After Dawn

Jonas Mcebisi

Description

In October 2015, the Gupta brothers offered Mcebisi Jonas the position of minister of finance in exchange for R600 million. Then deputy minister of finance, Jonas turned down the bribe and a period of deep introspection followed for him. How did we reach this point, and what did the future hold for South Africa’s democracy and the economy?

In After Dawn, Mcebisi Jonas analyses the crisis at the heart of our current system, which places politics at the centre of policymaking and implementation at the expense of growth. In this important and authoritative book, Jonas first unpacks and analyses the current badlands of the South African economic and political landscape.
In the second half, Jonas proposes a series of workable and practical solutions for transitioning South Africa into a growing, job-creating country including:

• Putting inclusive growth at the centre of economic policy;
• rapidly expanding new technological capacities and knowledge to transition to a twenty-first-century economy;
• expanding human capabilities at scale;
• path-changing trade-offs to catalyse the next phase of South Africa’s development;
• nurturing a corruption-free, high-performance state built on meritocracy and innovation; and
• changing the nature of politics.

Time is of the essence and the window of opportunity is narrowing for all South Africans to work together towards the South Africa we all imagined was possible in 1994.

Sujets

• Comparative Politics
• Political Science
• Republic of South Africa
• Local government law
• South Africa
• State
• Government
• LAW
• Afrique du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Date de parution: 01 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770106772
• Langue: English

Extrait

After Dawn
Hope after State Capture
Mcebisi Jonas
Foreword by President Cyril Ramaphosa
PICADOR AFRICA
First published in 2019 by Picador Africa
an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19, Northlands
Johannesburg, 2116
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN 978-1-77010-675-8
e-ISBN 978-1-77010-677-2
© 2019 Mcebisi Jonas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Editing by Sally Hines
Proofreading by Russell Martin
Indexing by Christopher Merrett
Design and typesetting by Triple M Design
Cover design by publicide
Author photograph courtesy of Government Communication and Information System (GCIS)


Contents
Foreword by President Cyril Ramaphosa
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: Can We Prosper?
Part One : A Diagnosis of the Problem
1 Eight Economic Realities
2 The Developmental State Remains Elusive
3 Successes and Failures of Policy
4 State-Owned Enterprises and the Growing Burden of Debt
5 Schools but No Learning
6 Youth Exclusion
7 Politics
Part Two : Mapping Possible Ways Forward
8 Setting the Basis for a New Agenda
9 A Conducive Environment for Investment and Business
10 A Twenty-First-Century Economy
11 We Need a Legitimate and Capable State
12 State-Owned Enterprises Must Become Smart Growth Enablers
13 Transform Our Labour Market and Reap Our Youth Dividend
14 It Is Time to Release Our Tech Potential
15 Rural Development Must Look to the Future, Not the Past
16 Thinking Globally and Acting Locally
Conclusion
Acknowledgements


