LONDON — Dr Alain Tschudin is my kind of interviewee. An academic with a career in professional research, he is also an author so like most wordsmiths, his conversation flows easily. A PhD from Cambridge, he is the executive director of Good Governance Africa, a not-for-profit which aims to help unlock Africa’s potential by praising those doing right – and exposing the corrupt. In this interview he addresses South Africa’s two big flashpoints – the destruction of rural municipalities and the ANC’s policy of land Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC). – Alec Hogg
This is The Rational Perspective, I’m Alec Hogg. In this episode, Dr Alain Tschudin, a measured optimist on SA. Good Governance Africa has big ambitions. Its intention is to set up centres across the African continent to monitor governance across the continent – using a carrot and stick approach by shouting out malfeasance and praising role models. It’s a lofty goal. But since opening its first centre in Johannesburg in 2012, the independent non profit has made huge strides. This year it opened its fourth office, in Harare, with the others in Accra and Lagos. GGA bases its opinions on facts. That makes it an invaluable source for those wanting to understand the back story of the continent and, more specifically, South Africa. This week I was invited to a briefing for its board members and contributors at the IOD in London, I caught up with the executive director. As per usual, I started by asking my guest to introduce himself.
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It’s Alain Tschudin here, from Good Governance Africa.
Alain, I’ve just sat in a presentation for a couple of hours, where you were talking here, in London, about the work that you’re doing on the African Continent. It’s a lot of long-term stuff.
We have a lot of work to do. We have to start somewhere so we’ve prioritised starting on the ground, with respect to many of our implementations. So working in the worst governed municipalities or targeting specific segments of the population, so for example, youth in marginalised areas because we feel that they need disproportional attention if we are to actually talk about a level-playing field, moving forward. So this is why we feel that it’s important to be visible and present in intangible contexts.
More interesting though is the facts. You’ve got a huge volume of facts on Africa. You support researchers who write books, one on the land question, one on extremism in Africa. How does that shape your thinking?
We’re an independent, non-profit organisation. We’re not partisan but we believe firmly that knowledge is power and we don’t want to move along the lines of speculation and opinion. We’d rather promote fact-based knowledge and evidence-based learning.
How do you get those facts though?
So how we get those facts is we actually engage in primary research ourselves, so we put boots on the ground. I’m a career academic and a professional researcher, so together with our programs team, and in partnerships and collaborations with other organisations and universities, we get out there. We put boots on the ground. We engage in direct field research, whether it’s through surveys or questionnaires or desk bound research, and we use the information that we encounter to come up with knowledge to not only generate the knowledge but then to disseminate it, as broadly as possible.
An example of that was you did a survey of all the municipalities in SA, and then proceeded, very politically incorrectly, to rank them.
Yes, so we wanted to have a look at the state of affairs with respect to governance in SA. We initially undertook a national study and we found that there was a lot of dissatisfaction amongst SA citizens, based on a nationally representative survey. So taking that situation in mind, we then decided to drill down to the local and metropolitan municipal level. We used publicly available data to do that, from the National Treasury, from the Auditor General’s Report, StatsSA, and based on that we compiled a ranking report. Again, the idea there is not to have a go specifically at certain political parties but rather using this ranking system to see how we could get municipalities to pick up the reigns and perhaps compete against one another, to improve their standings, over time. To attract investment, to up the stakes, to kind of pressurise one another to just do a little better. So it’s designed mainly as a tool to improve governance.
We had a really good piece on BizNews this last week, on the municipality of Hoedspruit. It was written by The Chamber of Commerce of Hoedspruit, and the day we published it, the community in Hoedspruit actually started marching against the 31-year-old, former waitress, who is now the Mayor, and is just dispensing largess in a way that defies any logic. That doesn’t seem to be an isolated example. That does seem to be a case where the people are now really getting unhappy in rural and municipal areas.
I think that peoples’ eyes are wide open. I think initially, when there may have been cadre deployment from various sectors. People might have been too polite or perhaps too intimidated or afraid to speak. But with the upswing of social media, with the increasing availability of data and information – people are coming out and are out there saying that they’ve had enough of this, they’ve had enough of being taken for granted. They’ve had enough of false promises. They’ve had enough of being abused and I think that the time is ripe, from a purely democratic perspective for people to do that. We tend to forget in SA about the bad old days where, across society, people were united and came together in order to advance democracy and it’s great that civil society is waking up again, in SA, and standing up to lobby for our rights.
