Themba Maseko joins WSG

14 January 2022 - Kemantha Govender

The Wits School of Governance is delighted to announce that Mr Themba Maseko has joined the School as the Director of Executive Education (short courses).

The former government spokesperson and CEO of the Government Communications and Information Services is already well acquainted with the School as the former Academic Champion for the Government Communications and Marketing short course. He is the first Head of, and was responsible for setting up the Gauteng Department of Education, former Managing Director of Damelin Education Group and Director General of the national departments of Public Works, Public Service and Administration.  He also served as the Communications Director at the Business Leadership South Africa.

“Themba comes with high leadership pedigree and a practitioner’s experience in public policy and governance. He has worked at a high level in government and was also one of the first cohorts of Members of Parliament under the democratic dispensation. We are extremely delighted to have him as a colleague and part of our management team at the School” said WSG Head of School, Professor Mzukisi Qobo.

Maseko is the author of the book, For my country and  holds a BA LLB from Wits University, an MBA at De Montfort University and the Senior Executive Programme, a joint programme from Wits Business School and Harvard University. 

“I am delighted to lead a rejuvenated team to deliver quality education in the fields of governance, public development and management. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, we have been compelled to re-think the way we do things, how we lecture being one of them. We are ensuring that our course content is relevant and can offer skills and support to tackle the myriad of challenges that we face today. We stand by our commitment to offer courses with a balance between academic grounding and practical learning” said Maseko.

Is opposition to basic income support for vulnerable adults informed by evidence or ideology?

31 January 2022 - Adjunct Professor Alex van den Heever

For over two decades, pretty much the same thinking has dominated economic policy in South Africa...

With what appears to be a perpetuation of poor economic and social outcomes.

The question is whether these poor outcomes are an accident of fate, or just the result of the repeated application of the same kinds of thinking.

In this respect, it is worth noting that if the Republicans in the US were to impose their dystopic vision on any society from scratch, it would pretty much look like South Africa today.

It would be characterised by structural poverty and deep social divides arising from market failures in the distribution of income and its close relative, the social distribution of risk.

Only the well-off would have any form of social security and the rest, well, that’s not the problem of government or the privileged.

So, why is the distribution of risk so important to incomes?

There are many events that can disrupt the flow of incomes to families.

These include the death, disability or illness of a breadwinner as well as normal activities such as giving birth and looking after an infant child or losing employment due to old age.

In addition, the loss of employment due to the structure of the economy and economic cycles imposes severe costs and hardships on individual households outside of their control.

The operative phrase here is “outside of their control”.

Under conditions of precarity, social contingencies such as death, disability or childbirth exacerbate the effects of any structural exclusion from the labour market.

While the occurrence and duration of these various events cannot be predicted at the individual level, they are, however, predictable at a societal level. This is quite simply why social security systems pool these risks.

Not only will most of these events occur at some point in any household’s lifetime, but they will happen to some households somewhere at all points in time.

However, the effects of these events are not evenly distributed.

Not unexpectedly, the more precarious a household’s social condition, the more catastrophic the impact of such an event, with the effects harming the lives and life paths of households.

The converse is equally true: the less precarious a household’s social condition, the greater its ability to mitigate the effects of such an event alone.

Think of a game of “snakes and ladders”, where for most of the population there are many more snakes than ladders. For the privileged few, in contrast, there are few or no snakes and just ladders.

In such a game, “winning” and “losing” outcomes are structured into the game and have little to do with effort levels, competence or even chance.

In any society that individualises the bearing of such income-harming events, socially predictable risks are implicitly transferred onto the households that have no real ability to manage them on their own.

Only a very small percentage of households will be able to manage such risks on their own — roughly equivalent to half of the highest-earning 10% of households.

The systemic outcome of individualising the distribution of risk in this way is to cement in disadvantage, which then “mysteriously” manifests as endemic poverty and inequality.

Social protection regimes redistribute the snakes and ladders, expanding access to ladders and reducing the impact of snakes.

To conventional economists, the social implications of these risk distributions are invisible — and therefore, to them, do not exist.

There was a time when surgeons also did not recognise the importance of washing their hands prior to surgery.

Why? Because the existence of “germs” was just a theory, as no one could see them.

It took the invention and use of the microscope to convince surgeons they were killing their patients.

This mindset is age-old and reflects the path dependency of entrenched practices and thinking where emergent evidence will not be considered until such time as it becomes overwhelming and obvious to pretty much everyone.

The recent note by the President’s Economic Advisory Council (PEAC) on the extension of basic income to income-compromised adults closely resembles this failure on the part of surgeons.

As with bad waiters, there are “none so blind as those who do not wish to see”.

Conventional economists, in fact, have no technical expertise or models to understand the social and economic transmission mechanisms associated with social income-pooling schemes.

They are therefore not in any position to comment with authority or evidence on the social and economic effects of any social security arrangement, whether in reference to a system of basic income or social insurance.

Conventional macroeconomic models, used for relatively basic projections or limited policy assessments, also over-aggregate the key features of any economy (and society), and cannot be used for anything other than the crudest of appraisals.

So, what such economists, using such models, cannot see, effectively “doesn’t exist”.

When it comes to the resulting policy analysis, the evidence gaps are invariably filled by selecting assumptions that reflect the prejudices of the economists involved and drive all the results. Alternatively, they just cut out the middleman and run with assumptions.

If we leap back in time to reflect on the utilitarian economists of the 19th century, it illustrates in fairly stark terms how evidence-free theorising in economics persists to this day.

For instance, there was a UK Royal Commission that in 1834 examined and reported on the workings of the “poor laws” which governed income relief (social assistance) paid by local authorities to those without adequate incomes.

A particular target of the commission was the so-called “Speenhandland system”, which supplemented the income of poor households based on the price of bread (a food poverty line of sorts) and family size.

These measures had been introduced via the “poor laws” system to address the fact that even earned incomes were insufficient to support poor families.

The Royal Commission, however, determined that the system of relief for the poor had the following outcomes:

• “paupers claimed relief regardless of their merits”;
• “large families received the most relief, therefore improvident marriages were encouraged and this led to larger families”;
• “women were able to claim relief for their illegitimate children, so the system encouraged immorality”;
• “labourers had no incentive to work hard and be thrifty when worthless idlers got more relief than could be earned by honest hard work”;
• “employers kept wages deliberately low”;
• “paupers had no respect for an employer when they knew that their wages would be supplemented by the parish”; and
• “men were discouraged from providing for their families and aged parents because they could ‘be put on the rates’”.

These outcomes were not informed by evidence and instead reflected views that “the existing ‘poor law’ undermined the prosperity of the country because it interfered with the ‘natural’ laws of supply and demand”.

The commission worked from the premise that poverty was inevitable (“the poor are always with you”) and that only the “deserving poor” merited support.

If you were able-bodied, you were by definition “undeserving”.

The commission consequently recommended a “poor laws” regime that expressly punished the able-bodied poor through a draconian workhouse system.

This, they assumed, would create an incentive for the poor to sort themselves out.

The idea that being poor was the outcome of structure rather than conduct was beyond the limited worldview of the utilitarian Benthamites of the period.

But how different are these views from those that inform government policy in South Africa today?

Importantly, how much evidence is used to inform such views?

It is worth noting that this 1834 position was comprehensively thrown out with the post-World War 2 European consensus on social protection, where redistributive schemes were systematically and comprehensively introduced to eliminate poverty and inequality.

After all, how could you ask the (majority) poor to fight for you against Hitler and Stalin when your society offered them nothing but hardship and suffering?

It was plainly understood that if you treat people like dirt, they may, and probably will, treat you the same at some point.

Were a Sweden or a France to eliminate their redistributive schemes now, their levels of poverty and inequality would gravitate towards South Africa’s outcomes.

Stable societies require that resources are reasonably pooled at the societal level using good institutions to transfer the burden of social risks faced by everyone, from individual households to society as a whole.

In simple terms: you restructure the distribution of snakes and ladders to provide the maximum opportunity for advancement to all.

To a large extent, the PEAC rejects this view and instead reflects the conventional wisdom espoused by the Royal Commission, arguing that social support for the “able-bodied” will allegedly undermine employment and fiscal sustainability:

“Significantly increased social grant spending would likely weaken the position of poor South Africans as it would erode public services and infrastructure, slow down employment creation and result in a crisis for public finances that would take years to resolve.”

This mirrors Commissioner Nassau Senior’s argument (from the Royal Commission) that “the great test which must be applied to any project of state action in regard to relief [social assistance] is the question whether it has any tendency to increase that which it is proposed to diminish”.

The commission’s argument is simple: if you provide income support to able-bodied people, they will have no incentive to work.

And economists, “as everyone knows”, are the “pre-eminent experts on incentives”, at least in their own minds.

But if the fear of starvation worked as an incentive to generate economic growth, South Africa would be the fastest-growing economy in the world.

However, very little has changed with respect to both poverty and inequality from 1994, and there are no policies proposed — outside of income support for those in income poverty — that are any different to what has been proposed before.  

Along these lines, the PEAC effectively adopts an ideological posture, arguing that “inclusive economic growth must be built on employment creation. Our vision must be to promote employment rather than ever-increasing state-funded income support. For those of working-age, grant support should be temporary with clear pathways to employment… We face a real danger of policy error at a macroeconomic level where we will limit our economy’s growth and job creation potential by increasing the system of social grant payments in an unsustainable manner that would weaken economic [sic] and undermine the country’s capacity to address poverty and unemployment” (p. 14).

According to this thesis, labour markets are primarily responsible for the distribution of income, and growth expands labour markets.

Along the same lines as the Royal Commission, therefore, income support to the able-bodied undermines the integrity of the labour market and therefore growth.

It is worth noting that this proposition isn’t really arguing that income support for working-age adults is not feasible. It is in fact arguing that it should not be done at all. Ever.

With this reading, and consistent with those of the Royal Commission, even if funds were available, this policy should not be pursued.

Invoking macroeconomic arguments and fiscal constraints, therefore, comes across as mere window-dressing for ideological opposition to such an income-support programme.

That is, when poor households are concerned.

For consistency, such a position would require a re-assessment of all programmes funded through the fiscus that involve income support provided to working-age adults in South Africa.

It may surprise many to find out that we have many such programmes, and they are not cheap.

They have the following features in common: they subsidise the top 10% of income earners; they largely fly under the radar as they are provided through the tax system; and they have no associated macroeconomic or other appraisals to support their social and economic outcomes.

The estimates in 2018 values are (Annexure B – Tax Expenditure Statement):

• Tax subsidies for retirement provision, which include deductions against contributions and the elimination of the 18% withholding tax on retirement fund assets in 2003:

o   Subsidies on contributions: R87-billion

o   Subsidies related to the return on investments of retirement fund assets:   R46-billion (own estimate — also see Social Budget bulletin 2)

o   Total = R133 billion

• Tax-free savings accounts: R3.4-billion
• Employment tax incentive: R4.5-billion
• Participation exemption, which exempts foreign dividends from income tax if a South African resident holds at least 10% of the total equity shares and voting rights in a foreign company declaring a foreign dividend: R11-billion

In total, these subsidies amount to an annual set of permanent obligations on the fiscus for working-age adults quantified in 2018 values at around R146-billion.

In contrast, the potential maximum recurrent value of the Covid-19 social relief of distress (SRD) grant in 2021 prices (not 2018 values) is around R56-billion with a maximum, but unlikely, ceiling value of around R76-billion at maturity.

The PEAC proposal for the Covid-19 SRD grant is, however, R0.

The irony should not escape anyone that, according to the PEAC, it is fiscally and macroeconomically irresponsible to provide income support to the millions of income-compromised adults of working age in South Africa, while government presently funds working-age adults in the top decile to the tune of R146-billion per annum (in 2018 values).

In the game of snakes and ladders, the PEAC clearly has no concerns about more ladders for the privileged and more snakes for the poor.

This is important because it raises clear questions about the authenticity of the PEAC’s admonitions about fiscal and macroeconomy responsibility.

Importantly, therefore, there is ample scope for a restructuring of the fiscal snakes and ladders to achieve a more effective social outcome with available resources.

Not exercising this discretion to support income-vulnerable households is therefore quite evidently a policy choice and not an imposition conditioned by an unfortunate set of time-bound economic circumstances.

Let no one be fooled.

This article was first published on the Daily Maverick website. 

Skills crunch in the state? Use outside experts

23 February 2022 - Professor Mzukisi Qobo

Getting outsiders to lend support to the government’s mission is a sign of self-awareness and purposefulness on the part of a country’s leadership.

It also shows a leader’s openness to innovative ideas. External expertise through secondments and advisory bodies can lend weight to the government’s reform agenda. Such expertise is different from that which comes through consultants who trade their knowledge in exchange for material gain with no serious moral commitment to government’s success. 

President Cyril Ramaphosa has recently come under torrid fire from commentators for bringing outsiders into the presidency, with some accusing him of centralising government and creating parallel structures. 

South Africa is fighting many battlefronts right now: an economy that is struggling to grow, a society that is fracturing in the face of socioeconomic challenges, and a broken public service. The government needs to mobilise creative energies across the private and not-for-profit sector in generating new solutions to old problems that are festering.

Since he assumed office in 2018, Ramaphosa has tapped into external experts to close critical gaps in government. 

In his first year in office he appointed investment envoys to market South Africa abroad, leading to the launch of the investment conference pledges to the value of R130-billion. He would later appoint advisory structures to support his reform agenda. These included the Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture, the  Presidential Economic Advisory Council (disclaimer: I am a member), and the Presidential State-Owned Enterprises Council.  

