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Back in the early nineties, the story of South Africa’s negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy was often told using the story of the friendship between then-ANC negotiator Cyril Ramaphosa and then-National Party negotiator Roelf Meyer.
Over a common interest in fly-fishing, the two men struck up a relationship that is often credited with getting the negotiation moving and manoeuvring these over the pot-holes of political intransigence.
Ramaphosa has gone on to become President of South Africa and Meyer has parlayed his negotiating skills into a career as an international conflict mediator: he is currently working in Myanmar where Aung San Suu Kyi is struggling.
Back home, he is also spearheading the business sector in a massive growth strategy. This time, his political running mate is Minister in the Presidency, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma whom Ramaphosa has made his point woman on the Public Private Sector Growth Initiative he announced in the state of the nation address.
The 18-sector South African growth drive, based on the Japanese MITI model driven by that country’s powerful Ministry of Trade and Industry, has been in planning for most of last year and is likely to be a centre-piece of government and business’s joint effort to pull the country from the low-growth, high unemployment trap it is stuck in.
The challenge facing the Meyer and Dlamini-Zuma team is arguably almost as acute as that facing South Africa when its politics was in crisis in the nineties.
The reason the initiative is based on the Japanese model is that Toyota’s CEO for Europe, Johan van Zyl heard Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address last year and was impelled by his call to Thuma Mina – Send Me, Hugh Masekela’s song which the president has commandeered as a theme of his presidency’s call for volunteers.
Van Zyl is South African but is now a global business leader. The idea he brought, based on his experience at Toyota, was that it was better for government and business to work at a sectoral level rather than a national level to develop a growth plan.
“Every sector has its own issues and structure,” says Professor Nick Binedell of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) who is also a director of The In Transformation Initiative (ITI), the organising agency and consultancy run by Meyer.
“There’s a gathering momentum being established between the compacts, the Summits, Davos (the World Economic Forum meeting every January in Davos, Switzerland) which should signal to citizens that there is a new energy.
“The relationship between business and government has improved significantly– ... there has been a climate change. (Now the challenge is) how do we convert better relationships into practical projects and inclusive growth?
“I am feeling more optimistic. We need an acceleration and a focus on execution,” says Binedell.
He was speaking before the power cuts which all parties acknowledge can drain the energy and goodwill from the growth plan. Over the course of 2018 and into the new year, different economic sectors, represented by company CEOs met with relevant directors-general and ministers to hammer out a series of sectoral agreements.
These covered the entire economy with a focus on growth sectors like tourism and agro-processing. Another ITI director Ivor Jenkins says each sector had to answer five questions. These were: What can you as a sector contribute to growth? What can you contribute to employment? What are the possible investments you can make and draw in? What are the skills you should be contributing? What are the transformation imperatives? In turn, they set out the three key impediments they needed government to roll out of their way to secure growth.
In the case of tourism, there was a single grouse: the visa system is an outdated deterent to increased tourism. Thus, Ramaphosa pledged that South Africa will put in place an e-visa system where visitors can get electronic visas.
South Africa is a landscape littered with good ideas but buggered by bad execution.
What will make this one different?
“There is a real search for leadership in business and for something (that is) not in the traditional method. This is leadership that comes with solutions and suggestions; it is not antagonistic or not negative,” says Jenkins.
He says South Africa has a successful model to work with. The automotive sector has long been an example of a successful partnership between the private and public sectors, although negotiations on incentive renewals and plant expansions have often been hard.
Tourism is a particular shining light, say the organisers who say that securing two million jobs from a successful growth strategy is not an impossible dream.
Can Dlamini-Zuma and Meyer’s teams secure the attention to detail and trade-offs necessary to get this growth plan off the ground? It’s vital as the economy is dangerously close to an investment ratings downgrade with consequent pressure on employment.
