I keep a collection — now spilling into multiple volumes of quotations and longer articles, even book extracts — of thoughts and writings I believe have the wisdom and wit to illuminate the context and times in which we live.
Many years ago, I read a profound book by David Landes, then emeritus professor of history and economics at Harvard University, entitled The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998). Landes, who died in 2013, offers an imperishable analysis based on detailed research, moving between sweeping scope and micro detail, and pithy observations. He describes the ingredients needed for winning nations and more equal societies; in contrast to the losers, destined to remain mired in poverty, violence, and despair.
Fascinating though his densely argued propositions are, leavened by humour and anecdote, it is his conclusion on how to approach the world which found its way into my scrapbook.
He ends his 500-plus-page tome with an attitudinal thought for the ages, describing the mindset required for those who want to join what he describes as “a small and fortunate elite” in the winners’ circle of achievers, noting this group is “open to newcomers, self-selected, the kind of people who accentuate the positive”.
As he explains: “In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when wrong they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.”
Superficially at least, our president appears to be a paid-up subscriber to this school of thought.
In his recent reply to the state of the nation debate in parliament, Cyril Ramaphosa advised MPs that they should be like him, “merchants of hope”, and not cast themselves, as he accused opposition speakers, “as merchants of despair” who, in his telling, “have determined that their political fortunes are best served by depicting the country as being in chaos”.
Ramaphosa and Landes are both optimists.
However, the significant difference between them is the distinction dietitians make between “good calories” and “empty calories”, where in the case of the latter, always a bad food option, the calories from sugar and fats outweigh the nutrients in food. Ramaphosa’s rhetoric is just that, empty words, because he chooses not to worry about the “achievement, correction and improvement” qualifications attached to useful optimism.
The president offers empty, easy rhetoric and false options, while Landes reminds that it is not a question of gauzy hopefulness. Rather, “We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well to try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means”. As our country hurtles into ever more darkness even the best optimists in our midst plunge into gloom and doom.
This on the back of former Eskom CEO André de Ruyter’s explosive television interview, the ANC vitriol it unleashed and now the Daily Maverick and Business Day chapter and verse of the criminalisation of the power utility and the political masterminds manipulating it, apparently from the cabinet table.
On the empty calorie count, Ramaphosa’s merchandising hope has been severely discounted by his inability to be anything other than a semi-interested bystander in the unravelling of his country, the serial failures of his administration and the rotting heart of his party.
Readers might recall that on January 16 he cancelled a trip to Davos due to the “energy crisis affecting the country”, according to his spokesperson, Vincent Ngwenya. But cancelling trips goes back further to September 19 last year, when he called off the New York leg of a visit abroad to “head home to deal with the current stage 6 load-shedding”, according to Ngwenya.
So, five months after the first cancellation, here we are at stage 6 on any given day. Mind you, from the theatrics of datelines and dramatic announcements, it is now 21 days since, in his state of the nation address, Ramaphosa plunged the country, again, into a state of disaster to address the energy crisis. No relief yet on the daily, grinding electricity blackouts. And it is just on three weeks since he announced a key cure to the crisis was the appointment of a minister of electricity. So urgent, it remains, at the time of writing on Tuesday, unfilled.
This is the politics of theatrical gesture, not serious-minded governance. And the idea that there is a “better ANC” waiting to emerge from the rubble of state capture must surely be another God in ruins. The best of its leaders, such as public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan, appear in the harsh light of exposés on criminal acts which have shuttered our power stations as no better than mediocre, weaselly party hacks.
Gordhan offered half-baked explanations as to why he did nothing to act decisively, or at all, on the revelations shared with him by De Ruyter. He speaks of “rumours, allusions and intelligence”, not hard evidence. Yet as the shareholder minister, it is his key task to gather the evidence, finger the wrongdoers and take the necessary action. And to stop the rot and return the country to light.
Nothing now to separate the Gordhans from the likes of mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantashe, both joined together to save the party at all costs, knowing that exposure of the wrongdoers and the political milieu in which the criminal operations fester could rumble the governing party’s remaining credibility and reveal a gaping wound where its moral core once existed.
Undaunted by this existential calamity, Ramaphosa on Monday found another reason to be optimistic about another self-inflicted wound on the country’s ailing economy and investment-starved outlook. He found a positive in the entirely negative announcement on Friday that South Africa is now in an elite league of dodgy nations greylisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), alongside Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. And to think just a decade back South Africa was by far the most advanced and financially sound sovereign in the continent. Or two decades back, when Eskom debt was better rated than the country’s. In 2001, the power utility was named Financial Times “Power Company of the Year” at the Global Awards ceremony in New York. Last week, a unit of the South African Reserve Bank gameplanned for “the potential collapse of the national electricity grid”, according to Business Day.
Still, the president advises that “greylisiting is an opportunity for us to tighten our controls and improve our responses to organised crime … “ Actually, the responses were missed at key moments over the past years and the lastminute.com legislation rushed through late last year was all of a piece with dozens of other failures to plan, anticipate and react in the right time frame with the right measures. Think back to the 1998 white paper on energy, which was approved by cabinet and offered the stark warning that unless more energy generation capacity was added to the national grid there would be an energy shortage by 2008. As Professor Mark Swilling pointed out, the document underestimated the situation: the first load-shedding was in 2007, occasioned by the same government which ignored its own report. Until too late.
A former colleague, Gavin Davis, responded to Ramaphosa’s latest bout of positivity on greylisting by waspishly noting: “Brilliant. And load-shedding an opportunity to improve electricity generation, unemployment an opportunity to create jobs, murder rate an opportunity to bolster policing. No threats, just opportunities.”
There you have it — optimism abounds!