These institutions serve as sounding boards and brains trusts that offer insights not constrained by conventional thinking and practices in government. Their focus has primarily been on those areas the president regards as a priority. Some have helped to activate policy implementation. 

For instance, the Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture recommended that the government create a beneficiary selection criteria policy in land reform, which would help in selecting the land redistribution beneficiaries. The department of agriculture, land reform and rural development carried through this task, and we now have some policy in our panoply of land redistribution instruments. Ultimately, implementation of any policy lies with the ministers and the accounting officers that preside over government departments.

More recently, Ramaphosa enlisted two outsiders to lead government priorities: Sipho Nkosi has been entrusted with overcoming bureaucratic red tape that undermines the growth of small, micro, and medium enterprises. He is a highly respected executive who presided over the establishment of a coal mining giant. Nkosi retired from the private sector a few years ago. 

The second appointment is that of Daniel Mminele, former deputy governor at the South African Reserve Bank, who also had a short stint as chief executive of Absa. Mminele’s orders from the president entail leading the Presidential Climate Finance Task Team, a tricky responsibility given the lack of commitment by developed countries to pay for their historical sins in polluting the environment. 

These are both impeccable appointments that could supplement thin capabilities in government. 

It is well known that the government suffers from a skills crunch and that professional standards are low, which is why early last year, the former minister of public services and administration, Senzo Mchunu, launched an initiative to professionalise the public service. There is a long way to go to rebuild capabilities in the state since the core challenge lies at the top ministerial layer. 

Where does skills erosion come from?

Skills erosion in the public service has multiple sources, including the absence of inspiring leadership at the executive level; corruption; mismatch between the needs of government and society, and the skills and capabilities of those who get appointed; a culture that tolerates underperformance; and cadre deployment. 

In a context where the skills base is low, it makes sense for the government — especially the president — to attract outsiders who bring innovative ideas to support his reform agenda. As desirable as that is, dismissing ministers does not always provide a quick solution since, in any case, the president has to go back to the same suboptimal breeder, parliament, to get talent. Reshuffling and demotion of ministers to less essential portfolios can help to keep them on their toes, but agility in government may require the supplement of external talent that does not come through the usual channels of the ruling party. 

Constitutionally, the president can only appoint up to two ministers outside of parliament, and therefore has to rely on professional expertise to secure his reforms. 

A Westminster loophole

The parliamentary limit to ministerial appointments has its origins in the Westminster tradition. This convention is followed in Commonwealth countries such as Canada, India, and New Zealand, with varying modifications. The way Britain has been getting around this since the years when Tony Blair was prime minister is to draw some of the ministers from the unelected House of Lords. Despite its obvious weaknesses and democratic deficit, this system delivers fresh talent.

When you want to get a job done as a leader, you should have access to a toolbox with the right tools, and that of South Africa’s parliament may not be up to the task. In such a situation, short of reaching out to opposition benches, a leader’s hand is tied as the Constitution gives him very little room to go outside to scout for ministerial talent. For South Africa, this problem of skills deficiency at the ministerial level is likely to worsen as the majority of the governing party in parliament reduces significantly from 2024 onwards, with dire implications for government performance, service delivery, and leadership of the economy. 

No parallel authority

The idea that bringing external expertise in government creates parallel authority, as some of the experts have argued, is not a true reflection of reality, mainly because power still lies with the ministers and the directors general. Without these two functions of government acquiescing to decisions of external experts or advisers, nothing moves. 

Yet the value that external experts bring to government could help in overcoming constraints to implementation and using their insights to unlock further opportunities for reforms in government. Having external experts who are given the task of driving certain reforms does not absolve ministers of their responsibilities; neither does it take away the president’s responsibility to discipline ministers for underperformance. 

The role of external experts and advisers should be complementary to, rather than competing with, existing institutions and their officials.

Any leader serious about getting reforms off the ground will need to supplement their core ministerial and bureaucratic team with fresh ideas from outside. In a general sense, having a revolving door in government where experts from the private sector, non-governmental sector, academia, and elsewhere are used can bring much-needed regenerative quality and innovative approaches to government. 

When the government makes use of outsiders, it is essential that they are given clearly defined responsibilities and support to do their work without bureaucratic hindrance. The president will need to lend them his authority so they have the legitimacy to drive or support reforms. They also must be adept at using soft power in working through the government bureaucracy and its Byzantine hierarchies.

This article is republished from the Mail and Guardian under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

OP-ED: South Africa can damn Putin and stay non-aligned in the West

25 March 2022 - Professor Mzukisi Qobo

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a rude reminder of how deeply interconnected the global economy is...

Parts of South Africa have now collapsed: WSG expert

11 April 2022 -

South Africa is likely to see increased anti-foreigner and other populist sentiments in the coming years as it teeters on the edge of becoming a failed state.

This is the view of Adjunct Professor Eddy Maloka at the School.

Speaking to the SABC, Maloka said that there would be increased fighting and violence in the country, whether there are foreign nationals or not. He added that South Africa is not unique in its acceptance of foreigners from neighbouring countries, but other countries do not see the same level of violence or xenophobia.

Watch the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nseFGADDhEc&t=1s 

“The problems that we have with migrant nationals are a reflection of the problems we have as a country. There is no way that the migrants can be the source of unemployment and the source of crime in South Africa.

“They only reflect the state of the country in those specific areas. They can exacerbate them (but are not the cause).”

Maloka said that there has been a complete collapse of local government in certain areas, with migrants taking advantage of this broken system.

“Government has collapsed in a number of areas across the country (and) we are seeing inner-cities collapse and degenerate. They have not picked up waste in the Johannesburg city centre for a number of years, so you can’t blame migrants for that – those are reflections of the problems we have in government.”

Maloka said that a number of factors are responsible for the country nearing a failed state, with a crisis in the ruling ANC being a key factor. He noted that this crisis had effectively been exported from the ANC into wider society through a dearth of leadership and a system of patronage.

He noted that this system is somewhat functional when there is a wide network of people to pull from, but that this is no longer the case, and the country now has a much weaker calibre of leadership and governance.

“It is not a problem that South African have caused themselves, it is problem that has been caused by the ruling party.”

This article was first published on Business Tech.

Wits welcomes Carnegie Diversifying Academy grant recipients

19 March 2022 - IOL Reporter

Wits University hosted a ceremony recently to welcome 26 grant recipients of the Carnegie Diversifying the Academy (CDTA) programme.

The grants, which have been awarded since 2015, seek to attract and retain a socially diverse professoriate.

The Vice-Chancellor and Principal Professor Zeblon Vilakazi gave opening remarks and highlighted the importance of diversifying academia in South Africa so that these academics can contribute their unique perspectives to solving the world’s problems.

Since inception, the grant has supported 120 academics, including the current cohort, to advance their personal development while becoming part of an active research university community that values diversity, transformation and a culture of building on past learnings.

In her address, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Ruksana Osman said that while the programme has traditionally focused on strengthening the professoriate, it has identified the parallel need to support those entering the academy. Indeed, two-thirds of the recent recipients are at lecturer level.

In addition to the Diversifying the Academy initiative, the University has also introduced the Enhancing Mid-Career Academic Transitions (EMCA) programme – also sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation – which is an academic development programme aimed at mid-career researchers.

This programme is a collaboration between CLTD, the Research Office and the Transformation Office.

Grant recipients from the 2021 cohort, Kholiswa Malindini of the Wits School of Governance and Dr Thabelo Ramantswana of the School of Construction Economics and Management, both said that the grants represent an opportunity for personal career development.

Ramantswana said she is excited to be part of the group and looks forward to support from the more experienced on how to manage grant and related processes.

For Malindini, the grant offers an opportunity to reshape her career.

“I have been able to buy out of my teaching contract and am freed from that rigid programme so it means I can concentrate more on my research that includes development economics,” she says.

The event held on 25 February provided the first opportunity for recipients to network with each other and key members of the University. Group mentorship sessions are in the pipeline.

Prior to Covid-19 the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies completed a broad review of the University’s diversity grant programmes and formulated key recommendations to bolster the programmes. An overview of the review findings and recommendations were presented by Dr Hayley McEwan of the Centre for Diversity Studies at the Welcome Day event at Wits on [date].

McEwan said the methodology of the review was multifaceted and included analysing employee data from 2009 to 2019 in terms of race, gender and disability; a literature review; a review of policies and strategies; as well as 79 personal interviews with grant recipients, Heads of School and Deans.

From the R45 million set aside for transformation programmes in 2017, around R35 million has been used to bring in new academics from industry and other universities. Recipients of enabling grants meanwhile have been able to buy out their teaching contracts to focus on research. These strategies mean that Wits is able to attract fresh talent, introduce industry-relevant insights and help tailor career planning for staff members. These strategies have been popular.

The state of disaster is over. Now what?

6 April 2022 -

Adjunct Professor Alex van den Heever joins Michael Avery and guests to discuss the slew of proposed new measures to deal with Covid-19.

With the lifting of the National State of Disaster after almost two years on Monday evening, the government is moving swiftly to draft new measures for managing the coronavirus pandemic.

Meet our new Academic Director: Professor Kwandiwe Kondlo

18 April 2022 -

Did you know that an Academic Director at a University school is more like the chief operations officer of a company?

Our newly appointed Academic Director at the Wits School of Governance (WSG), Professor Kwandiwe Kondlo is in this role and is responsible for guiding the implementation of the School’s strategy and coordinates the entire academic project. This position looks into details of internal processes and procedures, committees, content of courses taught at WSG, research, student throughput rates as well as research outputs.  

Kondlo has spent nearly 10 years as a Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Johannesburg (UJ). He was previously a Senior Professor and Director of the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of the Free State. He holds an MA from the University of Cape Town, and a DLitt et Phil (PhD) from the University of Johannesburg.

Kondlo said he is committed to upholding the vision of WSG which is to be “Africa’s leading School of Governance that is research-led, globally competitive and recognised as a postgraduate institution that works towards transforming the public, private and non-governmental sectors”.

“As Academic Director, I will stay relevant to this vision and ensure that the mission which is to produce internationally competitive, locally relevant scholarship on governance, is realised. I am working with a Steering Committee to identify from the overall strategy of the School, actionable items in the short, medium and long-term and constantly monitor activities geared towards the strategic goals,” he explained.

Kondlo said the School already plays a huge role in the governance space in the country with courses taught at diploma and, Masters levels as well as the PhD research programme undertaken by students. The scope and quality of academic teaching in the various programmes and the depth of research produced continue to put WSG in the frontline of intellectual endeavour.

“The courses are well explained and illustrated on the WSG website. Various academics from WSG sit in advisory committees at national, provincial and local government institutions  and some participate in public intellectual deliberations in various media platforms.

“In other words, the WSG is not just an isolated intellectual ivory tower but is deeply embedded in the realities of the country and actively involved in the design of practically relevant solutions to challenges facing South Africa,” he said.

He has worked in government and fully understands the dynamics of the public sector. He has also worked with the private sector as the CEO of what used to be known as SACOB, later transformed during his tenure into what is now known as the South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Kondlo said he looks forward to being part of a positive team, highly motivated and not afraid to dream of innovative ways and means to further enhance the brand of WSG and make a positive contribution to the country.

“Most importantly I look forward to starting a WSG Journal of Governance in the 21^st century and we are likely start this as WSG Governance Working Papers and I hope this could help us mark our own specific niche in the governance intellectual space and publishing”.

“I also look forward to helping attract a generation of young academics, especially young and upcoming black female South African scholars, as this is important for the future of South African scholarship and the WSG itself.

“The School is very determined to support them and through them establish lasting intellectual partnerships and network all over the continent and the globe. I am also planning with the Head of School to host more Governance seminar series which will hopefully enliven intellectual debates within the School,” he added.

Looking ahead, Kondlo said that there is a project fully underway to make more of WSG’s courses online and already have four ‘foundational’ modules all online.

He has sole authored two books and co-edited five books. Among his widely cited publications are his classic publication ‘In the Twilight of the Revolution – The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, 1959-1994’. The other book he co-edited with Professor Chinenyengozi Ejiogu, titled ‘Africa in Focus – Governance in the 21st Century’ has also made serious waves in the African continent.

Kondlo has supervised and moderated numerous MA and PhD students as well as Postdoctoral Research Fellows at various universities in South Africa and abroad.

Is it time to stop buying that PowerBall ticket?

9 May 2022 - Dr Christine Hobden

Read about the ethical dilemma as far as the Lotto goes...

As reports on wrongdoing at the National Lotteries Commission mount, those of us who provide the funding for its operation may want to consider whether we have an obligation to vote with our wallets.

As the PowerBall jackpot rolled over through a long January, there was increasing social media banter about what one would do if one won the jackpot ­– disappear into a life of luxury, walk out of toxic workplaces, or pay off family debt – and mock celebration of those small, taunting R7.50 wins that in most cases fail to even pay off the cost of playing.

The draw on 11 February saw a R165 million jackpot, and a single lucky winner, of whom we have not yet heard any details – for most then, hope is diminished, but not lost as the jackpot slowly begins to grow again. 

I too have found solace in the fun of dreaming big and losing small, at most spending R30 of my eBucks on an occasional draw. To me, the Lotto and PowerBall have always felt more akin to buying a raffle ticket at the church fair than gambling at the casino. While we know the casino always wins in the end, the National Lotteries Commission (NLC) is mandated to ensure that “net proceeds are as large as possible” and that these proceeds are used for “good causes” – for the upliftment of fellow South African citizens and residents. While I have consistently lost, never winning more than R15, losing to a good cause never seemed like much of a problem.

