Keeping the sign up: SA must stop living the lie to join middle power nations

Last year, on a road trip through the spectacular national parks of Western Canada, from Calgary to Vancouver, I witnessed direct evidence of the country’s moniker “Canada Nice” – from its majestic Rockies to local courtesy and friendliness.

It is unlikely Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos will be categorised under history’s “nice” label. But labelling it “important” and “a call to action” is a good fit.

While in the best national tradition, it was measured, understated and unthreatening, it certainly achieved global impact. In unsparing prose, closely reasoned argument and with dramatic power of analogy, it laid out the challenge of the “rupture” to the world order. And navigated a path for “middle power” countries to address the disorder caused by Canada’s neighbour, the United States, under President Donald Trump, and the return of intensified great-power rivalry, coercive economic weapons, and the retreat of an international rules-based system.

Though Carney did not reference Trump by name, the US president hit back in his own Davos address the next day with characteristic personalised threat and insult. Trump scolded, “Canada lives because of the US. Remember that, Mark, next time you make your statements.”

Perhaps the most powerful part of Carney’s speech, which he wrote himself, was not its original part. It was his quote from Czech dissident (and later president) Vaclav Havel who explained in The Power of the Powerless how the Communist regime maintained its power.

Havel wrote in 1978 of the shopkeeper who every morning placed in his window the sign “Workers of the World Unite”. He, of course, doesn’t believe it, but he places the sign anyway, “to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along”.

As Caney explained: “And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.”

Havel called this “living the lie” when he used this example over 45 years ago, of how the system depended on everyone’s willingness to engage in this performative illusion, even though it was known to be false. But it accurately illustrates many myths evinced today among countries and companies as well.

Carney’s call to action last week came with the demand that companies and countries now need to “take their signs down…” He elaborated how reality now outstripped the rhetoric in a world based on the illusion that trade rules, economic integration and alliance membership offer equal protection for all.

As a sidebar here, it’s worth noting how many local business executives complain in the boardroom (and around the braai) about the compliance cost of BEE and the human toll of stringent racial employment equity targets, or the cost to the company and country of the government’s hostility to the West. But in public, most remain either mute or simply enforce regulations they know to be economically destructive.

Investec’s Fani Titi’s critique of BEE last year and his tilt last week on the cost of our foreign policy misalignment is a rare exception that proves the general local rule of “living the lie”.

Leaving aside the domestic fictions now baked into the share price of SA Inc., does our country measure up in other respects for membership as a “middle power”? Where a concert of such nations acts together because, in Carney’s pithy phrase – “if we are not at the table, we are on the menu”.

Carney suggests a good hedge against being devoured by superpowers or “hegemons” is to “create a third path with impact”.

But to join such a grouping and to counter the new anarchy in the world is not, as Canada’s PM suggests, cost-free.

Real sovereignty, as opposed to “the performance of sovereignty”, requires, as Havel reminded us, to “live in truth”.

We have right now some spectacular examples of the precise opposite.

Readers will recall that in the face of threats from Trump’s White House, President Cyril Ramaphosa countered, “We will not be bullied”. Fair enough, and few will disagree.

Bullied by whom, we might politely ask? The fracas around Iran’s participation in the recent naval exercises around False Bay, farcically named “Will for Peace 2026”, suggests (in the absence of the 10-day overdue findings of a board of inquiry into it) a country that has outsourced its sovereignty to another hegemon, China.

On Ramaphosa’s best version of how his own “order” to rescind Iran’s invitation was ignored, he lamely said the exercises were “led by China” and that SA was simply providing the waters and base facilities rather than directing events. Even though this happened in our sovereign territory and highlighted, into the bargain, both our crippled hard power and an out-of-control rogue naval admirals.

The massacre of (apparently upwards) some 20 000 Iranians at the hands of their own government in just a few days recently, brings us to another key item on Carney’s menu order for membership of the international middle-ranking powers.

He made a clarion call for “honesty about the world as it is”. This is based on “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals”. When middle powers criticise economic intimidation from one direction, but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

This applies directly to foreign policy as well, based on honesty by countries who “earn the right to principled stands…”

The actual sign that the SA delegation placed in the window at the recent meeting of the UN Human Rights Council could be labelled in giant lettering either “hypocrisy” or “cowardice”. Maybe file under both.

At the UNHRC emergency session last week, a resolution was adopted condemning the violent repression by Iranian security forces, leading to thousands of deaths, injuries and mass detentions.

In its own estimation, “a moral superpower”, and happy to label nearby Israel “genocidal”, the SA delegation managed an abstention offering some mumbo jumbo about “foreign interference” with Iran’s vast state killing machine – one that makes the apartheid regime of old a rank amateur by comparison.

Finally, for membership of the club of emerging third path nations, it helps on Carney’s test, for a country to have what the world wants. He cites his own country’s capital, talent, a government with vast fiscal capacity, etc. SA has some of, but critically too few of , these elements. However, we share with Canada a vast reserve of minerals.

Gold, of course is the ultimate hedge against the world rupture that featured at Davos. Thus, the unprecedented surge in the gold price this week that breached the $5 000 per troy ounce spot price – an increase of 75% in one year, the highest level in history.

Forty years ago, when Cyril Ramaphosa was a mining unionist and Mark Carney was completing his economics degree at Harvard, SA was by far the number one gold miner and producer in the world. Canada ranked around fifth.

Today, the rankings have changed dramatically. Canada now sits in the fourth slot on global tables. SA, by contrast, sits outside the top 10 (currently 12th ), producing 80% less ore than it did in the 1980s.

Of course, some of the factors that have led to this decline and dent our ability to maximise the gold rally are outside the remit of government: mined out reefs, increased costs and safety issues associated with our very deep level ore, etc.

However, labour militancy, punishing electricity tariffs and, most importantly, policy changes and uncertainty and compliance issues including BEE, are all in the government wheelhouse.

The cost of mining one ounce of gold here, as the Wall Street Journal reports this week, “is among the highest in the world”.

Captain of the ship, Ramaphosa, this week offered a laundry list of how “The SA recovery is gaining momentum”. Many of the facts he cites are both correct and also completely misleading.

Economist Duma Gquebele called it “fake analysis”, noting that from the surge in JSE prices to the appreciation of the rand, the very rupture of the world outlined by Carney was primarily responsible for these gains. Not the quality of our governance.

Ramaphosa should take down the sign in his own window. He could read, for example, how a gold mining company – West Wits Mining – that opened the first new mine in SA in 15 years struggled to fund it.

The $100-million investment (and 400 new jobs created) for the company’s Qala Shallows mine near Johannesburg, owed very little to government’s boast that SA “is open for business”.

CEO Rudi Deysel told the WSJ: “Investors, they didn’t want to speak to us… they just don’t like South Africa.”

It was the rally in the gold price that unlocked the investment capital. Interrogating “why investors just don’t like South Africa” might be uncomfortable, but in Havel’s terms, it will mean “living in truth”.

Confronting uncomfortable truths and addressing them is the surest ticket for admission to the front ranks of emerging middle powers. Or else we can remain seated in the faraway balcony of also-ran countries.