Foreword
Reading Mcebisi Jonas’s manuscript, After Dawn , I was again struck by the historic moment that we are facing in South Africa – a moment that is in many ways not too dissimilar to the bitter-sweetness of the early 1990s when we were negotiating the country’s future through multi-party constitutional negotiations.
Coincidentally, the national election of May 2019 fell almost exactly on the 25th anniversary of the first parliamentary sitting of the Government of National Unity when we adopted the Interim Constitution on 9 May 1994. It was an exhilaratingly historic day, and I think we have forgotten just how momentous it was. At the time, we knew that we had work to do but we had no idea of the mountainous task that lay ahead – building consensus on the blueprint for the country, our final Constitution, which was promulgated two years later on 8 May 1996.
The constitutional negotiations that we embarked upon to draft the Interim Constitution, as well as the Constitutional Assembly negotiations to draft our final Constitution, were difficult, fraught with ideological and political battles and threatened by forces that did not want to see change and wanted to use violence to impose their will. Making the Constitution was no less complex – our ideological differences prevailed as each party carefully considered how to protect their own interests. Dissension was rife over things such as whether South Africa should be declared a Christian country, as it was during apartheid; the role of traditional leaders; the division of power between central government and the provinces; the shape and powers of the judiciary; the location of parliament; our electoral system; which of the many languages spoken in South Africa should be considered as being official languages; education; capital punishment; labour rights; and ownership of property and land.
As all negotiations are often fraught with differences and disputes, we adopted two mantras – ‘sufficient consensus’ and ‘there is no problem without a solution’ – to shepherd the constitutional talks, and, miraculously, by the middle of 1996 we had what I described then as ‘the birth certificate of the nation’: our final Constitution.
The outcome of the negotiations restored political rights, democracy and dignity for all, as well as the founding of democratic institutions to secure and advance democracy and human rights into our future. But, it is equally true that the settlement did little to rearrange economic power. It was, for example, silent on the need for ownership changes in major corporations. It also said little about the need to reverse injustice in land and asset ownership.
The brittleness of our country 25 years ago, and the adversarial nature of the negotiations, meant that the compromises we made then were necessary to avoid full-scale political implosion.
I am invoking the memories of the negotiations process because I think we are at another defining moment in our country’s history. Mcebisi Jonas’s book comes at this critical juncture: he puts a pivotal stake in the ground to remind us that, despite the miracle of the rainbow nation, our 1994 consensus risks unravelling precisely because we have failed to utilise the settlement for what it was – a vehicle of transition for far-reaching changes, not an end point in itself.
After Dawn explains to us why and how this has happened. On the one hand, the book leaves us with answers to the deep sense of disorientation and fatigue that we have experienced as a nation over the past decade or so. On the other hand, and more importantly, it makes a vital contribution to our future trajectory by proposing practical and implementable solutions. Mcebisi is blunt about our failures but offers us hope in return: After Dawn goes beyond rhetoric to set out where we went wrong (and in many cases what we did right), cutting across political and ideological divides to propose how to restore effective and accountable governance, and how to build a faster growing and more inclusive economy.
Since the State of the Nation Address in February 2017, South Africans from all walks of life have heeded the call of Thuma Mina. Most of us recognise that our country stands at a crossroads, in which we have the opportunity to set our economy and society on the path to prosperity. Indeed, part of the Thuma Mina call is for citizens to engage in a project of reimagining and rebuilding an inclusive and fast-growing economy, and a more just and equal society.
We have a long history as South Africans of making tough choices in precarious moments. Time and time again, we have pulled ourselves back from the brink of despair and inspired hope, renewal and progress. Today, we are faced with such a moment. And it is our profound responsibility to live up to it.
May we take this important book as a guide to dialogue and engage with each other as we make the difficult trade-offs required to reach our dream of a non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous South Africa. There will likely be differing views on some of the issues raised in the book, but it provides a solid basis for a wider conversation and for consensus-building.
President Cyril Ramaphosa
May 2019


Preface
Why This Book Now?
We learn from history that we do not learn from history. — Georg Hegel
In October 2015, the Gupta brothers offered me the position of minister of finance in exchange for R600 million.
I had already become aware of a festering nexus between certain business people and politicians. I knew that the ruling African National Congress (ANC), like most transitional political parties, was facing internal challenges and I knew patronage and access to state resources were used by political brokers to rally support behind leaders and factions.
I had put these issues down to the cut and thrust of an emerging democracy. I have been active in the struggle for democracy since I was 14 and I did not question the resilience of the ruling party to shepherd the country through these challenges.
But the afternoon I was offered the bribe crushed this belief. I felt a deep sense of loss and disorientation as it dawned on me that the rumours of a parallel state were not only true but had assumed a scale so audacious that South Africa’s state-building project had fallen headlong into the hands of business interests whose value system seemed directly opposed to that of the ANC that I knew. I thought of the years we had spent fighting for democracy; we lost our youth and we suffered at the hands of the apartheid state. Now we were faced with this – a mafia state that threatened to usurp everything we had fought for. In many ways, unlike apartheid, this felt like an invisible coup. I felt deeply disempowered. I felt like a puppet in a much bigger game that I could not comprehend.
I turned down the bribe and navigated the months that followed in a state of incomprehension about the future of our country. My sense of mission did not wane during this time. But it was an intensely lonely period. I could trust only a handful of people. Everything that I had held as sacrosanct for 45 years was suddenly disintegrating. I began to examine my basic assumptions about what democracy meant in South Africa. Who were we as a nation? How did we reach this point? I read widely, I studied other countries that had faced similar crises and I sought the international experience of the likes of Dr Daniel Kaufmann and Dr Joel Hellman, experts on state capture. Conceptually this helped, but it also confirmed to me that there was no clear precedent to help us chart the way.
The election of President Cyril Ramaphosa in December 2017 was a victory, and progressive South Africans breathed a well-deserved collective sigh of relief. But Ramaphosa was almost immediately burdened with the insu