But now, belatedly and perhaps not unexpectedly, I realise that as in many of our government spaces, money set aside for “good causes”, or indeed basic human rights entitlements, has long been going into the pockets of private individuals and into legal fees racked up as they defend their behaviour. Slowly and steadily, Raymond Joseph and others at GroundUp have revealed the multitude of dubious and illegal goings-on at the NLC: from board members receiving millions linked to Lotto grants, to serious concerns that Lotto funds were used for ANC campaigning in the Western Cape, to a Lotto grant for a children’s centre in Limpopo not reaching any children. Despite investigations and numerous employees blowing the whistle, the NLC holds a firmly defensive position, spending millions on litigation against current and former employees and committing further legal fees to unsuccessfully applying to set aside the appointment of independent investigators by the minister of trade, industry and competition in June 2020.

The real horror of this story is that the bulk of these stolen funds comes from those who have little to no income available to contribute: a 2019 study by Unisa’s Bureau of Market Research found that nearly 28% of people who play the Lotto are unemployed, and 42%, live on incomes of R5,000 per month or less. Indeed, the Lottery has been described as a regressive tax  – a tax that more heavily impacts upon the poor. While not imposed by law, this impact is sanctioned by governments’ active (and arguably manipulative) advertising.

As early as 2019, Joseph reported on the suspiciously large increase in the NLC’s advertising spend from 2012’s R716,000 to a high of R43-million in 2016, and a lower but still-substantial R21.9-million and R22.7-million in the 2018 and 2019 financial years. This level of ad spend provides important revenue for struggling media houses across the country. But the advertising often takes an advertorial form, making it difficult to distinguish from reporting, and the NLC’s ability to be such an important source of revenue compromises the media’s independence on this issue. It is perhaps not by chance that GroundUp, a non-profit that does not run advertisements, has been the main source of investigative journalism into corruption at the NLC.

So, what are we to do? 

While it is important that these issues are properly and independently investigated and that those accountable be held so by our judiciary, corruption at the NLC provides us with a perfect opportunity to “vote with our wallets” to add to pressure on the commission to do better. My work on citizenship and political consumerism suggests that we should be more conscious of our collective consumer power as a tool to hold our government accountable.

This may not be possible for everyone: many who support the Lotto experience conditions that make it difficult to leverage consumer power, and make it morally problematic for others to demand it of them. But for those who do have that choice, for whom the PowerBall or the Lotto is idle entertainment, or a nice but not necessary dream, a public boycott of all Ithuba lotteries might put weight behind a call for the government to take action on the NLC.

Boycotts, of course, come with costs and we should cautiously think through the potential impact on many deserving recipients of Lottery funding. But boycotts do not have to be absolute nor open-ended to be strategically valuable. Think of the impact of a well-coordinated and well-publicised boycott of a single draw or a regular boycott on the last Friday of the month, until certain, tangible accountability demands are met.

As readers and subscribers we can also put pressure on media houses to join the boycott by refusing advertising from the NLC for a defined period or until certain steps have been taken to hold wrongdoers accountable. We can also call upon banks and shops who facilitate the sale and advertising of lotteries to similarly put pressure on the NLC with their own consumer power.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we should think twice before providing any funds for the activities of the NLC, on principle and to avoid our own small-scale complicity in such wrongdoing. This may seem a little hopeless or even problematically self-righteous in a context where so much more is needed in our deeply unjust society. Yet we should not forget our collective power to put pressure on the government, both with our voices, and in this case, with our wallets.

This article was first published in the Daily Maverick.

Ruling elites are depriving African countries of innovation and dynamic leadership

11 May 2022 - Associate Professor William Gumede

And these leaders are fuelling hopelessness.

Many countries in Africa have been stagnating and backsliding because their leaders have failed to include the talents and new ideas of all ethnic, religious, regional and political groups when making nation-building plans.

The development potential of African countries is being hampered by the rulership of small elites – whether ethnic, military or struggle families – for their own self-interest.

These countries exclude women, young people and minorities from leadership positions in society, the economy and culture, depriving these countries of dynamic leadership, ideas and innovation. Yet all great transformations over the past 100 years have changed the position of women. Africa operates at under 50% capacity because the leadership, ideas and energy of women are not productively used.

African countries have been stagnating, backsliding and falling deeper into poverty – because they exclude so many talents, new ideas and energy, solely based on ethnicity, gender and outsider status. African ruling elites often do not include all society stakeholders, opposition parties, the non-state, business, civil society and community groups, together with the state, to cobble together long-term industrial, national-building and peace plans. The lack of bringing all of society together to co-create industrialisation, nation-building and peace is one of the reasons many African countries have stagnated and will continue to do so.

Being inclusive of all ethnic, religious, regional, political and demographic groups generates continual innovation, new ideas and energy in a country’s politics, economy and society – so critical for transformation. Lacking these makes the politics, economies and societies of so many African countries devoid of dynamism, energy and vibrancy – and is the cause of a lot of hopelessness in countries.

Since independence from colonialism, African industrialisation, development and growth have been stunted because most governments have either actively discouraged or been indifferent to entrepreneurs, and rarely fostered supporting institutions, policies and environments for entrepreneurship.

Given that most African countries after independence inherit economies without much advanced industry, skills and financial resources, entrepreneurs – who could add value to raw materials, come up with new methods of production and introduce new industry sectors and manufacturing products – were desperately needed.

In many African countries, genuine entrepreneurs who made it thanks to their own efforts and money, and by taking risks, are often not only outside the inner circle of the ruling parties, military or ethnic groups, they are also often viewed with suspicion by political leaders, citizens and civil society. 

Many African governments nationalised local and foreign companies or introduced indigenisation or empowerment programmes where the state or local political capitalists close to governing parties get slices of local or foreign companies.

Many African leaders and governments oppose merit as a guiding principle in government, society and the economy. Most African liberation and independence movements appoint only cadres of their own parties or in other cases members of the ruling ethnic, language or regional group. 

Many African countries lack the rule of law. The collapse of the rule of law often starts when governing African liberation and independence movement governments exempt party members and leaders from the rule of law, while they police ordinary citizens not connected to the liberation or independence movement leaders. This unequal treatment of citizens depending on their connectedness to the leaders of the governing party undermines the establishment of a culture of rule of law – crucial for industrialisation, growth and development.

In many African countries corruption has become everyday: the allocation of public money, appointments to public institutions and policy-making are done by clientelistic and corrupt means. Governing parties and leaders are themselves often deeply corrupt, which makes it impossible in many cases to eradicate corruption.

Very few African countries prioritised industry-relevant education as the tool for the empowerment of society. Getting the best global education for citizens, with curriculums containing the best from all over the world, to become as competitive as possible, has sadly not been a priority for most African countries. Developing human capital, through genuinely and determinedly giving all citizens the best-quality education, is not only the greatest empowerment policy but also the greatest economic growth driver.

A question of human value

The prerequisite for successful African development is for governments and leaders to value African lives. Colonialism and apartheid dehumanised and reduced the value of Africans, compared with whites. In the postcolonial period, new African leaders, governments and elites have continued to bestow less value on their fellow Africans, seeing them also as “subjects”, or voting fodder. Sadly, in many instances African elites appear to be only outraged when Westerners, whites and non-Africans violate Africans. However, they appear not to care if Africans violate Africans in whatever form – corruption, violence and gender crimes.

Since the end of colonialism and more recently apartheid, democracy has always been contested in Africa, with many liberation and independence movements of the postcolonial antidemocracy school arguing that democracy should be shelved to focus on development first. Key arguments in the African postcolonial antidemocracy school are that democracy is allegedly “unAfrican”; and those countries need “strong” leaders who should be in power for long periods to supposedly embed “transformation”. All the countries with so-called “strong” leaders in Africa have collapsed into failed states, ethnic violence and breakdowns.

Another argument against democracy made by antidemocratic groups is that democracy allegedly increases divisions in ethnically diverse societies because election campaigning in Africa has become so ethnically divisive. Yet it is not democracy that causes ethnic divisions; it is selfish leaders who campaign based on ethnicity. African countries that pursued development without democracy in the period after World War 2 have mostly plunged into civil war, country breakdown and failed states, and the few African countries that did try to pursue democracy and development together have done better. The African countries that have, since the end of colonialism, pursued democracy, such as Botswana, Mauritius, Cape Verde and Tunisia, have done comparatively better than all the undemocratic African countries.

Narcissists and psychopaths

Good leadership is crucial for development. Leaders can either foster development, inclusive nationhood and peace, or undermine these. Societies that have emerged from traumatic experiences such as colonialism, apartheid and civil war need leadership that is more caring, has greater self-awareness and is less inclined to seek refuge in victimhood. Leadership is at a higher premium in societies that are ethnically diverse and have high levels of inequality, and where democratic rules, institutions and governance are not fully embraced by all.

In failing African countries there is always a gulf between the interests of leaders and the interests of the societies they lead. Leaders often act and make decisions and policies that are in direct opposition to the underlying values, laws and public interest as set out in country constitutions.

African countries are fertile ground for psychopathic and narcissistic liberation leaders. Psychopathic leaders suffer from abnormally violent intimate, social and political behaviour. For narcissists, grabbing, holding on to and defending power at all costs becomes more important than compassion, reason or communal interests.

All these types of leaders in many cases focus on their own self-aggrandisement, often deliberately sowing societal or ethnic divisions for self-enrichment and looting public resources. In power, they also deliberately cause chaos and uncertainty – to perpetuate their rule. Such societies often vote for autocratic figures: either father figures or strong men who can supposedly defend them against perceived threats, such as former colonial powers, “enemy” groups and hostile former elites from the ancien régime.

Traumatised African societies often support autocratic, corrupt and incompetent leaders because they are “one of us”. This can also lead to misplaced racial, ethnic and community solidarity – someone will be supported, no matter how corrupt or incompetent they are, because “they are one of us”.

Honesty is crucial for transformative leadership. And they must refrain from seeking refuge in victimhood. The character of leaders matters and should be built on values such as compassion, social justice and forgiveness. The measurement of self-worth should not be based on money, material trappings or power. Leaders should not make decisions based on ethnic, racial and community solidarity, but on ethical values. Harmful beliefs and traditions should be discarded.

Leaders should never strive for popularity when it compromises constitutional values, human rights and dignity.

South Africa's healthcare warzone

9 May 2022 -

South Africa's healthcare system was in the ICU long before a deadly virus came our way.

Adjunct Professor Alex van den Heever contributes to a report on the state of South Africa's healthcare system.  Céline Tshika presented this piece on Politically Aweh.

Watch the interview here

Measuring economic activity in Africa

17 May 2022 - Odile Mackett, WSG lecturer

‘Time over money’ approach includes women and unemployed youth

Studying how people in Africa spend their time on nonleisure activities is a better guide to policy development than relying on the traditional money measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Drawing on recent research on the measurement of economic activity to challenge the way economists – and all of us – decide which work is the most valuable to society.

Read the full article here New Agenda (Page 36) 

Measuring economic activity

31 May 2022 -

Studying how people in Africa spend their time on nonleisure activities is a better guide to policy development, argues Odile Mackett

Mackett, a lecturer at the Wits School of Governance, said that a focus on nonleisure activities is better than relying on the traditional money measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

She elaborated on her research in an article published in the South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy. 

Read the article here: Measuring economic activity

The problem of funding SA students can be solved

10 June 2022 - Associate Professor William Gumede

SA’s private financial sector should fund all students, no matter their means, with loans underwritten by the state.

The current model of student funding is unsustainable and needs a new one that is centered on providing loans, rather than grants, to every student, no matter their income status, at tertiary institutions. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme, currently mired in red tape, inefficiency and poor decision-making, just like many other government agencies, should be abolished and be replaced by a private sector fund supported by government.

According to Universities South Africa student debt stood at R16.5bn in March this year. This year 120 000 students may not be able to graduate because they owe higher education institutions – collectively this group owes universities around R7bn.

Student funding policy should be based on honesty, affordability and pragmatism. Up to now, student funding policy, like most ANC government policy has either been based on ideology, wishful thinking and not on financial realities.

Former President Jacob Zuma had insisted for populist, ideological and cheap politicking campaigning reasons ahead of the ANC’s 2017 national elective conference and the 2018 national elections, insisted that all education should be free in the form of grants. The post-Zuma ANC leadership has continued with the current unsustainable model for a combination of ideological, wishful thinking and political expediency – to secure populist votes.

South Africa’s tattered public finances are unable to finance a student funding model that is based on grants. This is not to dismiss that over R4 trillion of public money has been lost over the past decade and a half, through government corruption, mismanagement and ideological projects.  Another R1 trillion had been given by the private sector as handouts to a handful of politically connected black economic tycoons, who have not added value in terms of new manufacturing, employment and ideas to the economy. Off course, such a waste of money makes it difficult to argue that there is no financial capacity in the state to finance higher education or any other need. Nevertheless, a loan-based funding scheme is the most pragmatic solution.

The Heher Commission into the Feasibility of Fee-Free Higher Education and Training, chaired by Justice Jonathan Heher, established in 2016, proposed an income-contingent loan scheme – which was rejected for political expediency by former President Zuma and the ANC government. The rejection of the Heher commission’s practical recommendations has been typical of the ANC government whose approach to policymaking has been to establish commissions to essentially kick for touch difficult policy decisions to placate public criticisms, but then reject the recommendations of such commissions if these are not populist or ideologically acceptable to the ANC.

In a more pragmatic approach, free education should be every student having the right to get a loan, without any means-testing. Many of the recent student debtors are those who belong to the “missing middle”, those students too poor to pay for higher education, but not poor enough to qualify for funding from the NSFAS. There should be no exclusions from student loans, such has been the case of the current system where the “missing middle” group are excluded from NSFAS funding.

