BRENDAN BOYLE
THERE is nothing quite like a road trip to help one to reconnect with the complexity and wonder that is South Africa.
The reality of road travel might be harsh for the tens of thousands risking their lives in over-crowded buses to get to the Zion Easter festival at Moria in Limpopo or for those using long-distance taxis to get between their family homes and their city lives.
But whether it is in the air-conditioned silence of a smart saloon or the rattling din of a bus, the country comes to your window and, if you leave it open, the unique smells and sounds of different districts announce themselves.
Travelling back and forth between East London and Cape Town for my firstborn son’s wedding, I avoided most of the N2 and opted for secondary routes – and once, by mistake, a rutted tertiary road.
In many of the places where people are compressed, whether it is in a rural hillside village in the Eastern Cape or an informal settlement among the farming towns of the Western Cape, the sense of waiting is still palpable.
People sit on makeshift seats outside tin shacks or brick or mud houses watching time pass. Some may be keeping an eye on toddlers at play, waiting perhaps for the laundry to dry or listening for the call of an ailing relative inside, but far, far too many of them are obviously of working age, but with no prospect of regular employment in their foreseeable lives.
The children labelled according to their schools by their green, maroon and grey uniforms seem more optimistic as they head to and from their classes. There is lots of chatter, some play with balls or sticks and a boy walking alone might have the makings of a better Thabo Mbeki one day.
They hope, no doubt, that the education they are getting, no matter how poor, will set them up for a better life than their parents have been able to give them.
There seems to be more purpose in the deeper rural areas, where the homes are further apart, but that probably reflects nothing more than the greater challenges of finding fuel, fetching water and doing the small amounts of shopping a government grant makes possible.
Cattle and goats are still plentiful, but where there are signs that crops once grew, the fields are mostly barren.
Every so often, an island of success, like the intensely farmed district of Kirkwood, shows what is possible.
The work must be hard and the hours long – this probably is not the decent work that Cosatu speaks of – but there is an air of purpose and productivity in places like these.
Flying has an equivalent effect, though more cerebral than physical. Looking down on the vastness of the Karoo emphasises the scale of the logistical challenge to get services from, for example, the power stations of Mpumalanga to the car plants of the Eastern Cape – and the cars made there to the Gauteng hub.
Descending over Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town underlines the complexity of running a city.
Try to spot the water works and imagine the job of connecting it to every house, office and factory and then to maintain that network, keep the pressure up, the leakage down and the water drinkable.
On a night approach, the web of street lights, traffic lights, house lights and sometimes the blazing glare of a flood-lit sports stadium boggles the mind. We get angry – and rightly so – when an inoperative traffic light jams the early morning traffic, but imagine the infrastructure needed to maintain all those lights at all those intersections and to respond when one is reported to be off.
Whichever way you look at it project South Africa is massive. Every day that we don’t keep up with its escalating demands makes the task harder.
Agriculture, industry, service delivery, education and job creation on this scale need to be integrated if we are to have any hope of a future that looks more like Kirkwood than crumbling Jansenville.
The government has plans aplenty to do just that, but without the professional civil servants capable of project management on such a scale and committed to rising within that mandarin class by dint of their skills and hard work, it won’t happen.
Being secretary general of an organisation as old and vast as the ANC requires great skill and experience of the movement, but those are not the skills needed to make the country work at ground level.
Even less so are the skills that get a cadre through the ranks from branch to, say, provincial executive committee equal to the job of running a hospital, a water treatment plant or a traffic system.
That, of course, is what Nedbank chairman Reuel Khoza was talking about when he dared to say in his annual report what investors and the ratings agencies that guide them are talking about more and more in boardrooms here and abroad.
“South Africa is widely recognised for its liberal and enlightened constitution, yet we observe the emergence of a strange breed of leaders who are determined to undermine the rule of law and override the constitution.
“We have a duty to build and develop this nation and to call to book the putative leaders who, due to sheer incapacity to deal with the complexity of 21st century governance and leadership, cannot lead,” Khoza said.
It is a popular fiction that any reasonably intelligent person can do any job and that the ANC can, therefore, deploy its loyal cadres to run important state utilities. The party can and does deploy people to wealth, but has less success in deploying them to work. Khoza was himself one of the more successful ANC deployments, but now that he dares to share the benefits of his experience, he is dismissed as a traitor to the greater cause.
And that is because the ANC’s greater cause is too often not the country, but itself.
Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch
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Article source: http://www.dispatch.co.za/news/article/3223