was presented in 2011. It was accepted by all the political parties that were then in parliament. The EFF, I have to acknowledge, was not in parliament, but I think there were in fact 11 parties in parliament who all endorsed it.
The sadness is that its recommendations, the 181 actionable ideas, have not been comprehensively implemented. And that’s been a major failure of the state – but not only the state, by the way, because the plan was a plan for society as well as for government. Businesses has failed. Civil society has failed. The churches and faith-based communities have failed. They played a huge role in bringing apartheid to an end and facilitating a peaceful transition.
That’s what has to be fixed: a belief in the country, an acceptance of each other and each other’s fundamental equality, and a determination to work together on practical issues.
I think there are some encouraging signs that this is beginning to happen. For the first time in my adult life business and government are working in three broad areas to fix transport, electricity, and crime. These are tangible things. There are plans, there are timelines, there are resources being allocated.
Listen/read: SA’s most senior business people now part of the government’s ‘crisis committees’
And I think we will see progress.
JEREMY MAGGS: Driven by a degree of expediency, though, on both sides. They now have no choice but to work together.
BOBBY GODSELL: Well, if you like, driven by a sense of crisis. I think most changed behaviour is driven by a determination that this is not the country we want, that we can do so much better. But we can only do it together.
JEREMY MAGGS: Bobby Godsell, I want to pick you up on two things. One is polarisation that exists in this country – we are a society marred by division – and how we can perhaps bridge that. The second thing is it’s all very well to have plans and people working together, but it’s a question of proper implementation.
Let’s talk about polarisation first of all, though. So many people are talking beyond each other. You give me the example of the political parties addressing different racial profiles. It’s not acceptable, and that doesn’t work, it’s a hindrance. How do you overcome that polarisation to bring everybody into that broad tent?
BOBBY GODSELL: Look, before I have an effective answer to that question …
JEREMY MAGGS: You wouldn’t be sitting here, you’d be sitting somewhere else!
BOBBY GODSELL: Maybe in Heaven. [Laughter]
JEREMY MAGGS: You must have some thoughts.
BOBBY GODSELL: Where we have to start on is the polarisation. We have to start with individuals. I’m a white South African. I grew up as a white South African. This is my skin colour. It’s not a big issue for me. It might be an issue for other people, but this is my own community, the white community.
I think the first start, the first thing that has to happen, is that people have to say this is our home and it’s our only home. We’re going to take it back. We’re going to fix it.
The problem with doubt about your country – and it is a doubt, it’s a doubt that may incidentally be more particularly evident in English-speaking South Africans than in Afrikaans-speaking South Africans, which is kind of interesting – is it’s a crippling phenomenon. You are a South African altogether; you’re active, you’re engaged. ‘They’ don’t fix the potholes in your neighbourhood. You get together in a residents’ association and you fix the potholes. This is a small issue.
You are active in the community policing forum. You are a registered voter. You are interested not only in who will govern, but how they will govern. You are interested in the people. You seek your power every five years. How will they use it?
It’s that set of attitudes that belong to the concept of citizenship in a deep way. What intrigued me a long time ago was that many black South Africans respond to the word ‘African’ rather than ‘South African’. And many white South Africans don’t actually respond to the word ‘African’ very well.
So I think from both sides we’ve got to actually move to a deeply shared identity and destiny because, of course, people can emigrate, and they have that right and they can exercise that choice.
I think they’re often very unrealistic about the fact that they will leave all the problems behind. I think many of the problems follow them.
Alan Paton said an important thing about people who lose hope. He said people who lose hope should, at least for the rest of us, shut up.
JEREMY MAGGS: Do you think leading on from that assertion then, there is a willing majority of people in this country who still want to fix things, who still have the optimism and the hope that you talk about, that there is a majority of middle-ground consensus that exists?
BOBBY GODSELL: I have absolutely no doubt about that. I think, Jeremy – and it’s tricky because here I’m saying it to you who in your career has been lifelong in the media – what South Africa has, and we’re not alone by the way, is a disconnected elite.