New loan-based funding should include post-graduate studies. Currently, funding for post-graduate studies is limited. Any new loan-based funding model must be integrated to include technical and the vocational sector.

Repayment of a new loan-based funding scheme should be structured over the lifetime of the recipients, tailored to their income after graduating. No current student with outstanding debts should be prevented from getting their academic results, graduating or seeking employment.

All current outstanding student debt should be restructured to be paid over the life of recipients. Students’ debts should be scrapped at death, critical illness and disability. Parents, children and families of recipients should not be settled with the responsibility of the debts that students incurred.

NSFAS should be abolished – or drastically overhauled, to become more commercially orientated. NSFAS has been run as a typical state-owned company, with red tape, incompetency and influence-peddling by politically connected businesses to secure procurement contracts, which have driven up administrative costs, slow delivery of services.

The NSFAS racked up R5billion in irregular expenditure during the 2019/2020 financial year, and R3.2bn during the 2018/2019 financial year. A R3.2bn tender to issue laptops to NSFAS funding recipients was drawn out because of the insistence on narrowly defined BEE criteria, rather than on quality, competency and value-for-money.

The current model is dependent on NSFAS existing. A new system should be a combined public-private financial system. Either the banks should provide the loans – underwritten by the state; or the current NSFAS should be put into a commercial fund that would be jointly managed by the banks. The banks would then distribute the loans and the state will guarantee the loans.

South Africa has a large private financial sector, so from a pragmatic point of view, they should be involved in financing student studies, their participation should be opposed to, as is the case with many ANC policymakers currently being ideologically opposed to involving the private financial sector in student funding.  

Former education director-general Itumeleng Mosala has said that the ANC government was offered a US$5bn loan at low interest by the Japanese government in 1994 to establish a student fund to fund the higher education poor students but that the government rejected it at the time. The ANC government has made many of such decision blunders, because they base decisions on ideology, lack of expertise or wishful thinking or lack of imagination.  

Companies implicated in corruption should contribute to a new loan-scheme fund as part of the reparations. Dodgy BEE deals to small politically connected ANC elites should be stopped and companies should rather contribute to education as a form of BEE.  

Universities have seen declines in subsidies from government. Funding for research in public and private institutions have shrunk across all sectors – under the competitiveness of the economy, and thus the creation of jobs, attracting new investments and fostering development.

It is important that the government set aside at least 2% of GDP for higher education and training. Furthermore, large private companies must also be compelled to set aside a proportion of their profits to fund research, education and innovation – not only to make themselves and the country competitive. Finally, recipients of a new loan scheme must also be compelled to do community work in return for getting public money. All recipients of funding must also attend democracy and civic education – to learn the values of the Constitution, such as gender equality and ethical behaviour. It will also be useful if recipients if attending a personal finance management course becomes compulsory. Learning the values of the Constitution and personal finance is something that should become compulsory for all higher education students. 

This is an extract from Gumede’s remarks made at the meeting of university principals and chancellors at the Chancellors’ Forum to discuss ways of tackling South Africa’s ballooning student debt, convened by Dr Precious Moloi-Motsepe, the Chancellor of the University of Cape Town.

This article was first published on the TimesLive website. 

A BIG alone may not solve SA’s inequality problem, but it does improve individual agency

10 June 2022 - Tamsin Metelerkamp

A basic income grant is not only a matter of welfarism, but also a developmental project.

*Adjunct Professor Alex van den Heever was quoted in this article 

Administered progressively, it can improve the agency of individuals and allow them to participate meaningfully in society. Without it, many are forced to exist in survival mode.

The debate around the institution of a basic income grant (BIG) in South Africa is not new. In the past two years — since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rollout of the R350 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant – the idea of a BIG has gained traction in many circles, with experts in economics and civil society weighing in on its value.

At a roundtable discussion on the issue hosted by the Helen Suzman Foundation on Thursday, 9 June, Leigh Schaller of Fine Print News emphasised one devastating statistic: that a quarter of South Africans are living in extreme poverty. This means that they do not have enough money to meet their basic nutritional needs each month.

Behind this statistic are individual human beings suffering very real indignities and harms in the absence of viable social support. There are young women suffering through their menstrual cycles without sustenance; mothers who cannot feed their children; elderly citizens forced to take medication on empty stomachs.

All these scenarios were put forward by Basetsana Meletse, member of the #PaytheGrants campaign, during Thursday’s discussion. Addressing government, she asked, “What are you taking us for?”

“Can you please go revisit your policies and stop calling us the ‘poorest of the poor’, because we are voters. You are there because of our votes, yet you are treating us like trash.”

The Helen Suzman Foundation discussion comes just one day after it was revealed that the government has failed to pay a single R350 SRD Grant in April or May 2022. Civil society organisations including #PayTheGrants, Amandla.mobi, Black Sash, the Institute for Economic Justice and the Social Policy Initiative released a joint statement on Wednesday, 8 June, calling the situation “a scandal and a national disgrace”.

Basic income grant

There is an urgent need for a basic income grant to be introduced following the expiry of the R350 SRD Grant in March 2023, according to Kelle Howson of the Institute for Economic Justice. The new grant should be pegged to one of the official national poverty lines, which are objective measures of living standards and need in South Africa.

“It can be funded through various progressive taxation mechanisms that ensure that the wealthy make a net contribution, and that the poorest receive a net benefit,” said Howson. “These mechanisms or options for such mechanisms go beyond the simple trio of income tax, corporate tax and value-added tax to include a plethora of options.”

The objective of the grant would be to shift real opportunities for consumption from an affluent elite to those who have a level of consumption that is unacceptably low, according to Michael Sachs of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies.

“Taxes are not the only way of extracting real resources from one part of the population and transferring it to another… but taxes are certainly the most transparent, the most democratic, the most efficient way of doing this, [when] subjected to some kind of level of democratic accountability,” he said.

Howson advocated for a universal BIG that would be administered to all South Africans, rather than those below a certain income level. Grants that target a certain income level are “near impossible” to administer correctly, she said, referencing the recent scandal around the unpaid R350 SRD grants as an example of where a targeting framework failed.

“That comes down to the targeting framework that has been put in place as a result of the arbitrary budget threshold that has been allocated for the grant,” explained Howson.

“[The Department of Social Development] and [South African Social Security Agency] have been forced to introduce a means-testing system that has proved completely beyond the government’s capability to actually implement.”

However, Sachs argued that a universal system would be politically and fiscally ill-suited to a society where the poverty of the majority and the affluence of the minority are so extreme. Extending the grant to the affluent would result in more spending on the part of government, but no additional impact on poverty or hunger.

South Africa is not developing or growing, said Sachs, because it is a divided society. This division exists in the distribution of space, land, wealth and social services. The problem of inequality is one that needs to be addressed before the country can attain sustainable growth.

A BIG could be helpful in attaining equality within South Africa if the country had a clear path of transformation and development, continued Sachs. In the absence of such an overarching vision, however, he was sceptical as to whether the BIG alone would solve the problem.

Development and dependency

The BIG is not only a matter of welfarism, but also a developmental project, according to Howson. Used as a progressive policy platform, it can present real possibilities for helping the country achieve better outcomes, such as a more inclusive economy and more resilient communities.

“It’s absolutely not a silver bullet. But it can be part of a pioneering new deal and a new [possibility] for South Africa’s future,” said Howson.

Van den Heever of the Wits School of Governance, referenced a common argument against the grant: that giving people “something for nothing” will make them less inclined to work, creating an issue of dependency.

“We have large parts of our society, certainly at the sort of the top 1% of income earners, who don’t actually earn their income from work, they earn their income from assets,” said Van den Heever. “If that argument applied, it would apply to them as well as to everybody else.”

There is no evidence, however, that a BIG creates increased dependency for people at lower-income levels, he said.

“What you’re largely doing [by providing a BIG] is — if you’re doing it progressively — improving somebody’s agency to participate effectively within society,” explained Van Den Heever. “But remove them, place them under incredible stress, and they will not be able to exercise appropriate agency — they will just be in a survivalist mode.”

This article was first published on the Daily Maverick website. 

Ramaphosa will build trust if he opens up about the theft at his game farm

22 June 2022 - Professor Mzukisi Qobo

In South Africa, leadership failures and the denigration of ethics have undermined our concept as a nation.

The sense of who we are, what we believe and what gives us collective pride is something that we can no longer grasp or imagine with confidence. 

The Irish political scientist, Benedict Anderson, talks about nations as “imagined communities”. Such collective imagination imbues nations with myths and a healthy dose of pride that fuels social and economic progress. 

Stirring collective imaginations and energies towards a positive end is one of the defining features of great leaders. 

What enables leaders to do this is their ability to cultivate connectedness based on trust and shared interests between them and those they lead. Citizens can only trust leaders when they feel a sense of proximity, real or imagined, with them. When societies perceive a divergence between their interests and that of their leaders, confidence erodes, and a chasm of mistrust opens up between the leaders and the public. 

Since the democratic change in South Africa, and especially at the end of the Mandela era, we have endured a series of leadership disappointments in ways that cut deep and scar our collective concept as a nation. 

In its more than 25 years of existence as a democracy, South Africa has had only fleeting moments of superb leadership, the kind of leadership that elevates the public spirit, enriches the ethical quality of society and flickers the hope of economic progress. 

Such moments were evident during the embracing of the constitutional order and nation-building during Nelson Mandela’s era, a period of high economic growth and the African Renaissance project under president Thabo Mbeki, and when President Cyril Ramaphosa stopped president Jacob Zuma’s state capture project in its track and pulled the country back from the brink. 

During those phases, when we saw a light of hope, there were also intractable tendencies that contained seeds of institutional decay. These tendencies included the arms deals corruption case that began under the watch of Mandela’s presidency and haunted the Mbeki presidency, an unfinished business because some of the politically powerful perpetrators are yet to be prosecuted. 

The Zuma era of state capture was particularly corrosive because it set a new — and much lower — standard of what is acceptable in public leadership and ethical conduct. At the end of Zuma’s tenure, the only credential for leadership was simply to be slightly better than Zuma, a dismally low bar. As long as you are not stealing from the public coffers, you are considered fit and proper for leadership, according to this fallen standard. Leadership is now a stampede of the average.

This erosion of standards has also filtered into the bureaucracy at various levels of government. 

At this rate, it will be much harder to establish a new framework of ethical leadership in the government, because many who, under normal circumstances, would judge themselves not qualified for leadership will now be convinced that they are worthy giants. 

This debasement of leadership virtue counts among the worst legacies the previous administration has left us with since the onset of democracy. 

But we have new challenges to leadership, such as the recent events of criminality on Ramaphosa’s farm and its implications for ethics and leadership in the country. 

It has been widely reported that there was a theft in the president’s property that the public did not know about for two years, which has raised a dizzying amount of speculation. 

There are unanswered questions about the source of the foreign currency stolen from the property and whether this was declared under the South African Reserve Bank regulations and speculation that various individuals may have used the president’s property as an avenue for laundering their money and that tax laws could have been breached either by the sellers or punters in the game industry or both. 

These are matters under investigation by law enforcement agencies, and the law can grind slowly as fragments of leads and evidence are painstakingly pieced together.

Aside from what the law enforcement authorities may conclude, the president has a social contract with the citizens. The public has a certain expectation of how he ought to conduct himself. They want to know that they can trust him. 

If the president has erred, they want him to be candid so they can find it in themselves to reconcile with him and have proper closure rather than tarry in suspense. The cloud of smoke and silence is not helping to rebuild trust and may instead risk creating an unnecessary blot on the legacy of the president.

There is a level of esteem with which Ramaphosa is held in society even outside the political office. Most people know that he was a businessman when he took office and that he is wealthy because of his commercial enterprises that are not entangled in the state. 

Very few people consider the unlikely possibility that the money on the president’s property is a result of proceeds from corruption. 

 It is not about the theft of public money that disturbs those who trust him and who are genuinely asking tough questions. 

Rather, what is of great concern is the ethics of his dual role as a businessman and president and his perceived lack of transparency and accountability on the more specific questions that the public has rightly raised about events that took place after his money was stolen. 

These incidents and how the president eventually responds to them — and not what the law enforcement agents find — will be one of the country’s significant tests of leadership and ethics.

He must choose whether he wants to be remembered by history as a cattle auctioneer or as one of the finest leaders who not only turned the country from the brink but set it on a path to prosperity. 

If the latter, he may need to use all his energies to run the country, especially given the difficult economic times it is going through, and work on honing his legacy. He must close the door to private auctions until the end of his term.

Where to from here? In search of new pathways to renewing leadership and values, we must hold on to radical pragmatism and not shirk our responsibility to squeeze the president hard for accountability and transparency by appealing to his conscience — but stopping short of taking the pressure to its logical conclusion, namely, to call for him to step down, precisely because we are facing a precipice as a country and many of those baying for his blood are vultures in the garb of radical economic transformation. 

Those implicated in state capture activities will be keen to weaken Ramaphosa or force him out prematurely. If they succeed, they will set the ground to further erode independent institutions in the same manner they did after the recall of Mbeki in 2007. 

These revelations about the theft that took place on the president’s farm have conveniently come at the time when the governing party is gearing itself up for its December conference and the Zondo commission is releasing its explosive reports on state capture. 

When leaders avoid public scrutiny, their actions negatively shape public ethics and conceptions of leadership. The president must rebuild public trust in his leadership. The best way to do so is by being candid about the events that took place on his farm two years ago. 

