Getting Good Out of Evil

By Mike Pothier, CPLO – “Even though you meant harm to me, God meant it for good, to achieve this present end, the survival of many people.” Genesis 50:20

It will be some time before it becomes clear whether last week’s meeting in Washington between Presidents Ramaphosa and Trump, and their respective teams, was successful in trade terms. Getting the threatened 31 per cent tariffs on our exports reduced, and keeping the US open for our minerals and agricultural produce, was a big part of the meeting’s purpose; as was securing assistance with technology, supplies of natural gas, and other US products that we need.

To the extent that ‘resetting’ our diplomatic relationship with the Trump administration was another purpose of the trip, it seems less likely that it will prove successful. Mr Trump’s strategy of undermining and humiliating people he looks down upon with a mix of lies, half-truths, bullying, and bombast makes it virtually impossible for an honest and honourable exchange of views to take place. International visits to today’s White House are carefully stage-managed to impress Mr Trump’s support-base rather than to engage sincerely with whoever has come to present their case to the world’s most powerful country.

But there are a few ways in which Mr Ramaphosa’s mission might have benefits here at home, even if it turns out in the end that he failed to bring Mr Trump and the truth about South Africa into closer acquaintance.

Firstly, demonstrating that there is nothing like facing a common challenge to bring rivals together, Mr Ramaphosa and the DA’s John Steenhuisen presented a united front against Mr Trump’s mendacity. They were, effectively, team-mates in a contest; as were – in that moment at least – the icon of SA big business, Johann Rupert, and the leader of COSATU, Zingiswa Losi, who stood and spoke quite literally shoulder to shoulder in pursuit of a shared purpose.

Surely it is not too much to ask that something of that spirit of unity should be brought home from Washington and deployed in our battles against far more frightening foes than Donald Trump? Unemployment, poverty, corruption, economic stagnation and crime, for example. It is absurd that, nearly a year after its formation, the two leading parties in the Government of National Unity seem to spend as much time bickering with each other as they do in seeking solutions to our problems. And equally absurd that organised business and labour cannot cobble together a common approach to our economic challenges.

Secondly, it would be much harder for Mr Trump and his South African sycophants to sustain their distortions about our crime issues if the government had not turned a blind eye to them for so long. When 63 people are murdered every day (one life lost every 22 minutes) it is an obscene distraction to be debating how many of them are white, or farmers, or anything else. We should instead be asking why our criminal justice sector, from the police and the prosecuting authority to the courts and the prison system, has been allowed to wallow for decades in a state of ineffectiveness and atrophy. Corruption, incompetence, cadre deployment and under-resourcing have all played their part, and now they are providing grist to Mr Trump’s mill of lies. Perhaps the embarrassment and discomfort of having to sit through his theatrical display of video clips and press cuttings will inspire Mr Ramaphosa and his ministers to take crime more seriously from now on.

Recent opinion polls show that on the list of issues that worry South Africans, crime is second only to unemployment. This brings up the third area in which the visit might have local benefit: the question of whether the time has come to move away from ‘transformative growth’ policies that have neither transformed nor grown our economy. It appears that aspects of our policy on black economic empowerment in the electronic communications sector may be tweaked to allow Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system to operate here without the prescribed 30 per cent ownership by historically disadvantaged groups.

If this can be done (though it is not settled yet) for Mr Musk, and to curry favour with the Trump inner circle, might it not be worth making more comprehensive legal changes to BEE policies so as to reduce constraining factors affecting our own companies and businesses, and thereby give them room to grow the economy and tackle joblessness? There is precious little evidence that transformative policies have worked for any but a small set of highly-placed economic players; without going back to an economic set-up that overwhelmingly favoured white interests, we should be able to find more effective ways of promoting black economic advancement than we have over the last three decades.

There is no doubt that Mr Trump set out to harm South Africa last Wednesday. It is up to us to find the good that could yet emerge from the experience, and thereby help to ensure ‘the survival of many people’.

Mike Pothier, Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office Programme Manager, cplo.org.za. Reproduced with permission