My experience of everyday South Africans is that racism is not widespread, actually. My sense of everyday South Africans is they’re getting on with their lives.
They’re by and large ready to treat each other with dignity and respect. They by and large actually look each other in the eye. They by and large get to know people’s names, people whom they see.
JEREMY MAGGS: And smile at each other.
BOBBY GODSELL: Indeed they do. They want things to work.
I’m afraid it is true that bad news sells and good news generally doesn’t. In South Africa this has the form. If I hear one more time about ‘the fact’ that the ANC is inevitably and immediately and already going to be in a coalition with the EFF, and Julius Malema is going to be the deputy president – honestly this is something that was media-created. There never was a realistic possibility of this.
I can’t think of a single ANC leader at any level of this organisation – regional, provincial or national – who hasn’t said they don’t want a deal with the EFF. But why do we have this lingering nightmare mainly in white heads? There’s a wonderful Jewish word, or at least a Jewish golem, this ominous presence; what it does is to sap the energy. You say, ‘We can’t fix it because they’re going to work together’. [Chuckling]
JEREMY MAGGS: And you are suggesting, Bobby Godsell, that in some respects, the media is fanning those flames?
BOBBY GODSELL: Not only the media, by the way. Here’s the problem about the disconnected elite.
It’s a problem I think [is] hugely manifest in the United States of America; it’s polarisation. Take CNN and Fox. It’s not only the journalists – and it is the journalists, by the way – but it’s [that] every CNN panel and every Fox panel is loaded with commentators quite often, by the way, also CNN journalists and Fox journalists, who are filled with a sense of gloom.
I think, by the way, there’s a generational quality to this. I look at these talking heads and I look at who is writing columns in South African newspapers. I’m afraid to say – and I say this as a 70-year-old – this is overwhelmingly old people. These are people who were young and vital and active in the 1980s and early 1990s. They were part of transforming South Africa and performing our miracle. They feel kind of let down and left out – and now they are exceedingly grumpy.
JEREMY MAGGS: But they also have the wisdom of experience, don’t they?
BOBBY GODSELL: Well perhaps, perhaps they do. But what you have to do is to try to tease out of the gloom what exactly it is.
Let’s talk about a concept that is very prevalent, like the ANC/EFF deal, the problem of a ‘failed state’. Firstly, by the way, I’m an amateur intellectual in the sense that I’ve spent my entire life reading about the world.
I have yet to come across a meaningful definition of this concept of ‘failed state’. I don’t know what it means. In South Africa I think it’s an extremely unhelpful concept. It’s much better to talk about what is failing in the state – and there is a lot that is failing.
I’m subscribed to a private fire brigade service because I don’t trust the Johannesburg Municipality fire brigade to come to my house quickly in the case of a fire. So there’s an example of failure, and we should name it as failure and we should fix it.
But a failed state – that’s more sweeping. The suggestion is that you’d be a fool if you think you could turn this around.
JEREMY MAGGS: And then I guess a phrase like that almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
BOBBY GODSELL: Exactly. It’s a mantra, it’s a dogma. It’s actually, oddly enough, almost like a religious belief, and it’s very hard to move people.
Again, there’s a lovely expression, Effendi – clever people who were part of creating Turkey to be Turkey; [creating it] to be fair to them.
But a lot of our commentators are filled with a sense of gloom or the inevitability of failure. It surprises me, because I doubt if their daily life reflects this. But there’s a narrative that South Africa has failed, that the dream has failed, that the Rainbow Nation is finished. You’ve got to unpack this into things that can be actually addressed.
JEREMY MAGGS: I don’t want to delve into kind of the human psyche, because neither of us is an amateur psychologist – unless you are, Bobby.
BOBBY GODSELL: Not at all.