This article first appeared on the M&G website.

Statement: Role of universities as public interlocutors of dialogue

9 July 2022 - Senior Executive Team

Universities have an important role to play in upholding democracy, in speaking truth to power, and in facilitating debate.

Institutions of higher learning are also crucial in providing a platform for diverse voices to be heard.

For 100 years, Wits has participated in the intellectual debates of the day which have enabled robust engagement between parties and entities with differing views, ideas, and ideologies.

As an institution, we remain committed to:

• academic freedom, autonomy, accountability, tolerance of difference of opinion, and transparency,
• democracy, justice, equality, and freedom from racism and sexism as enshrined in the Constitution,
• promoting freedom of enquiry and the search for knowledge and truth,
• fostering a culturally diverse, intellectually stimulating and harmonious environment within which there is vigorous critical exchange and communication, and
• freedom of speech and public debate, through facilitating dialogue and interaction between different parties, with the goal of increasing mutual respect and trust, amongst others. 

It was in this context that we invited the Minister of Public Enterprises, Mr Pravin Gordhan to speak on campus at a public event on the Reform and Governance of State-Owned Enterprises, as part of its efforts to discuss critical issues around governance and public policy. The Minister completed his speech and was then regrettably heckled during the Q&A session. Rather than engaging constructively, a few attendees made derogatory remarks and began shouting and insulting the Minister, thus not allowing him to respond to questions, which led to the facilitator ending proceedings. Notwithstanding the frustrations that everyone feels regarding the current energy crisis, the nature of the engagement subsequent to the delivery of the speech was not constructive.

As this was a public event open to all, including students from other universities, the University is in the process of reviewing the video footage in order to determine the next course of action.

The University will continue to encourage critical debate and the tolerance of diverse views, whilst providing an opportunity for different voices to be heard in a respectful manner. 

Thank you

SENIOR EXECUTIVE TEAM

Can SA afford the Basic Income Grant?

25 August 2022 -

Adjunct Professor Alex van den Heever contributed to an ongoing debate on the Basic Income Grant.

Watch the interview here https://www.cnbcafrica.com/media/6309979976112/ that took place on CNBA Africa. 

Step-aside issue set to dominate policy conference and influence ANC leadership

28 July 2022 -

Associate Professor William Gumede talks about the ANC’s policy conference, which prepares for the organisation’s national conference in December.

Sunday Times podcast: In this episode host Mike Siluma spoke to Gumede and Sunday Times political reporter Kgothatso Madisa about the significance of the ANC’s policy conference in 2022.

Listen to the podcast:

https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2022-07-28-podcast-step-aside-issue-set-to-dominate-policy-conference-and-influence-anc-leadership/ 

How do you stop a hospital heist? Appoint a plunder-proof board

18 August 2022 - Adjunct Professor Alex van den Heever

Theft-proof hospital boards must be set up to hire and fire the heads of hospitals, and to hold them accountable.

• The way South Africa’s health sector is governed leaves hospitals exposed to corruption. Hospital chief executive officers (CEOs) are political appointments, and so are the people at the accountability bodies, such as the Office of Health Standards Compliance, that are set up to hold the executives responsible. 
• CEOs are responsible for making sure the hospital is financially sustainable and to make sure it delivers good quality care to the community. But this won’t happen as long as the wrong people are chosen for the job. 

If you park a car in Hillbrow, leave the doors open and the key in the ignition, it’ll be stolen in no time. 

There’s nothing shocking about that, it’s the natural outcome in an area with such a high crime rate. 

Similarly, nobody should be surprised when the country’s state hospitals fall prey to corruption.

We’ve left them exposed to a badly designed governance structure for nearly 30 years.  

Chief executive officers (CEOs) at hospitals are chosen by the member of the executive council (MEC) for health in their province. 

This lets politicians deploy cabals that are in control of human resources, procurement and licensing for facilities. CEOs control some of the decisions about which equipment and medicines should be bought, but the provincial health department often has the final say when it comes to approving payments.  

Once they get the job, the CEO is in charge of buying equipment, hiring and firing staff, making sure the facility operates in a sustainable way, and providing good quality care. 

But that won’t happen as long as the wrong people are chosen for these positions — whether they’re unfit because they’re unqualified, or because they’re dishonest. 

If anything goes wrong, it’s only the head of department (HOD), who is invariably a political appointment as well, that can remove a CEO. This governance configuration ensures that honest and hardworking staff are insecure and more likely to face removal, while the corrupt are protected from the consequences of their misconduct. 

The showdown between doctors, the community, and the CEO at the rural Eastern Cape Zithulele District Hospital, is one example of what can happen when systems go wrong.

The hospital’s CEO Nolubabalo Fatyela (appointed in 2021) ordered the facility to turn patients away if they don’t have a referral letter from a primary healthcare facility, the Daily Maverick reports. 

Even though that’s how the public health system is supposed to work in theory, the move upended a years-long commitment by Zithulele staff not to refuse anyone care, since people often have to travel from far-flung areas to get to the hospital for help as so many clinics in the province are dysfunctional.

The Eastern Cape health department backed Fatyela even as rubber bullets hailed down on people outside the hospital who were protesting the changes. The embattled CEO was only transferred in late July along with clinical manager Ben Gaunt, who ran an HIV nonprofit based at the facility (the Jabulani Rural Health Foundation) before Fatyela closed it down. 

Treatment policies at the hospital could still be reversed, but the community’s trust will be much harder to win back, and the conflict has already resulted in a drop in the number of outpatients treated there. 

This is a tragedy that will repeat at other facilities if South Africa doesn’t change the way hospitals are run: they need theft-proof boards to hire and supervise CEOs instead.  

“Theft-proof boards” may read like an oxymoron, but there are ways to do it. For starters, here’s why the current system isn’t working. 

Firstly, patronage systems run far too deep for any amount of cash to fix the health system.

The health sector is haemorrhaging money. 

The Gauteng health department, for example, has a serious illegal spending habit. 

The department racked up R3.8-billion in irregular expenditure in 2020/21, which is more than double the amount from the previous year. 

Irregular expenditure is a category that describes spending that flouts South Africa’s legal supply chain processes, and it’s used as an indicator of corruption. 

By way of comparison, the Western Cape department of health only had R82-million in irregular expenditure for the entire period from 2016/17 to 2020/21. 

Over the same period the Gauteng department spent R11.7-billion illegally. 

That means there’s either no capacity to fix this, or no wish to do so — and definitely no fear of the consequences. 

If more funding won’t help, it means that we need to overhaul the governance framework that influences the selection of leaders in the system. 

That’s the second issue: currently, politicians decide who fills the top hospital jobs while they also determine who heads up supervisory bodies such as the Office of Health Standards Compliance and other regulators, which have been established to protect the public from misgovernment. 

Unfortunately, this approach has exposed all parts of the health sector to the perverse dynamics associated with patronage politics. Political “leaders” get selected through the exercise of patronage derived from the theft of resources from the state. 

So it doesn’t matter how many checks and balances there are in place to prevent corruption, theft of health sector funds is inescapable — as is a drop in the quality of care patients get. 

At one tertiary hospital, for instance, the contract for hospital beds was awarded to a company that was offering bad quality products at double the price of its competitors, a clinical director told researchers for a study published in the journal, Health Policy and Planning, in 2016. 

One of the beds broke while a patient was undergoing a caesarean section, and she cracked her skull. 

The systemic underperformance in South Africa’s public health system shows that such incidents are a daily occurance, with terrible consequences for everyone dependent on the public health system. 

Who should choose the leaders?

It is possible to set up a trustworthy board in a “low-trust society” like South Africa where people have very little faith in the government and each other.

The way hospital boards are currently structured is, however, not the answer. Provinces already have the power to write the laws that would govern such bodies in a meaningful way, but they’ve done very little with it. 

Provincial laws still permit hospital CEOs and other key personnel to be political appointments and the ineffectual boards don’t have any powers, other than a mandate to act as a link between the hospital staff and the community.  

The Gauteng health department started to recruit board members to oversee state hospitals in 2017, but the project hasn’t worked. Four years on, only a third of the 277 state hospitals in the province had a functioning board, according to the provincial department’s 2020/2021 annual report.  

The posts that were filled were abandoned for that year anyway as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns. None of the hospital boards in the province were active, because members are volunteers, and they weren’t designated as “essential workers” during the stricter levels of lockdown. 

But there are ways to correct the problem. 

For starters, laws must be drawn up to give an independent supervisory board the power to appoint, remove and supervise hospital CEOs. 

People should only be considered for a board position once they’re deemed “fit-and-proper” and equipped to supervise a complex organisation such as a hospital. 

Having a postgraduate degree and appropriate work experience would be essential to ensure that they have sufficient expert professional knowledge and critical thinking skills to carry out their duties.

Some red flags should immediately disqualify candidates. For example, if they were on a board of a company within two years of it going bankrupt, been charged or convicted of a crime and having been dismissed from any position for dishonesty.

Once people are appointed to the board, there shouldn’t be any chance for them to skirt their responsibilities. Improper behaviour should also result in someone being investigated or sacked, say, if they don’t recuse themselves from matters in which they have a conflict of interest. 

Who should be appointed?

The team that appoints people needs to make sure there’s a good mix of skills on the board, including expertise in medicine, management and business. 

Board members can’t have any conflicts with the hospital they’re overseeing. That means no doctors, nurses, or union representatives from the facility should be allowed to serve on hospital boards. 

These groups should serve on consulting teams but they shouldn’t hold the reins.

Where will the hospital boards fit into South Africa’s existing health structures?

South Africa’s health system is divided into 52 districts, each with its own health council.

This structure is supposed to oversee the services in the area and relay that information to the provincial health council. They are purely advisory with little real influence on events. Such councils are also made up of political appointees. 

The provincial health councils can draw on information from these councils to shape aspects of that district’s health system including the budget, treatment targets and staffing drives. In practice, however, they add very little value to strategies and plans. 

Plus, these councils are too far away from individual facilities to decide which services they should provide and how they should do it. 

Instead, their role should be to determine wider strategies. The province could, for example, say that new HIV infections must come down. The hospital board would then negotiate for the funding, equipment and staff to make sure they can roll out the right prevention medicines and educational projects to reach that goal. 

In Australia, provincial offices have five-year agreements with hospitals which specify what they want facilities to achieve. That way, facilities become the independent delivery arm of the strategy that is drawn up at the provincial and district level — and hospitals boards, and CEOs, are held accountable.

Each province (called a state in Australia) also has a five-year contract with the national government that sets out the targets for the state.  Each province will look a bit different depending on the specific health issues they have to solve.

So the system would look more or less like this: the CEO has a contract with the board, and the board has a contract with the province. The province, in turn, has an agreement with the national health department. 

Who will fill all the oversight boards?

There’s more than enough expertise in South Africa to equip the country with good quality boards for most public hospitals.  

The country’s network of school governing bodies is proof that people want to be involved in the governance of public institutions, such as schools and health facilities, that have a direct impact on the quality of their lives.

School governing bodies consist of parents, teachers and community members and the bodies have the power to, for instance, determine a school’s policy on language and religion. Some also manage school finances. 

In areas with less expertise, one hospital board could supervise the CEOs in a number of health districts and hospitals. 

But the main goal must be this: to break the link between political officials and the leaders responsible for the delivery of health services to citizens. The structures of accountability must be brought closer to the served population. 

None of what I’ve explained here is new: these exact policy changes were proposed back in 1996 already as part of the Hospital Strategy Project, a report that the national health department commissioned in order to improve the country’s state health services at the end of apartheid. 

In 2002, the Commission of Inquiry into a Comprehensive System of Social Security for South Africa, recommended this type of hospital governance — again. 

But by then, the patronage systems were already in place, and there was no reason for politicians to change anything. 

As a consequence, the National Health Act of 2003 wrote the patronage model into law, and established corruption and performance failures as an everyday part of the health sector. 

It’s still possible to change the way the health system is governed. In fact, it’s something I believe South Africa can achieve fairly soon, even within a period of five years. 

But without any real commitment from the government, the burden falls on community members to ask more of their local governments. 

In the end, policy change is not only up to individual politicians; public discussion and intellectual inputs count too. Citizens can and must demand that a commitment to a redesigned health service becomes a prerequisite for any politician to gain or keep power. 

The alternative is failure.

This article was first published on Bhekisisa.org

WITS ORACLE MODERNISATION PROJECT: iWIts upgrade

10 October 2022 -

Importance notice for all staff and students

Wits ICT would like to inform all users of the new downtime for the Oracle EBS (iWits) upgrade, scheduled from the 7th of October (6pm) until the 13th of October 2022. The use of the Oracle suite of products including student self-service and online applications will be unavailable during the downtime period, Internet and e-mail will still be functional. For any queries or concerns, please log a ticket on WitsICT ISM or contact ICT Service Delivery at ithelp@wits.ac.za.

Mass trauma is leaving everyone broken

20 October 2022 - Associate Professor William Gumede

We need to teach self-love, self-esteem, and agency assertation at all levels of South African society to rebuilt the state and foster democracy.

South Africa has gone about the wrong way in rebuilding the state, fostering democracy, implementing development projects, and combating societal violence, and the results are clear, a failing state, poor development outcomes and frightening levels of everyday violence.

Rebuilding a state, fostering democracy, securing inclusive development, and boosting peace in countries coming from traumatic experiences, such as apartheid, racism and civil war, need different approaches to conventional ones – used in South Africa since the end of formal apartheid in 1994.

