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Cape Town - The biggest challenge for South Africans right now is to solve the problems that are afflicting the country – issues like poverty, inequality, unemployment and the lack of skills, according to former finance minister Trevor Manuel.
“Right now I don’t know how we deal with the problems of poverty and inequality, but I do know that we won’t solve them by calling each other names,” said Manuel at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (UCT GSB) as part of the business school’s Distinguished Speaker Programme.
“There is no magic, no silver bullet.”
In his talk on the theme “personal reflections on a career in public service, he spoke of the passion and zeal that public officials had during the early days of the new democracy, acknowledging that the same enthusiasm for the job appeared to have waned in the years that followed.
“My main concern for business schools like this is that we don’t do enough to hone policy development skills of people. Mainly, we aren’t generating nearly sufficient numbers of people who understand the policy process,” he cautioned.
READ: Zuma: SA will survive
He also said there was a strong correlation between administration and policy and that people needed to know how to implement policy. It wasn’t enough to have wonderful documents and plans like the constitution or the RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) or NDP (National Development Programme) if officials were unable to put it into practice.
Manuel said the anti-apartheid struggle had reared many of the first ANC government officials, exposing them to the poverty and suffering.
“So, the question we focused on every day was whether we could build a democracy that advanced the interests of the poorest of our people. The Constitution provided a framework for this,” he said.
Public service
He suggested that many of these public servants had since left government and had not been replaced by people of the same calibre.
“Parliament perhaps doesn’t carry the same status any longer, so it does not attract people as much. These are issues that we need to talk about,” said Manuel.
“If you are concerned about popularity then the public service is not for you. Then it would be better to sell vacuum cleaners and Encyclopedia Brittanicas.”
He explained that when he and his colleagues took over from the apartheid government, they inherited a host of problems like a Reserve Bank with zero net reserves and an economy that had been closed for many years.
“Some tough decisions were left to me and we thought things would work out differently. We thought we could stimulate growth and everything pointed in that direction, but part of what we didn’t understand well enough then was how crises elsewhere in the world would affect us. We lived through the Russian crisis, the Asian crisis and the Brazilian crisis before our own crisis hit us,” said Manuel.
Manuel is currently with Rothschild’s as deputy chair and senior adviser.
READ: Trevor Manuel joins Rothschild
He called for people to become more involved and active in their communities, to become more empowered in bringing about change.
“The engine room for development starts with active citizens,” he said.
“We are a nation, a generation of people who solved problems of a political order, but it’s incomplete for as long as people feel they are not included in the outcome of the democracy,” he said.
He pointed out that debt and unsecured lending was a huge problem.
“Too many poor South Africans carry debt and households face enormous challenges,” he said.
Touching on the hot topic of corruption in public service, which many of the questions from the floor alluded to, he said: “We have to root out corruption. We can’t have a little bit. It never steals from wealthy people, it always steals from the poor. The fact that people get to public office to feather their own nest is wrong. No corruption should be tolerated in any society.”
READ: Capital flight dwarfs corruption - SACP
- Fin24