The bad old days is reflected in the 20 worst municipalities in the country, those right at the bottom of the pile. Who, when you overlay the old National Party homelands, are without exception, within those areas. That tells us something. That must have been very deep in that period of history.
Yes, look, so we undertook those rankings in 2016, so they’re not necessarily reflective of where we are now.
So Hoedspruit might actually get into the bottom 20 now.
One never knows, I’m not going to comment on that one, but the fact of the matter remains that the discrepancy between the high performance and the low performance does certainly have an historically basis to it. This is not to say that there isn’t change in former homeland areas but if one thinks about it, the magnitude of the change has to be so much greater because of the intentional suppression of human development in those areas. So, our intention was never to say that these are areas that have just been left destitute in a democratic SA. There are areas that need a lot more tender loving care, and in certain instances, we are not seeing that. That actually hasn’t happened. What we’re trying to do, at least according to the 2016 data, directly intervene ourselves, work with the local authorities, work with civil society, work with our partners to exercise some sort of transformative effect, on the worst of the performing municipalities in SA. To show that perhaps that what has been left out in the cold, could be a beacon of light, moving forward.
Tell us about the bottom of the pile – the birthplace of OR Tambo, the birthplace of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela?
Yes, so in Kantola Village, within the greater, local municipality of Mbizana, that houses Bizana, the biggest town in the municipality, is an excellent case and point.
It came last of how many municipalities?
It came last out of 234 municipalities and we decided that because it was lowest on the rankings but also, because 2017 was Oliver Tambo’s Centenary Year, that we would do something demonstrative, appreciative of his legacy to try and ensure peace and prosperity for all. So we decided to take our first scoping exercise down in Mbizana after our results broke. So we went down there in early 2017, we looked around, felt that we wanted to tap the voice of the citizens. So we engaged in a saturation survey, surveying 1,000 citizens along a 30km tract of land, from Oliver Tambo’s birth village, Nkantolo, all the way through, from deep rural, to rural, to sub-urban, peri urban, and urban – citizens of Mbizana municipality. We also interviewed over 100 micro-enterprise owners and take seriously their views on governance.
What conclusions did you come up with because given that we often find the solutions by looking at what we shouldn’t be doing?
Yes, so we found very high-levels of unemployment. We found that there was great concern amongst the citizens, those 1,000 citizens along that 30km tract of road, about jobs. When we asked people to rank in order of priority their top priority, their second priority, and their third most important priority – jobs came out top. The fact that people are crying out for employment speaks volumes. Other factors that came out, in terms of peoples’ own reporting, safety and security, education, water and sanitation.
What caused it? What puts it so far down the pile? Why is it that jobs are just non-existent?
It’s the aggregation of factors across the board and historicity factors into this as well in a big way.
Historicity?
So, the fact that we’re looking at a very depressed area, socioeconomically, historically, and intentionally by design. There wasn’t investment as there would have been in the predominantly white areas.
So, how do you fix it?
How you fix it is by attracting investment. We coined the phrase, ‘local capital plight’ because what we observed during our work there is that a lot of people make their money in Mbizana, but it flows over the Umtambuna river and goes into another province. So the money that’s being made in Mbizana is not staying in Mbizana to be spent there.
Why does it go into another province?
Because many of the people who operate the businesses are resident across the river and the province of Kwa-Zulu-Natal. Where there are better facilities, where there’s better infrastructure, where it’s a former apartheid stomping ground, if you like – the coastal area of Port Edward.
But aren’t we looking at something in a microcosm here, which is a macro problem for SA, where a lot of capital is being exported pretty much every previously advantaged, (if you like) South African, is looking to find an escape hatch for their capital? We see here, in London, how much money is leaving. How many people, and what skills are leaving the country? Isn’t there a big message in what Mbizana is teaching us?