The challenge is, mass trauma leaves individuals, families, and communities so broken, many struggle to engage fully in the life of intimate relationships, democracy, the state, development initiatives, business and in the workplace. This makes state and democracy building difficult, undermines development efforts, stunts entrepreneurship and many lead to social breakdown. Worse, unless this is tackled it may continue to be passed on to future generations. 

At the heart of it is that these authoritarian regimes leave many victims with the “feeling that the self has no foundation” anymore. It leaves many with pervasive, deep-seated, and persistent feelings of angst, insecurity, and fear of the future. It batters self-worth, disfigures the sense of self, and ultimately makes it difficult for individuals to reach their full potential. It leads to inferiority complexes.

The corruption, enrichment of the few and uncaring attitude by many ANC and government leaders, which have left expectant former disadvantaged communities stuck in chronic poverty, hopelessness, and violent surroundings, have reinforced the sense of insecurity among many of them.

At the individual level it has led to inferiority complexes, self-hatred, lack of self-love, low self-esteem, low tolerance, not feeling worthy, high levels of anger, resentment and bitterness. Susanne M. Dillmann writes that trauma even distorts the ability to give or receive love.

Victims of colonial, apartheid, chronic poverty, civil war, and failed state trauma frequently live for the now because no imaginable future appears possible – and what they have, their lives and property can be taken from them in a moment, in the past by autocratic governments, local criminal gangs or vigilantes from other ethnic groups.

Societies emerging from trauma may fall into victimhood more easily — blaming former colonial powers (often rightly so), other communities that look different to them and foreigners (which is why we see the high levels of xenophobia in SA) — rather than pro-actively building a new future.

Crucially, it destroys the agency of individuals: the ability to act on one’s own will, despite the constraints of belief systems one has grown up with, others’ perceptions of one and a limiting environment. 

Unless state-building, development, empowerment, and workplace development programs tackles the deep-seated insecurity trauma leaves victims with, it will not only impact the individual, undermining their health, bringing toxicity into their personal relations, impairing their decision-making, it will also bring toxicity into the state, development and empowerment programs and the organisations traumatised individuals work for.

Leaders or employees within the state, democratic institutions, private sector, civil society, or political parties with low self-esteem, lack individual agency and with inferiority complexes, are very likely to make toxic, short-term, self-interested decisions, which goes against the public interest, which will undermine development, democracy building and social order.  

Restoring the agency, the insecurity, and their sense of self, of victims of oppression is one of the key conditions for democracy building, sustainable development, and violent and unsocial behaviour, follow terror regimes. However, very little has been done by the South African state, business and civil society to the address the lack of agency, insecurity and lack of sense of self, in the hearts of many formerly disadvantaged individuals.

In the vacuum, the danger has been that former disadvantaged individuals often deal with their insecurity, by embracing tribalism, populism, and xenophobia. It has also led to violent crime, drug, and alcohol abuse. Many has withdrawn from civic life. Many others have low levels of tolerance for differences.

Victims often vote for political movements and leaders from their own ethnic group, who they shared struggle history with or who make violent threats against perceived “enemies”, whether other ethnic groups, non-nationals, or big business, even if these movements and leaders are corrupt, incompetent or act against the victims’ interests.

Victims therefore regularly vote against their own interests – trauma bond voting: therefore, repeating cycles of voting for incompetence, corruption and for the continuation of poverty, which in turn reinforce the negative impact of colonialism and apartheid, and their own individual insecurity.

Democrats would want the insecurity to be filled by new democratic values, mores, and cultures – and by the best (most democratic) elements of cultural, religious, and spiritual values. All organisations – the state, educational institutions, religious, sport and cultural organisations, business, civil society, and the media, will have to actively help to tackle this mass insecurity left by our traumatic past.

Traditional, cultural, communal, and religious beliefs which undermine human rights, dignity and equality must be jettisoned. New beliefs, traditions and cultures based on human rights, equality, and dignity, must replace ones that are harmful. Patriarchy, based on inequality in gender, social class, and age, which operates as an ideology in all African countries must be gotten rid off.   

Self-love, self-esteem, and agency assertation will have to be taught at all levels of society, whether nursery workplaces or sport clubs, given the reality of broken families – where it is unlikely to be nurtured.

This means that all other areas of human interaction - social, religious, cultural, and political organisations – should include self-love, agency assertation and self-esteem, as part of their induction, training, and well-ness programmes.

Anti-poverty strategies must be multidimensional in that they must include self-esteem, self-love, and self-care. It should be compulsory to have self-care, self-esteem, self-love as part of all government empowerment, public works, and community building programmes. Recipients of government social grants, financial support and scholarships must be compelled to attend civic, democracy and self-esteem, self-love, and self-care programmes.

It is crucial that there are more platforms where ordinary people can talk to others about their individual trauma, tell their stories and reflect with others on what happened to affirm their visibility. The state should consider deploying an army of community counsellors – which could also be a practical form of job creation - across the country to provide support.

Simple localised community-driven memorials, monuments and histories with local stories should be rolled out. Practices such as conscious breathing, meditation and volunteering are crucial tools to build self-love, self-esteem and agency that should be introduced more widely across society. We need a civil society movement to restore self-love, self-esteem, and individual agency – through co-ordinated campaigns to foster these across the country.

The post-apartheid state must treat citizens with dignity, care, and efficiency. Currently, the post-apartheid state is in many instances treating disadvantaged communities with similar disdain as the apartheid state did. 

Delivering quality public services, making the country safe, creating job, business, and empowerment opportunities, and strengthening democracy, will help boost the self-esteem, self-love, and individual agency of the former oppressed.

Lastly, it is crucial that ordinary citizens stop voting based on the past, based on struggle credentials and based on ethnic, colour and party solidarity. They must vote on merit – for those who are honest, competent, and compassionate, even if they do not share the colour, religion or past with one – or they, and their offspring will stay stuck in feelings of insecurity, inferiority complexes and lack of agency for generations.

This article is based on a keynote address to Breathwork Africa’s Umoya Breathfest, held at the Cradle of Humankind, Johannesburg, 18-22 September 2022.

Do no harm - 5 steps a researcher should take

12 October 2022 - Professor Jasper Knight

Researchers have a number of responsibilities when embarking on their work - not least of all to ensure participants are not harmed and are fully heard.

Academic research is not always abstract or theoretical. Nor does it take place in a vacuum. Research in many different disciplines is often grounded in the real world; it aims to understand and address problems that affect people and the environment, such as climate change, poverty, migration or natural hazards.

This means researchers often have to interact with and collect data from a wide range of different people in government, industry and civil society. These are known as research participants.

Over the last 50 years, the relationship between researcher and participant has fundamentally changed. Previously, research participants were viewed merely as objects of study. They had little input into the research process or its outcomes. Now, participants are increasingly viewed as collaborative partners and co-creators of knowledge. There are also many ways in which they can engage with researchers. This shift has been largely driven by the need for research that is relevant to today’s world as well as greater recognition of the diversity of people and cultures, and the internet, social media and other communication tools.

In this context, ethical research practices are more important than ever. However, guidelines and standards for research ethics vary between country and institution. Expectations may also vary between disciplines. So, it’s a good time to identify the key issues in human research ethics that transcend institutional or disciplinary differences.

Issues to consider

I am a long-time chair of one my institutions’ research ethics committees, and I do research ethics training for researchers and managers across southern Africa. I have also published on research ethics. Based on this experience and drawing from other work done on the topic, I suggest there are five critical ethics issues for researchers to consider.

Managing vulnerability: Research participants, especially in the developing world, may be potentially vulnerable to coercion, exploitation and the exertion of soft power.

This vulnerability may arise because of systemic social, economic, political and cultural inequalities, which are particularly marked in developing countries. And it may be amplified by inequalities in healthcare and education. Some groups in any society – among them minors, people with disabilities, prisoners, orphans, refugees, and those with stigmatised conditions like HIV and AIDS or albinism – may be more vulnerable than others.

This issue can be managed by considering what the participant group is like and by making sure that the data collection process does not increase any existing vulnerabilities.

Obtaining informed consent: This is a key precondition for participation in any study. Potential participants should first be informed about the nature of the study and the terms and conditions of their participation. That includes details about anonymity, confidentiality and their right to withdraw.

The researcher then needs to ensure that the potential participant understands this information and has the opportunity to ask questions. This should be done in a language and using words that the person can understand. After these steps are taken, the participant can give informed consent. Informal (verbal or any other non-written) consent is more appropriate if participants are not literate or are particularly vulnerable.

Protecting people: The overarching principle of protecting research participants was articulated in the landmark Belmont Report. The report emerged from a national commission in the US in the 1970s to consider research ethics principles. It called for researchers in any study to demonstrate non-maleficence (the principle of not doing harm) and ensure that they protect both participants and their data.

This can be done at different stages through the research process: by decreasing the potential for risk or harm through careful study design; by providing support or counselling services to participants during or after data collection; and by maintaining confidentiality and anonymity in data collection and reporting. Finally, personal data must be protected or de-identified if they are being stored for later analysis.

Managing risk: Potential sources of risk or harm to participants should, as far as possible, be identified and mitigated when the study is being designed. Risk may arise in any study, either at the time of data collection or afterwards. Sometimes this is unexpected, such as where data collection becomes more dangerous due to civil unrest or under Covid-19 restrictions.

It is important that researchers provide the details of support or counselling service for participants in case these are needed. Any trade-offs between risk and benefits can be considered through a risk-benefits analysis. But researchers should be realistic about any potential benefits that may result from their study.

Championing human rights: Researchers have responsibilities: to their disciplines, funders, institutions and participants. This means they should not merely be passive analysers of data. Instead they should be positive role models in society by seeking solutions, advocating for change and upholding human rights and social justice through their actions.

Research activities, especially those involving participants, should address and find solutions for local and global problems. They ought to result in positive societal and environmental outcomes. This should be the context for all types of research activities in a 21st century world.

Making it happen

Increasingly, there are national and international codes of research ethics, guiding researchers in different fields. An example is the 2010 Singapore Statement on Research Integrity. It emphasises the principles of honesty, accountability, professional courtesy and fairness, and good stewardship of data. These are the characteristics not just of ethical researchers, but of good researchers too.

These principles and processes should make research less risky and protect the rights of participants by building trust between researchers and participants. These principles can also help in making research more transparent, accountable and equitable – critical in an increasingly divided and unequal world.

Jasper Knight, Professor of Physical Geography, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

WSG Professor receives award for best supervision

10 October 2022 -

No stranger to awards, Professor Pundy Pillay adds another one to his mantle

Wits School of Governance's most senior economist, Pillay stands out particularly for his successes in postgraduate supervision, for which he received the Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Award for Supervision - the first time this award has been made.

Pillay has twice been given an accolade as Best Supervisor in the Commerce, Law and Management Faculty.

Read more about Professor Pillay

Do you want to know what a PhD journey is like at the School? Learn more from Professor Pillay.

Applications deadline extended

21 October 2022 -

We have extended the deadline for some of our academic programmes to Tuesday, 15 November 2022.

Keeping it simple: monetary policy, growth and jobs in South Africa

1 November 2022 - Mr Lesetja Kganyago, Governor of the South African Reserve Bank

Public lecture: Central banks are important, long-standing expressions of a universal need for stability in social and economic affairs.

Their goals centre on achieving some definition of price stability, and in more recent decades, their methods have fixed primarily on inflation targeting.[1] 

Where they directly target inflation, central banks’ primary tool is the policy rate, normally defined as a very short-term or overnight borrowing rate. At this rate, banks can borrow from the central bank to address overnight needs for liquidity and this marginal borrowing rate sets the basis for all other lending rates in the economy. A secondary policy tool is a blend of communications about current economic conditions and the policy rate level.  A third encompasses the requirements and flexibility of the policy framework – the target itself and how it is measured.

In more recent years, and under the impact of deflationary conditions, a few advanced economy central banks have adapted their approaches with secondary targets, such as inflation averages over time and unemployment rates.[2]^,[3]  

Today, I want to spend some time unpacking why it is useful for the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), and most emerging economies generally, to target inflation, and why achieving that goal ensures that monetary policy includes economic growth and job creation. 

I will look at recent changes in policy targets for the moment, before returning to current conditions and the relevance of jobs and growth targets for monetary policy. 

Financial distress, deflation and policy exceptionalism

It is useful to start with the global economic shocks of the past 15 years and their monetary policy implications. 

While the global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic had different origins, the economic policy responses to them were similar.  Advanced economies reacted to both by dropping interest rates as far as possible and using quantitative easing (QE).  During the GFC, QE programmes kept asset prices of various kinds higher than they would otherwise have been, preventing asset price deflation from causing even worse economic outcomes.[4]  During the pandemic, QE additionally supported spending, as mobility and many face-to-face economic transactions were curtailed, while also protecting financial institutions.

Job protection was also a major focus for major central banks and job creation became a measure of their policy effectiveness. More liquidity would help keep interest rates low, enabling firms to keep paying wages and to restart the economy.

What impact have these efforts made on policy frameworks? Certainly, where countries faced collapsing growth and weaker inflation together, they could all move policy in the same direction.  However, when the GFC ended and the pandemic ended, not all faced the same policy trade-offs.  The GFC ushered in an extended period of ongoing QE and low rates, but this was not true for most emerging market economies.  The end of the pandemic has been different.  It has thrown us all back into a pre-Great Moderation world in which inflation is super-sensitive to supply and demand shocks.

In particular, and with the benefit of hindsight, the current global inflation finds much of its origin in a too aggressive use of QE and in negative real rates as the pandemic started to wind down and economic activity rose.  As in emerging economies post-GFC, many countries now, post-pandemic, find their output gaps to be badly measured and giving off incorrect signals about their policy stance. 