JEREMY MAGGS: It’s a lot easier to be angry and bitter than it is actually to be happy and optimistic. ‘Angry’ is an easy default position.
BOBBY GODSELL: I’m afraid that’s true.
I would also have to say, by the way, it’s much more pleasant to be hopeful than it is to be angry. Because the anger actually turns in on yourself.
Again, there’s a generational quality. I have three daughters in their 30s. My wife and I have both just turned 70. For us, our political education, our political induction as teenagers and young adults, was all about race, or South Africa as a black country or a white country. It was all about race. For my daughters, race is not actually a terribly prominent issue at all. Gender is. And beyond gender, actually, integrity. Do the leaders mean what they say?
There is a deep suspicion of the advertising industry, of the promise. Now it’s extraordinary – every bank has got to promise you happiness as well as easy banking. There’s a strange infusion of a kind, and it’s I think the failure of a more vital social compact here. But it’s not only here. So we need to restore a sense of hope. But it’s not just people holding hands and singing Kumbaya, it’s actually identifying what needs to be fixed for ordinary people – and fixing it.
JEREMY MAGGS: Let’s get to the other question that I had about our lack of ability to implement properly.
BOBBY GODSELL: Yes.
JEREMY MAGGS: You sat for a while, as you said, on the National Planning Commission.
BOBBY GODSELL: Yes.
JEREMY MAGGS: You came up with some very good work. The problem, though – and again, it’s a cliché here – is that we are very good in this country at developing plans. We are appalling at implementing them.
How do you bridge that? Is there an easy way? Is there a methodological way of doing that, do you think?
BOBBY GODSELL: Certainly in broad terms I think that we [have] implemented badly since ’94 is true. And I think at the heart of that failure …
JEREMY MAGGS: What did we implement? Let me let you finish first. Develop that thought and I’ll come back here.
BOBBY GODSELL: We failed to implement a Government of National Unity. It lasted for all of two years. And then FW de Klerk walked out. We failed to develop and sustain a rapid-growing economy. We had, by the way, five wonderful years from 2002 to 2007. To be fair, the global economy was growing rapidly, we grew at above 5%, and we reduced unemployment and we reduced poverty. So that was a moment, but we failed in the big challenges …
JEREMY MAGGS: … because of hubris.
BOBBY GODSELL: No. Here’s my view as to why we failed. What we needed – and I think, by the way, what was hoped for in ’94 – was that white people would make their wealth, experience, resources and skills available to the national project, and that the new black elite, who were running the institution, would want that wealth, those skills.
The wealth is important, by the way. I’m not talking actually about the super-rich. The fact is that everybody who’s come into life with parents owning a home, who had a good education, generally speaking at a state school – like let’s think about KES [King Edward VII school] or Parktown Boys, for example – used state hospitals, used state public transport, all of which was good, and all of which was designed to look after 20% of the population, the whites. They came with a set of advantages. And those were the people, again, if you think of municipal government and the miserable failure of engineering and finance in municipal government.
One of the worst things that came out of Codesa, by the way, was a concession – probably the major concession we got from the National Party, from the ANC – was a concession to offer white public servants a golden handshake, that they could leave with a lot of money. And a lot did. And a lot did in [the field of] teaching.
JEREMY MAGGS: This was the famous ‘Sunset Clause’.
BOBBY GODSELL: And that’s the failure of bringing together those who had a capacity to implement the plan well with those who were designing the plan – although I would argue that we needed to design the plans together and implement them together. So this is not a stark black/white separation.
It’s just that quite a lot of the people who had the skills to be implementers in fixing Johannesburg, in fixing your suburb, in fixing the police force, withdrew. I think they would often argue they withdrew because they weren’t wanted.
This was a crazy kind of courtship with both sides sort of blaming the other for not having the courage to go and ask the other person to dance. You know, my hope is that next year we are asking each other to dance – and we will.
JEREMY MAGGS: So how do we become better in the shortest space of time at more effective implementation?
