IN THE South African political economy, you can always tell when spring is approaching. First, the strike season is over, however briefly. Then important people begin to talk about the need for us all to "do something" about our political, economic and social malaise.
Thus did Cosatu secretary-general Zwelinzima Vavi Tweet the other day that, "All I am saying is that this country should have a national dialogue — it won’t happen if we begun with blame game or (a) factional mindset".
Similarly, Business Day turned a speech by Barclays Africa (Absa, in case you’ve been away) CE Maria Ramos into an op-ed appealing for a social compact: "Across the globe," she wrote, "new uncertainties are replacing old certainties. The most obvious manifestation of this new reality (are) the visible signs of growing distrust of leaders and of institutions…. This decline in trust in politics and institutions is undermining citizens’ involvement in policy."
They are both right. But what to do? I have written here much more about the need for a national consensus than I have about the idiocy of not making Pat Lambie the regular Springbok flyhalf, but only the Lambie bits get remembered.
The fact is that high-trust economies grow faster and more consistently than low-trust ones. It stands to reason. You have to have at least some common understanding among rich and poor, about how your society creates wealth (and not merely making money) and then how it distributes that wealth, or you have nothing but a fractious clamour for the money that’s already there. In the late fifties, Zimbabwe had a bigger economy than South Korea. After the Second World War, (West) Germany’s economy was smaller than New Zealand’s. In 1960 Argentina was a richer country than Canada. Guess who got consensus right?
And if you put the unions, business and government into a room and ask them to thrash out a compact that they can come back and sell to us, they’d end up having a terrific fight and emerge to say that either the unions, business or government was being unreasonable, unbending and destructive. That’s how we do things here. Cue blaming colonialism, apartheid, socialism, corruption or just plain stupidity.
I was at a function the other day where a young ANC-aligned bureaucrat was explaining to some CEOs how they should talk to government. They needed to come with the "right attitude", whatever that is, be "patriotic" and the group should be informal and small. Like the dinner.
But how do you do even that? Who on the business side gets left out? Do only big companies get invited? Is it one company per sector? Or one big and one small? Do companies run by foreigners, such as Sasol, get left out? Anyway, by now you’ve already filled an auditorium, let alone a dinner table.
The first thing to recognise about reaching for the dialogue Vavi wants is that it can be neither a dialogue of equals, nor a dialogue of like and like. Government is one big thing, with one leader (or nonleader in our case, but that’s another column). The unions are also fairly monolithic but as recent events have shown, not always united.
Business is an entirely different animal. There are 1-million registered companies in SA and all are different. Some are big and rich. Most are small, deep in debt and have to compete fiercely merely to survive. Any "dialogue" would fail unless it takes that reality into account. The other day I found part of a letter written by the economist John Maynard Keynes to US President D Franklin Roosevelt:
"Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians, and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be "patriots", perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves or tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish. It is a mistake to think they are more immoral than politicians. If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation’s burdens will not get carried into the open market; and in the end public opinion will veer their way."
All those years ago but still apposite here. As the end to the recent Numsa strike has shown, big companies have different pressures to smaller ones. "Dialogue" that doesn’t recognise the varying pressures small and larger businesses face, and does not include them in their categories, is a lost cause from the start. You need, at the table, the government, the unions, and large, medium and small business. You just cannot speak to "business" as if it were one thing. It isn’t.
For if it’s true that in order to understand someone you have to walk in their shoes, it could also apply to the Great Debate.
A businessman in the union leader’s shoes will have to attract members and mitigate their hardships. How will he tell a father of three to go home with R7,000 in his pocket every month, get to work on time and to pay no heed to the calculation of, say, an inflation-linked pay rise?
In the government’s shoes, how do you expect anything less than an urgent and acute need to get re-elected by as many people as possible? And if you put your feet into the shoes of a company, how do you satisfy the demands of your shareholders, the people who fund you?
They in turn, are fund managers who have to pay returns to their customers and if they don’t they lose them. Worse, if you’re in the shoes of a small business, how do you negotiate a "compact" when you owe your bank R5m and are behind on your payments?
We all have to walk a mile in the other man’s shoes. The government is run by mainly decent people. But only a tiny minority know anything about the risks and anxieties of operating a business so that it generates the profits from which the state gets its tax revenue.
For the most part, the older guard running the ANC genuinely believe that all business makes money but it isn’t even nearly true. You can’t start a "dialogue" without embracing that reality.
In any talks these sides have to have, they’d need to agree on facilitators who could compel each participant to first argue the case of one of the others. Unions need to hear themselves making the case against centralised bargaining. Business needs to hear itself make the case for paying living wages. And the state needs to make the case for lower deficits and for profit maximisation. If that is all too much, it would be best not to start to talk at all.
The last thing we need is more failure.
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