As, and if, the current surge in global inflation wanes, some advanced economies may very well return to lower inflation for structural and demographic reasons.  These central banks may retain other metrics in their policy frameworks – such as economic growth rates or the prices of specific assets (e.g. house prices in New Zealand), or in the case of the United States (US), employment levels. 

But it is highly unlikely that emerging market economies will decide to change their policy frameworks. Many had reverted to much higher inflation even before the pandemic eased, while others, like South Africa, are now caught up in broader inflation.   In that more normal context, the standard monetary policy approaches make as much of a positive impact on economic growth and jobs as they can.  However, the real solutions to faster growth and job creation lie in other policy domains. 

Why the difference between advanced and emerging economies?  Why might the rules governing objectives differ somewhat?  The answer has to do with pure economic theory, actual experience, and with the different economic conditions − cyclical and structural − faced by different central banks.

To begin, it should be clear that for quite some time, essentially since the early 2000s, central banks of advanced economies have faced stubbornly low inflation, despite low interest rates, for a range of structural reasons related primarily to demographics and high savings. So, when they took an accommodative stance to raise growth and employment levels during the Great Moderation of the 2000s and the period into the pandemic, inflation still remained modest.  

As the pandemic hit, because inflation remained low, there was as yet no contradiction between the inflation targets and boosting growth.  Policy expansion could help get people who had dropped out of the labour market back in.  Job creation was efficient.  Expansionary stances worked well with strategies that lowered the cost to firms of retaining people in jobs. 

In South Africa’s case, the pandemic also facilitated expansionary policy, precisely because inflation had trended lower from 2017.  This allowed us to lower policy rates sharply in 2020 to confront the shorter-term damage done to the economy. The repurchase (repo) rate averaged 6.7% between 2017 and early 2020, before dropping to 3.5% in March/April of that year. 

A deeper dive into jobs and growth targets

As in advanced economies, our expansion did little to immediately bring back jobs.  Many were lost as lockdowns were extended, while some new ones were created in various services linked to the shift in consumption patterns.  Expansion did support the recovery of both pre-pandemic spending patterns and many of the jobs associated with them.  Of course, there is also much further to go, as some sectors remain constrained.

The open question is whether sustained expansion in an environment of high debt levels and rising inflation could live up to the hopes of those that argue for a ‘jobs’ mandate for monetary policy.  The short answer is ‘no’, but let me explain why.

Our basic problem is that while growth creates job, inflation does not.  Not only does this fatally challenge the belief many hold in the existence of usable Phillips curves, but it also limits what macroeconomic policy can achieve in terms of job creation.  As we have noted many times in the past, the solutions to our unemployment problem lie well outside the realm of monetary policy, and in fact the failure to employ those solutions directly limits the positive contribution monetary policy can play.

Let’s look at what the historical data tell us about Phillips curves.  We see two correlations.  One is that as inflation rises, unemployment rates rise.  This characterises the late 1990s and into the latter half of 2003.  In 2002/03, for example, inflation reached double digits even while employment was falling – when unemployment breached 30%.

From about 2003 to 2007, however, we see another correlation, where inflation falls and employment rises.  After the GFC, from about 2011 to 2019, we see something different.  Inflation first came off the highs of the GFC and then accelerated back up to around 6%.  There was some initial recovery in jobs, but as time went on, the acceleration was increasingly located in the public sector rather than the private sector.  Economic growth weakened quite sharply from 2013 to 2015 and then more gradually slowed through to the pandemic.  From 2017 onwards, inflation decelerated and so did job creation.  

The GFC and the pandemic were relatively clear instances when policy could respond in textbook ways to support the economy and see-through inflation shocks.  Before and after these crises, we see more transparently the longer-term relationships between inflation and job creation.  First, inflation does not create jobs.[5]  And second, on balance, expansionary policy prompts more inflation than growth or job creation.  This tells us that South Africa’s Phillips curve is near-vertical at a low rate of positive economic growth.[6]

This is strong evidence that the basic job creation mechanism is being impeded by things other than aggregate demand.

This adverse relationship between policy expansion and inflation kicks in when employment levels rise above what is called the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU.  Evidence for South Africa shows that this happens when our unemployment rate is still very high.  This is exacerbated by level changes in the NAIRU caused by structural impediments to job creation.  For instance, load-shedding or higher transport costs indirectly increase the cost of creating jobs and push up the NAIRU.[7] 

A range of long-standing factors contribute to our very high NAIRU.  Perhaps the most important of these is where people live and the cost of supplying their labour, and the skills they have compared to their cost.[8]  Regulatory costs of our economy also feature in various ways, including housing, where businesses can ply their trade, and compliance − which is a much larger burden for small and medium-sized businesses compared to that of larger firms.[9] 

Part of the difficulty is that we have done little to make it easier for less-skilled workers to find jobs, or to make it less costly to employ them.[10]

Another part of the failing job creation machine is simply weaker real economic growth compared to the 2000s, when job creation was quite strong. 

This should not, however, lead us down the path of grasping at another seemingly ‘easy’ answer.  Higher inflation will not give us higher sustainable growth.

Instead, higher inflation undermines short-run growth by increasing interest rates on borrowing, affecting consumers’ buying on credit and business owners who want to use credit to invest. Higher interest costs reduce short-run cash flow, reducing all future consumption spending.

While surprise inflation reduces the real value of the existing stock of debt owed, the trade-off is lower economic growth in subsequent years.  The short-run benefit of a surprise lower interest rate is transformed by higher inflation into a long-run cost to growth. 

When inflation is higher than that of our trading partners, we suffer a continuous loss of competitiveness.  High inflation overall also generally means higher inflation for poorer and less-skilled South Africans than for the wealthy. This increases inequality further and worsens the already low standard of living for those households, making them costlier to employ. 

For a few years before the GFC in 2008, the relationship between growth and employment was better – if economic activity grew by 1%, employment grew by around 0.62%. But since then, up to 2018, each percentage point improvement in growth only gives us 0.37% more jobs.  Our low employment problem overlaps entirely with our low growth problem.

In this context, the best a central bank can do is stabilise unemployment at the rate consistent with price stability. If a central bank attempts to get unemployment below the NAIRU, the result will be larger quantities of inflation but only small and temporary quantities of jobs as the supply curve becomes more vertical. The same is true for economic growth.[11]

Assuming that most of our unemployment problem is structural, are we at least sure that the residual cyclical unemployment is being reduced by monetary policy?  Is a dual mandate better at addressing these cyclical drivers? 

At the SARB, we use an alternative measure of economic activity to the NAIRU for understanding where the economy is relative to its tipping point into more inflation or into deflation.  This is the output gap, or the distance between the possible, or potential, growth rate of the economy and the actual or realised rate of growth.[12] 

Similar to the US Federal Reserve (Fed), we use a Taylor rule to help tell us what the interest rate level should be, given the output gap and the distance between the inflation rate we want (the target) and where it currently is. [13]  The Taylor rule tells us that we should set an interest rate that includes how quickly or slowly the economy is growing, compared to the speed at which it could be growing.

If the output gap is a good representative measure of the cyclical unemployment rate, then we are fully covered – the monetary policy equation we use to get to the interest rate includes, as best we can, the relationship between those rates and employment. 

If we look at how the Fed operates, we can take further comfort in our own framework.  The Fed has an inflation target of 2%, averaged over time.  This averaging introduces some flexibility to not respond to inflation shocks that are temporary, just as in our flexible inflation-targeting framework.  But the Fed framework does not say that when unemployment rises it will aim for a higher inflation rate.  In other words, the dual mandate recognises that in the long run, the highest cyclical employment rate is consistent with low inflation.  In the policy debate at present in the US, there may be a rise in cyclical unemployment to get inflation back down and to achieve a lower sustainable unemployment rate. 

We need also to be cautious in our current circumstances.  With surging inflation in advanced economies, it is likely that the adjusted policy frameworks of recent times will shift back to simpler and clearer formulations. 

Three takeaways from this discussion stand out.  One is that inflation-targeting central banks also consider real variables such as growth and unemployment when they make monetary policy decisions. 

Second, that central banks don’t drop targeting inflation, even if they have an employment mandate.  It simply means they respect the NAIRU and discuss more directly its level and what can happen to inflation when the speed limit implied by it is exceeded.  

And third, that despite some policy innovation in recent times in some advanced economies, these may very well be scaled back to simpler frameworks.

Finally, we need to recognise, for the sake of solving our low employment problem and to keep monetary policy focused on the right things, that many issues sharply limit the transmission from policy to job creation outcomes. One is the job intensity of growth which we discussed. Another is the supply of skills that are coming into the market, and their cost. 

Some might argue that in that case, it means that monetary policy should be pushed much further and harder to get the expected growth or jobs. Unfortunately, when inefficiencies and constraints exist, pushing harder on monetary policy is like pushing the accelerator to the floor on a curvy, icy road over a mountain pass.  At present, many central banks are skidding on that ice, with global inflation sharply higher and persistent.  Even our own relatively benign recent inflation experience has become much more challenging very quickly

Keeping it simple

We have seen now that having two targets certainly does not mean double the benefit. Instead, it means that there are times and certain conditions when one policy tool helps to achieve both.  It also means that under other conditions, one tool cannot achieve both, and much of the world has now entered this territory. 

When policy becomes overloaded with too many and contradictory objectives, then negative outcomes are more likely.

As inflation rises and growth slows, a central bank that fails to respond to rising prices will face the prospect of compounding inflationary shocks.  Currencies depreciate and investment falls. [14]  

So where, in all of this, does South Africa find itself? We have not reached the ‘end’ of our policy rate space. We do not have stubbornly low or close to zero inflation.  We are experiencing rising inflation rates. Inflation expectations, for the most part, are proving to be more responsive to current inflation outcomes than we would like, and less anchored around the midpoint of our target.

If the expectations that firms and households hold for future inflation stray from the inflation target, then higher nominal wages and consumer prices are likely to emerge. In other words, once inflation expectations rise, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the central bank has a more difficult and longer-term problem on its hands. A more expansionary policy stance runs that risk by enabling first-round inflation to embed into second-round inflation.

This implies that we need to continue the normalisation of interest rates, moving them closer to the level that is consistent with more stable inflation rates and sustainable economic growth.  At present, our repo rate is at 6.25%, still below long-term levels, but rising to a more sustainable long-term level that is consistent with inflation stabilising at 4.5%. 

Conclusion

As we have discussed today, neither growth nor high inflation lead directly to job creation in our economy. Much of our employment challenge lies in encouraging the return of economic activity in sectors that have been hardest hit by the pandemic.  And we will also need to recognise that some jobs may be permanently lost as firms do things differently and as consumption patterns shift.  Other jobs will be gained, however, and permanently impacting on employment levels requires approaches that have nothing to do with monetary policy.  Just adding jobs targets will not get us there, and indeed part of our inflation problem stems from efforts to achieve such targets at a global level.

We should be careful not to add to our policy objectives in a way that surely would push us into sharply higher inflation.

If these are the primary constraints to job creation defined by the literature, and monetary policy has no impact on them, then the claim that more expansionary policies will solve the unemployment problem is simply an empty promise, backed up by little more than ideology and wishful thinking. 

We have an unemployment problem that needs more credible solutions.

Employment and growth are both limited by factors that are beyond the reach of the central bank’s toolset.

The best chance we have with monetary policy to get faster, more job-rich growth is to maintain our focus on price stability with flexible inflation targeting − a proven framework. This enables the SARB to help maintain a stable environment that is conducive to economic growth, and because credibility is high, for it to create the necessary flexibility to ignore short-term inflation shocks. 

A credible monetary policy will also keep borrowing costs lower than they would otherwise be.  This is a central benefit to long-term economic growth and job creation. When inflation rises and stays high, investment decisions are distorted towards short-term investments that carry with them short-term jobs. For this reason, low inflation is a sound developmental policy.  It encourages firms across the private and public sector to make long-term investment decisions that imply productivity growth over time.  This is critical, indeed a prerequisite, for sustainable jobs and income growth.

Consumption based on rising debt levels cannot be a sustainable growth and development strategy. 

Having faced the unique threat of the COVID-19 crisis, we confronted that challenge with relatively low stable inflation and policy rate space. We were able to soften the damage of the crisis with the policy rate, while still protecting the value of the rand, and in so doing, were able to play our part in maintaining macroeconomic stability.

Now that the global economy is recovering and inflation in many countries, including our own, is rising, we have learned from experience that we must not be tempted to loosen our grip on inflation, or to fall behind our peers as rates are normalised – the consequences would be too costly.

[1] Quite a few central banks do things differently, using various kinds of fixed exchange rate systems.  Usually, these systems are used because of high import levels and dominant trade relationships with large neighbouring economies. These latter central banks normally face very high levels of imported inflation – their own price levels are determined by price inflation coming from other often larger economies, with which they trade heavily.

[2] Inflation averaging and jobs targets are ways of indirectly targeting levels of economic activity.  Nominal gross domestic product or price level targeting are better known versions of such efforts. F Budianto, T Nakata and S Schmidt, ‘Average inflation targeting and the interest rate lower bound’, BIS Working Paper No. 852, April 2020.

[3] P Karadi and A Nakov, ‘Effectiveness and addictiveness of quantitative easing’, Journal of Monetary Economics 117, 2021, pp 1096−1117.

[4] In a few places, including Europe, quantitative easing also supported sovereign debt values and the financial systems that held much of that debt.