BOBBY GODSELL: Well, the crisis is a great advantage. I don’t know of anybody in Johannesburg who wouldn’t like to fix the water supply.
Actually I think the water supply can be made dramatically better in a 12- to 18-month period. It has to do with being able to pump during load shedding, and it has to do with some degree of water-pipe replacement. It may have to do with some new design for getting water to people’s houses, but there’s a bunch of experts out there, and there’s a plan starting with the National Development Plan. But there are much more recent plans to fix that.
And, again in Johannesburg, I think there are plenty of community police forums that work very well. There are a lot of police stations that actually are well managed and well run. There are some that are appallingly managed – but that’s fixable. I think people have the desire to do this.
And the great thing that has happened to our government is that they’ve realised they can’t do it alone.
The first policy document the ANC produced in 1990 was called Ready to Govern. And I think sadly what they really meant was ‘Ready to govern alone’ – and I think they have recognised that they can’t.
JEREMY MAGGS: I just want a quick view from you on the art of negotiation, if we can talk about that quickly.
I mentioned the accolade that was given to you on your retirement from the mining industry, particularly shaping the destiny of the labour relations landscape. You’ve been at the coalface – if you’ll excuse the pun – of negotiation. You said at the beginning of our conversation that you wish we could have done more about it, and you wish that we could still negotiate better.
What’s the secret, Bobby Godsell, to negotiation? I sense the way in which we can bridge that gap that we spoke about earlier is if we start talking to each other more meaningfully. Is there a primer that you have in that respect?
BOBBY GODSELL: My only thought is – and it’s absolutely not original – Henry Kissinger published a book two years ago at the age of 98 called Leadership.
The first point about the precondition for a successful negotiation is that both parties believe there’s at least a 50% chance of achieving their own interests through deal-making rather than through fighting. And I think we haven’t been there until now. To be blunt, I think government and the ANC know they need the rest of South Africa to address the problems.
I think the South Africans who wanted to emigrate hopefully have emigrated, and the rest of us are here to stay, and the rest of us are looking at a legacy for our children and grandchildren. So we want to fix things.
So I think now there’s an understanding of that only [being possible] together, by defining common goals. Again, the preamble to the National Development Plan sets out goals for our society, what South Africa should look like. In a magnificent poem for 2030, there isn’t anybody in the leadership of the DA or the ANC, or for that matter the IFP, or for that matter the Freedom Front, who actually fundamentally disagrees with those goals. So those politicians need to be working together to define common goals.
Then they need pacts with society, labour, business, and the rest of the community to implement effectively.
JEREMY MAGGS: And just be a little bit kinder.
BOBBY GODSELL: Yes, absolutely. To be more joyful, to be more hopeful. It’s terrible to move around thinking that you’re living in a failed state.
JEREMY MAGGS: I was looking for an elegant way to segue into the piece of paper that you brought with you, and the best way I can do it, Bobby Godsell is: Have you read any good crime thrillers lately?
BOBBY GODSELL: [Laughing]
JEREMY MAGGS: Absolutely.
BOBBY GODSELL: Here’s a quote from the latest Deon Meyer, delightfully called Leo [published by Queillerie, October 2023].
It’s between these two chief characters, Benny Griessel and [Vaughn] Cupido. Cupido is speaking.
He says: ‘I feel you, Benna. Dinge lyk nie great nie. Ek worry maar ook. But we both know this is a transition phase, never as good as we hope, never as bad as we fear. En in hierdie land fix ons op die ou end alles. Skeef en krom, I grant you, maar ons fix dit.’
JEREMY MAGGS: Bobby Godsell, I think that’s an excellent place to park a punctuation point on this conference. Thank you so much for joining us.
I’m Jeremy Maggs. Thank you for listening to the FixSA podcast on Moneyweb, brought to you by the Industrial Development Corporation.
Listen to previous FixSA podcasts here.
Brought to you by the Industrial Development Corporation of SA.
