What should be done: Let us see November 1, 2021, as a reset button pressing moment.

   In answering this question, South Africans should make honesty about what the country is going through, the context of all contexts. 

To avert a further decline of South African livelihoods and the instability that has come with it, as seen in the rising crime rates, racial intolerance, vigilantism, and growing confidence of the poor to loot openly, South Africa's social partners should get into a 'beyond incumbency' dialogue, again, about the country's future. New risks, and difficult compromises, will have to be taken in the process. Continuing under the present firmament of government, State management, and management of the economy does not have any moral high ground, save that it is liquidating the corresponding correctness of what a constitutional democracy such as the one we have can deliver.

The governing, economic, and political, elite should enter into such a dialogue having due consideration that South Africans do not subscribe to most of their way of seeing and understanding what the problem is. The generation of young adults and youth that is ascending podiums of being parents and middle management of this nation have no relationship with the historical baggage those in politics want to make the politics of our nation to be about. In fact, the promise that the 1996 Constitution has delivered, and the politics of our country is messing up, is what is important to them and the future of their children, the rest is as important as history is to shape a new and better future. 

The freedoms that came with the Constitution have been so internalized by this generation that failures such as the ones we see in ESKOM and other public infrastructure provision SOEs are to them a result of a failure to govern by those in charge and thus should be voted out. This cohort of South Africans has ceased to be ideological about what is important for their livelihoods and their future, in fact, what the liberation movement represents has been so deeply internalized by them that they are starting to believe is achievable without 'the movement'. 

The governing elite should come to terms with the fact that society accepts their bona fides purely on the basis of the oaths they took to work within the limits and rights imposed by the Constitution. What drives them in their NGOs, otherwise also called political parties, is of interest to society to the extent that it does not disturb their livelihoods. The open society benefits guaranteed by the Constitution have matured society to not only expect more of the freedoms it has, but better public services befitting the size and character of the economy they know South Africa is and can be.

The 'horror movie' that the country went through, as narrated by its starring actors from within the political elite, is what this generation does not want to see and hear about. The 'corruption' pandemic the country has gone through in both the public and private sectors, requires resolute leadership to get society out of the blame and condonation quicksand and put instead a consequence management process that leads to prosecutions and arrests. 

After a punishing COVID19 pandemic, a state capture and corruption past, collapsed public infrastructure required to make an economy recover, the South African governing and economic elite is presiding over a crumbling state and political economy. As the benefits of the 1994 political settlement are about to take root, in that society has become smarter in how they use their power to vote, social partners should now start to genuinely work towards an economic settlement and put in place measures that will unlock private sector induced economic stimulus packages beyond investment conference pledging.

This should entail more than just defending the current jobs at the expense of releasing new ones, but go on to allow liberalization of the labor bargaining environment without vitiating the gained collective bargaining rights that came with the post-1994 dispensation. In the list of what the economic settlement should be about must be,

1. Deal with the protection of small and medium enterprises as the engine of any economic recovery plan
2. Improve the border patrol situation which would curtail the influx of immigrants to an already suffocating economy 
3. Legislate and enforce job reservation for South African citizens as primary beneficiaries of their economy, and then protect skill bearing and properly documented foreign nationals
4. Create and/or allow collaborative partnerships between the private sector and municipal jurisdictions that are economic nodal points or in a trajectory of becoming such,
5. Create funding models out of the forced savings and risk premiums infrastructure that South Africa has developed, to support an industrialization program.
6. Decisively dealing with the energy and public infrastructure insecurity that has thus far hamstrung the economy. (This might require firing Andre de Ruyter and fixing ESKOM, and getting rid of or changing the Executive and accounting Authorities presiding over Transport, Energy and Public Enterprises)
7. Focusing on creating a Public Service that knows 'how to govern'. This should be done through enablement mechanisms that churn more 'how to manuals' than 'what is monographs'.

The success of this program might occasion a need to replace 'some deployees' including those in the accounting authority structures assigned with institutions responsible to be catalytic to economic recovery. To ensure that outcomes of this process are possible, there might be a need to change the internal dynamics of the ANC, arguably 'still' a nexus of political life in South Africa. Its internal rhetoric should be circumcised into programs that have a project life span, and are capable of being chunked for its cohorts of leaders to achieve over a stabilized continuous period, assuming 'the proverbial Jesus does not come too early'. The internal faction fights that have choked its ideational capacity might have to be allowed to run their full course and those that lose the fight be expelled from the party.

The NEDLAC process as the foremost legal engagement mechanism for social compacting in South Africa will be critical to these efforts. Social partners must move beyond the illusion that established relationships inside the NEDLAC processes will prevent the instability within the ANC-led governing alliance to spill over the socio-economic fabric of South Africa and start living with the fact that the ANC itself is inherently unstable. Labour and business which have in the recent past, and as a dividend of the Ramaphosa ascendance to President of the ANC and South Africa, amassed sufficient leverage, should influence it to recalibrate its policy posture on economic recovery rather than believing in the reliability of its 'ideation' decision centers.

The goodwill that the various investment summits have to build into the social compacting process, and calls for the governing center to be genuinely inclusive of all social partners need to be amplified to force accountability to South Africa within the governing party. 

The hard work towards the economic and political recovery of South Africa is the only viable path social partners can take. Anything less might widen the space for what we saw in July 2021 to be repeated. The local government coalitions should thus be seen as a platform to press a number of reset buttons about South Africa. CUT!!

🤷🏽‍♂️ A ndzo ti vulavulela

🤷🏽‍♂️ Be ngisho nje