Anyone who endures the regime of intermittent fasting or carb-counting (or both) might be interested in the news that there are now two new weight-loss drugs — in advanced trial stages — which by way of weekly injections ensure weight loss of about 15%. This is achieved by stimulating “a feeling of fullness” and by “switching off the powerful urge to eat” which trips up even the most determined dieter, according to reports.
The results to date for both so-called “GLP-1 receptor agonists” are encouraging and hugely profitable for the drug manufacturers. It appears to be a big advance on the existing options available to battling slimmers and the governments and health systems which count and pay the costs of the global obesity pandemic.
Back in the political regime here, the new-old (very old indeed given the “new” minister of “youth” is 74 years old) cabinet unveiled last week by Cyril Ramaphosa is a study in contrast. Far from slimmed down, the executive chosen by the president — after inordinate but now customary dithering, delays and deferrals — suffers from a political version of elephantiasis. This illness causes parts of the body to swell to “massive proportions”.
So too with the new/old cabinet. Just more than five years ago, on February 16 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa took office as president. Among his early pledges were an end to load-shedding, high economic growth and increased investment, curbing corruption and, yes, a slimmer cabinet.
It will only depress readers to regurgitate how each of these key pledges has been honoured entirely in the breach.
But at the risk of doing a Ramaphosa floating away on a cloud of rhetorical fantasy unmoored to harsh reality, the facts are plain: SA’s GDP contracted by 1.3% in the last quarter of 2022, and as Financial Mail writer Claire Bissiker notes, “should load-shedding continue to average stages 5-6, whole year GDP growth could be negative in 2023”, reducing the country to levels of economic regression last seen at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The current account deficit has now reverted to pandemic levels too. The mafia state tentacles are now so pervasive and the interdiction of rampant criminal elements so feeble that ailing infrastructure is stripped to the bone and internationally we are awarded pariah status through greylisting.
Of course, if you were doing the spin doctoring for the Ramaphosa presidency, arguably the second worst public sector job after the vacant CEO post at Eskom, minus the disadvantage of cyanide with morning coffee, you can make a case in defence of the ravaged pledges from five years ago.
The small SA economy is buffeted by forces beyond the control of any head of government (the pandemic, the ebb and flow of commodity prices and war in Ukraine and so on, the rise of global inflation and the US Fed aggressive interest rate hike et al). These are what economists call exogenous factors which aggravate vulnerabilities and expose economies in developing world countries such as our own.
The spin doctor will of course glide over a lot of inconvenient truths. Missed or botched reforms, the infuriation of key Western and increasingly local investors at our pro-Russia stance, our chronically mismanaged state-owned companies which have throttled our exporters (overall exports, due to port and rail failures, down 7.5% last year and mining exports, our get-out-of-jail card amid a minerals boom, cut by 8% in 2022) and the billions now spent by businesses large and small on mitigating the catastrophe at Eskom.
On the fight against corruption, Ramaphosa and his team will point to the recovery of some independence and vestiges of institutional health at key state institutions from the SA Revenue Service to the National Prosecution Authority to the Special Investigations Unit (SIU). Even if this requires averting their gaze from the looming collapse of the first state capture trial, the inability to extradite the Guptas and the serial failures on the intelligence front to anticipate, let alone prosecute, the ringleaders in the July 2021 insurrection in KZN. And the fact that now more than 70 homicides a day have become the country’s grim new normal suggests epic state failure on the key task of the government of securing its citizens.
However, Ramaphosa and his team will simply state, as he did recently in response to the bombshell charges made against the state’s blind eye to the R1bn per month stolen at Eskom and criminality which reaches into the heart of government by its former CEO, Andre de Ruyter: “There are independent institutions where there will be no form of interference, where there will not be any form of diversion, blockage or any form of sabotage.”
In other words, some other institution will attend to the problem here, just as global forces beyond our shores and far beyond the control of the presidency account for a fair degree of economic misery, or “the challenges” to use the all-purpose presidential euphemism.
And then there is always the handy alibi of “apartheid was even worse” — or the use of the very lowest common denominator to excuse the failures of the last thirty years by a party and government which vowed to be morally superior to its vanquished predecessor in each and every respect.
If you tempered your despair about these times with a touch of generosity towards Ramaphosa, celebrating his fifth year in office, you too might wish to invert the famous sign US president Harry Truman placed on his desk and join the president in saying “the buck stops over there, not here”.
But the one factor which is entirely and solely in the prerogative and power of the president, which belongs alone to him and which the constitution explicitly states does not get outsourced, is the size and composition of his cabinet.
And here we saw last week the president explicitly resile on his 2018 pledge to reduce its size (he increased it) and improve its delivery ability to ensure an “active and capable development state”.
There has to be a degree of shamelessness in such a risible defence of bloating the executive to 30 ministers (grand total of 62 including deputy ministers) and ignoring a report he commissioned on downsizing the cabinet to 22 people. which, as News24 reports, has “had on his desk for four years”, just as the board appointments for the leaderless SABC has sat on the same desk for the past five months.
But beyond the quantum of trough-feeding cabinet ministers is their quality and sprawl. Gupta holdovers in the lower ranks of deputy ministers, serial underperformers retained and the key crisis of the day, energy, is now factionalised into four or five different ministries.
The best defence outgoing public works minister Patricia de Lille could offer, when Leon Schreiber MP totalled the sums (about R1bn) of keeping 97 houses available for ministerial and deputy ministerial use, in addition to free water, free electricity and free generators, was that “this practice was inherited from the apartheid government”.
There it is in plain words: we are mimicking our detested predecessors; they provide the standard by which we justify ourselves.
Last week even the most cynical and jaded citizen was left slackjawed when the ANC/EFF choice for mayor of Tshwane, Cope’s Murunwa Makwarela, was revealed within hours to be, first, an unrehabilitated insolvent and then a forger and faker who doctored his own fraudulent insolvency rehabilitation “court order” in a desperate and doomed bid to hang on to his mayoral chain.
Ramaphosa might not approve of the emerging ANC/EFF coalition in Tshwane, or he is too weak to do anything to stop it, or it is in another tier of government so it is inapt for him to comment.
But hot on the heels of this municipal shame, comes revelations that his newly appointed cabinet minister in charge of the public service, Noxolo Kiviet, has, according to the conferring university, Fort Hare, obtained two degrees without the required undergraduate qualification and has been so reported to the SIU for not having anything beyond a matric certificate and some lesser short course “which had handwritten results”. A fraud in other words.
Pallo Jordan withdrew from public life, though he had long left the cabinet when his “doctorate” was exposed as fake. Ramaphosa’s government repeatedly vows to crack down on public servants who fake their qualifications. And now the minister in charge of public servants and their integrity is herself mushroomed in scandal around fake claims and integrity.
Kiviet has shown no shame in her current exposure and appears determined to tough it out. Ramaphosa does not have another address to send this problem. He is the author of his cabinet’s composition. Let’s see where the buck stops.