I think in Mbizana, the fact of the matter is that it’s previously disadvantaged South Africans who are moving their own money across provincial borders. I can’t really speak about the international capital plight, but I think at the local level that it sure is a sign of a lack of confidence of the area where one either resides or does business. So rather than invest the money, and put it back into Mbizana, for whatever reason. The money is going to another location because the perception is that it can be better used, spent, or invested there. One of the strategies to counter this, on our part, is to work together with the private sector, work with other civil society organisations, and work with the municipal manager and the local government of Mbizana. To try and find ways to create incentives and opportunities to invest. So rather than seeing money flying out. We see money coming in.
Make it investible as Cyril Ramaphosa is trying to do with SA. But maybe to just dwell briefly on that. The change under a Ramaphosa regime to the Zuma regime – as far as it affects a non-profit organisation, like yours, which is looking to get the facts, which is wanting to expose them. Do you see that impacting your work at all?
Look, I think it’s a breath of fresh-air for us to have a change at the top. I do think that President Ramaphosa is being held to a rather unfair and unrealistic level of expectation. This is a consequence of the Ramaphoria that everyone has spoken about, but he isn’t the silver bullet. We can’t expect one person to hold, in this person, this solution to a decade of rot. I think that things are still very highly contested within that political space. I think compromises are having to be made. I think that there are a range of checks and balances that we are seeing playing out right now. That is, in part, going to hamstring us and in part, might also free up the blockages.
Did you feel any impact? You talk about 10 years of rot, because if you’re in the business of exposing information one would think that it can’t always be comfortable when those who have the power don’t want it to be exposed.
Look, it does place one in a difficult situation but by virtue of the fact that we’re called Good Governance Africa, one of our values is moral courage, and we feel that it’s in the interest of the common good to stand up and to not only expose governance where it is bad and where it’s rotten but to celebrate governance where it’s good. So we like to take a balanced approach to what we do and celebrate the gains that have been made. I think the fact that, for example, the governing party in SA voted for a progressive leader, as opposed to the alternative – it’s refreshing.
Well, narrowly.
Narrowly, seat of the pants stuff, under 200 votes out of 6,000, but nevertheless it was a vote in the right direction.
When we started talking you mentioned that you like people who are exposed to your research to leave cautiously optimistic.
Yes.
Are you feeling that way about SA?
Look, we get asked to gaze into a rather muddy, crystal ball from time-to-time, and if I have to think back to where we were, let’s say this time last year, there was a lot of pessimism about the place. There were downgrades everywhere. The internal party politicking within the ANC was on a knife edge, between the traditionalist’s elements and the reformers within the ANC. There was a rather dejected downbeat mood about where SA was, and the fact that we were heading for a precipice at a rate of knots. I think what we’ve seen is, especially over the last 6 to 7 months, I think we’ve seen a reversal in the trend of sheer disbelief. I think that people are probably, slightly at 6’s and 7’s right now, because of this wave of euphoria that came in February, with Cyril Ramaphosa’s election. I do think though that there’s something to be said for steadying the ship and I think if one looks at, again, the checks and balances and compromises that are being made to do that right now. The fact that for Moody’s, for example, the jury is still out. The fact that the question of land expropriation without compensation is being engaged. The fact that we have certain reforms on the agenda, whilst other aspects of not really being touched. I think we’re not in as bad a place as we were. So if we approach this by negation – we’re not in as bad a place as we were and we’re in much less of a dangerous place than we were this time, last year. Looking forward – I think there’s still a lot of work to be done. One of the first recommendations that we made when Cyril came in, was that he had to flush out the rather unsavoury elements within the cabinet. That he had to repopulate key figures within the public service. That he had to make sure that he could work towards establishing credibility within, not just government but within his own party, once again. We see that in part this has happened. There have been some gains but there’ve also been moments of tremendous frustration and disappointment. We still have bureaucratic incompetence in some sectors. We still have literally, some of the old crooks and criminals in positions of power, but yet again, we also have shining lights, who are now back on the scene and who are trying to clean up the mess. So the jury remains out. There’s a slightly, lightly air though. There’s not a heaviness of heart and I think the majority of our country’s population was feeling that last year. I think, at the moment, we are watching and waiting and doing so with interest.
That was Dr Alain Tschudin, the executive director of Good Governance Africa. This has been The Rational Perspective. Until the next time, cheerio.