[5] J Fedderke and Y Liu, ‘Inflation in South Africa: an assessment of alternative inflation models’, South African Journal of Economics 86(2), 2018, pp 197−230; B Botha, L Kuhn and D Steenkamp, ‘Is the Phillips curve framework still useful for understanding inflation dynamics in South Africa?’, South African Reserve Bank Working Paper Series, WP/20/07, 2020.

[6] When vertical, any expansion in demand is constrained by supply – prices rise but not volumes and not volumes of jobs. 

[7] One older estimate of the NAIRU put it at about 25%.  A Kabundi, E Schaling and M Some, ‘Estimating a time-varying Phillips curve for South Africa’, South African Reserve Bank Working Paper 16(05), May 2016.

[8] M Leibbrandt and P Green, ‘REDI3x3 conference: Policies for inclusive growth’, February 2017. http://www.econ3x3.org/sites/default/files/articles/Leibbrandt%20%26%20Green%202017%20REDI%20conference%20on%20inclusive%20growth%20FINAL_0.pdf

[9] J R Magruder, ‘High unemployment yet few small firms: the role of centralised bargaining in South Africa’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4(3), July 2012.

[10] D Faulkner, C Loewald and K Makrelov, ‘Achieving higher growth and employment: policy options for South Africa’, ERSA Working Paper 334, 2013; C Koep, M Leibbrandt, H McEwan and I Woolard,  ‘Employment and inequality outcomes in South Africa’, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit and School of Economics: University of Cape Town, 2010.

[11] See Kabundi, Schalling and Some (2016) and Botha et al. (2020).

[12] The output gap is also measured in level terms, not only the rate of growth in gross domestic product.

[13] See, for instance, S de Jager, M Johnston and R Steinbach, ‘A revised Quarterly Projection Model for South Africa’, South African Reserve Bank Working Paper 15(3), August 2015. https://www.resbank.co.za/Lists/News%20and%20Publications/Attachments/6839/WP1503.pdf

[14] Domestic savers seek protection also, shifting saving offshore and away from assets like sovereign debt, whose real value falls as inflation rises.  When inflation rises too fast, it becomes more volatile, and veers quickly towards hyperinflation. High inflation increases inequality dramatically, undermines export industries, and with investment falling and local industries struggling, the marginal or less productive jobs are the first to be shed.

Citizens, not sitizens, please: more than ever, South Africans must take charge

1 November 2022 - Associate Professor William Gumede

We need active citizenship to show social solidarity to break out from the hopelessness, paralysis and apathy.

The disintegration of the ANC, the governing centre of South Africa’s post-apartheid dispensation, which has unleashed state failure, breakdown of rule of law and paralysing uncertainty, demands new kinds of active citizenship from privileged individuals, businesses, and civil groups, to provide the services, support, and stability to the vulnerable, the state cannot provide.

The turbulence South Africa is currently experiencing, unleashed by the breakdown of the ANC, will continue until a new governing centre is reconfigured from either part of the ANC or a new opposition party-based governing centre. This is likely to happen at the 2024 national elections, which is likely to usher in a new governing coalition – either the ANC or components of the ANC in alliance with smaller parties, or a governing coalition of opposition parties.

Sadly, this means that in the interim period, communities will have to increasingly rely on themselves with little hope of credible interventions by the state at national, provincial, or local level. The ANC government and leaders appear seemingly either unresponsive or lack the will or capacity to tackle these breakdowns, or just do not care because many reckon their voters will continue to vote for them, no matter what they do, so they do not feel under any pressure to act.

The rise in lawlessness, violence and breakdown in social order are now reaching terrifying proportions. Taxi, gang, and political violence; kidnappings of children, business leaders and public figures; and hijacking of businesses, houses and cars are every day.

The government continues to appoint deployees without the requisite skills, handover critical contracts to political connected companies without the capacity and tolerate corruption – which breaks down public services, collapse legitimate businesses and increases unemployment, which brings more cycles of state failure, breakdown of law and social disorder.

In the face of such overwhelming obstacles, ordinary South Africans, communities, businesses, and civil groups will need extraordinary doses of resilience, to overcome hopelessness, paralysis, and apathy, and to pro-actively shape their own destinies. Resilience is variously described as the ability to bounce back from setbacks, to overcome deep-seated challenges thrown into one’s path, and to be able to improvise in moments of terrifying crises, by coming up with innovative solutions.

The robustness of South Africa’s non-state sectors, such as business, civil society and media which have been competent, independent from government and staffed by capable talent, compared to the failure of the state, have boosted the overall resilience of the country. The reality is that the decline in South Africa would have been worse – if this possibility can even be imagined if it was not for the strength of the non-state sectors.

The challenge is how to empower individuals and communities to overcome hopelessness, paralysis, and apathy, and to pro-actively shape their own destinies. Covid-19 have seen active individual and corporate citizenship in action when ordinary citizens and businesses helped those more vulnerable with food, hygiene products and money.

Active citizenship will mean that ordinary citizens, with the means, time, and energy, will have to step in and contribute where they can – supporting vulnerable individuals, families, and communities, showing active citizenship.

South Africans of all colours with financial means should show greater social solidarity with disadvantaged individuals, families, and communities. Many citizens, companies and civil groups are already filling potholes, cleaning up public parks and cleaning streets. Such initiatives must continue – and extended to poorer areas also.

Skilled South Africans who have the time, could help in poorer communities. Retired professionals could teach in black schools, communities, from mathematics to rugby skills, or mentor a child in Soweto, Alexandria or Khayelitsha. For example, if they are medical doctors, they can volunteer their services, or if lawyers, can provide legal help to vulnerable individuals and communities.

Corporates should transform their empowerment and corporate social responsibility models away from giving shareholding to politically connected ANC or trade union leaders and companies, but to empower their current and former employees, local communities, and civil society organisations. Corporates should provide empowerment based on increasing the assets of disadvantaged communities as broadly as possible – building schools and houses, training the unemployed and employing larger number of young people. For example, corporates could use their training academies to train non-employees, particularly young people.

Corporates could give incentives to their employees to volunteer in poorer communities. Privileged individuals could pay for the education of the children of their domestic worker. They could give their domestic workers industrially useful practical skills – driving, first aid or vocational training. They could adopt a child’s education in the township or adopt a township family – through regularly helping.

Privileged schools can adopt/twin with poor township schools, with teachers from the well-resourced teaching at the poorer school, and richer parents volunteering at the poorer school. Former pupils of embattled township schools, residents of neglected townships and informal settlements who are now financially well-off must contribute to their old schools, townships, and informal settlements, whether mentoring, sponsoring poor children and families and giving access to their networks.

Vulnerable communities themselves will have to “find unknown inner strengths and resources” to cope with the uncertainty at the individual and community level. With policing failing, communities, without the means to hire private security, will have to set up community protection forums to keep their streets, townships, and areas safe. Most importantly, citizens, businesses and civil society should continue to hold public and elected officials accountable.

Citizens should volunteer on school boards, attend municipal ward committees, and participate in integrated development planning representative forums to hold elected councillors accountable. Citizens, business, and civil organisations must protest corruption, incompetence, and waste by public and elected officials.

Most importantly, the single most important tool to overnight reverse state collapse, breakdown of rule of law and corruption – and pull South Africa from the brink - is for voters not to vote for corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent leaders and parties, and not to vote based on ‘struggle’ credentials, colour, and ethnicity or on ideology.

More conscious citizens, business and civil society must get involved in voter education to raise the consciousness of those disgruntled with ANC elected and public officials, to not stay away from voting. But to vote for leaders and parties that are competent, honest, and caring, even it means voting for leaders and parties they do not share colour, past and their ideology with. Unless, the voters stop voting based on shared colour, struggle credentials and ideology, the parties, and leaders they vote for will remain unresponsive, and SA will continue on the path of state failure, breakdown of rule of law and chaos.

Gumede is the author of Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times (Tafelberg). This is an edited extract from his talk at the recent Oliver & Adelaide Tambo dialogue on “Strengthening A Nation’s Resilience Dialogue”, Gordon Institute of Business (GIBS).

WSG academic earns NRF rating

1 December 2022 -

Dr Christine Hobden has earned an Y1 NRF rating.

Hobden is a senior lecturer in Ethics and Public Governance. She holds a DPhil in Politics (Political Theory) from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Before joining Wits School of Governance, Hobden lectured in Philosophy at the University of Fort Hare (2017 – 2021) and held a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute (2015 – 2016).

Hobden currently holds an Iso Lomso Fellowship for early career African Scholars at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (2019 – 2022). She is an editor at Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory and a part of the leadership of the Association of Political Theory in Africa (APTA).

Her research explores normative questions about democratic citizenship and international justice. Her recently completed book, Citizenship in a Globalised World, conceptualises a state-based citizenship that is fundamentally collective and globally-oriented. Her current research projects develop an account of political consumerism as a channel of civic responsibility and, drawing on the life and work of Rick Turner, an argument for becoming ‘engaged political philosophers

More about NRF Ratings: https://www.wits.ac.za/research/top-researchers/nrf-ratings/ 

Redress for victimised whistle-blowing public servants is a critical in SA

15 March 2023 - Dr Christine Hobden

Through the State Capture Report we know that individuals received backlash in the form of malicious disciplinary hearings, side-lining and threats.

"Like many who are today called whistle-blowers, we never set out to become whistle-blowers… We were just normal human beings who knew right from wrong, regular employees who did their job with the utmost care" – Mzukisi Makatse and Sello Qhina

In a recent open letter, National Lotteries Commission (NLC) whistle-blowers, Makatse and Qhina, are seeking support and redress from the NLC, now under the new leadership of chairperson Barney Pityana and commissioner Jodie Scholz.

Many are hopeful that this new leadership will help to right the ship for a corruption-riddled NLC. Yet at the time of the publication of this open letter, they had not yet redressed the injustice faced by whistle-blowers who were key to instigating investigations into an estimated R1.4-billion corruption at the NLC.

In this letter, Makatse and Qhina draw our attention to an essential aspect of rebuilding our public institutions: acknowledging and supporting those who lost their jobs in their encounter with corrupt individuals and systems; those who faced severe consequences for doing their public service jobs in a context in which this was not rewarded but punished.

When we think of the brave individuals who have reported wrongdoing and blown the whistle on corruption, I suspect that most citizens think of high-profile individuals who, with their positions of power, had fairly extensive knowledge of wrongdoing, and voices with much public weight with which to share this knowledge.

In many of these cases there seems to come a moment for these individuals where they choose this path motivated by moral courage; reaching a point where it becomes morally clear to them that they have to speak out despite what they understand to be potentially severe consequences.

I suspect that when we think of whistle-blowers in South Africa, these are often the kinds of heroes that we imagine. And there are indeed heroic defenders of our democracy, who blew the whistle in this way, many of whom have paid a great price for doing so.

Yet, as I have engaged with more and more cases of whistle-blowing and reporting of wrongdoing, for me it has become clearer that for many, whistle-blowing feels more like something that happened to them than a path they courageously chose: Makatse and Qhina talk of “the bonfire we chose to start. Or did the bonfire choose us?”

This distinction is interesting to notice – not to undermine the bravery of these individuals or the value of what they did, but to notice that implicit often in the idea of the whistle-blowing hero is that they are remarkable individuals who are willing to and do make a choice to take up the risk.

But it strikes me that we need to decentre the image of the whistle-blowing hero, and confront this implicit assumption of heroic choice so that we can imagine and identify the full spectrum of those who resisted State Capture within the public service.

For many, we should best describe the price they paid as inflicted upon them. In the course of trying to carry out their basic functions correctly, they became whistle-blowers – for many it was not possible to do one without the other – beginning with reporting and facing barrier after barrier, ending with whistle-blowing.

As Makatse and Qhina describe: “We picked up irregularities in our work processes and decided to report these out of our normal duty of care to the employer, NLC. When the employer did not act as it should, we started to raise even more questions.”

There are too many unseen resisters who, against the emerging norms of their environment, continued to do their jobs and in doing so flagged and reported on irregular behaviour, processes and events.
Through the State Capture Report and the stories of whistle-blowers like Makatse and Qhina, we know that such individuals systematically received backlash in the form of malicious disciplinary hearings, side-lining and threats.

Whistle-blowing is most typically the final step on a long path of reporting and resisting unethical and illegal behaviour internally. We should notice then that not all who resist also blow the whistle – perhaps they are not able to bear the costs, or they do not know how to do so safely, or they cannot find a space where their voice is heard.

Perhaps they feel defeated by those who wage war against any form of resistance to the State Capture project.

Makatse and Qhina found their voice through collaboration with investigative journalism, as have many others. But South Africa’s media cannot carry this task alone.

If we are serious about reforming the public service, we need to create much more space for the typical public servant to safely tell their stories – big and small. And, as citizens, to advocate for our government to apologise for those who, in government employment, faced impossible choices, experienced humiliation, victimisation, persecution, and in many cases were pushed out of their employment.

It is a significant task to find ways to acknowledge and support these public servants, but, I think, an important aspect of reforming the public service going forward.

Alongside and within the project of professionalising the public service, the institutional culture of the South African public service needs to change. Not only do we desperately need the long-called-for protection and support for whistle-blowers, but also public servants who have long learnt to fly under the radar and watch their backs need a way to trust that things have changed (or, are at least, are changing).

One small step in this direction is to create space to explore in much more detail as a society just what this public service culture has become – what are the experiences of public servants in the everyday of their tasks? How many bore costs for resisting illicit behaviour within the everyday of their jobs, and in what ways?  

And, following this, for the government to take responsibility for these costs, offering apology and support and, in so doing, beginning to put weight behind the promise that change is coming.

This article was first published in the Daily Maverick.