Ramaphosa’s ‘National Dialogue’ is just more talk while SA burns - Ivo Vegter

Key topics:Ramaphosa launches National Dialogue despite urgent need for actionCritics slam dialogue as wasteful, led by unelected, unqualified figuresVision 2030 goals unmet; poverty and decline persist amid leadership inaction.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Ivo Vegter*.President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced a National Dialogue, starting with a National Convention in August. Talk is not what this country needs.If there’s one person who is all talk an no action, it’s Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa.That was a useful skill when he was a unionist. That was a useful skill when he was a negotiator to establish a new democratic dispensation and avoid a civil war. That was clearly a useful skill when he negotiated plum black empowerment positions that made him a billionaire.Now that he is president, however, that is not a useful skill. South Africa needs urgent reform and bold action, not another drawn-out round of “dialogue”.On Wednesday at lunch time, Ramaphosa announced (video/text) that he would, in his capacity as head of state, convene a National Dialogue, which would open with the first of two National Conventions on 15 August 2025. A second will be scheduled for some time next year.“In many ways having dialogues is part of our DNA as a nation,” he said. “At every important moment in the history of our country, we have come together as a nation to confront our challenges and forge a path into the future in dialogue with one another.”This democracy was birthed in dialogue, that is true. The problem is that government policy has been all talk and no action since then.“…we face persistent challenges,” says Ramaphosa, about unemployment, inequality, crime, gender-based violence and corruption.They are persistent, Mr Ramaphosa, and they have been persistent for decades, because you and your political party have caused them, and done nothing about them. Talking some more about them won’t solve those challenges.Vison 2030 “Through the National Dialogue, we seek a shared vision of what it means to be a South African and develop a new national ethos and common value system. … It is anticipated that the National Dialogue will drive progress towards our Vision 2030 and lay the foundation for the next phase of South Africa’s National Development Plan.”Vision 2030 was the name of the National Development Plan published in November 2011. That’s 14 long years ago.It promised to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality, by 2030. We’re three quarters of the way to 2030, and… well, I was going to say nothing has changed, but we don’t even know what has changed.The last time Statistics South Africa appears to have bothered to measure poverty rates was in 2014/15, more than a decade ago. I might be missing something, but I cannot find any data on poverty and inequality after 2014.So, what are we going to have a dialogue about? How will anyone know whether we have made, or are making, “progress towards our Vision 2030”?If we are making progress, then perhaps Vision 2030 is fatally flawed, because boy, this country is in deep trouble and headed in the wrong direction.World record unemployment; world record crime rate; negative economic growth per capita; credit ratings in the toilet; investors, skilled professionals, and wealthy consumers fleeing to anywhere else; pervasive corruption; prosecutors that couldn’t convict a self-confessed shoplifter; a third of the population on welfare; half the population living in poverty (says this professor); state-owned enterprises collapsing under debt and mismanagement; roads, sewerage works, water reticulation, harbours, railways, and electricity supply all breaking or broken, and never getting fixed…“The dialogue will be a people-led, society-wide process to reflect on the state of our country in order for us to reimagine our future,” says Ramaphosa.We don’t need to reflect on the state of our country. The state of our country is unprintable, but everyone knows a word for it.Why do we need to “reimagine our future”? All we want, Mr. President, is a future of jobs and economic growth.Eminent persons By “we”, I mean of course “they”. The president has assembled an “Eminent Persons Group” of 31 members to, and I quote, “guide and champion the National Dialogue”.Since when does the president get to appoint unelected people to determine the future course of South Africa?We have an entire Parliament, filled with 400 National Assembly members and 90 National Council of Provinces members, each on at least R1.2 million a year in salary, which is more than most countries pay, and forms part of a Parliamentary budget of over R1.9 billion per year.What do they do? Aren’t they supposed to reflect on the state of our country and actually do something about our future?And what about the 27-member National Planning Commission, “comprising carefully chosen experts in various fields and sectors”, appointed by the president? What are they there for? What have they achieved?Why have elections at all, when the president can just call up 31 of his closest friends to have a chinwag about the state of the country?Eminent? The list of eminent persons is itself rather suspect. It contains a random assortment of celebrities and wannabe celebrities, sportpeople, religious leaders, artists, unionists, activists, retired politicians and officals, three businesspeople, and not a single economist.We all love Siya Kolisi, but what does he know about the state of the country or how to fix it? I’m sure Mia le Roux, Miss South Africa, is a lovely woman, but as a 29-year-old part-time B.Com Marketing student, what possible contribution can she make to righting this sinking ship of a country?There’s an “award-winning rocket scientist” whose achievements appear to be limited to an amateur rocket, some school science projects, and co-authorship on a single scientific paper. I’m sure he’s a clever guy, but what does his interest in alternative energy bring to a discussion on the future of South Africa?There are religious leaders, two of whom lead separate sides of a schism in a church whose main feature is to fleece members of cash offerings that are given to the church leaders, so they can supposedly intercede with the ancestors on the members’ behalf.The three businesspeople on the list are Bobby Godsell, a mining tycoon; Gloria Serobe, co-founder of Wiphold and professional board-sitter; and Robert Brozin, the co-founder of Nando’s. Unlike the religious leaders, they sell products of actual value for the money they take from customers.However, given that economic growth must be South Africa’s top priority if it is to address the downstream challenges of poverty, unemployment, inequality, and crime, it would have been nice to see a few more people who know what growth is and how to achieve it.Poets, storytellers, an early literacy expert, a mountaineer, actors, and peace activists; what use are they on a panel to consider the state of the country and solutions to its “persistent challenges”?Mandate Having lost the clear mandate of an electoral majority for the ANC, this National Dialogue is nothing more than an underhanded way for Ramaphosa to spend state resources on an extra-Constitutional gathering aimed at re-establishing a consensus around the ANC’s pet ideological positions: race-based social engineering dressed up as “transformation”, socialism dressed up as the “National Democratic Revolution”, and business as usual.We all know, from exasperated experience with the Zondo Commission on State Capture, that a process that produces extensive analysis and recommendations on how to proceed will just be ignored.We all know, from bitter experience with the National Health Insurance Act, the Expropriation Act, and dozens of other pieces of contentious legislation, that neither Ramaphosa’s cabinet nor Parliament are at all responsive to “dialogue”.This government’s idea of “consultation” has always been to allow people to send them submissions and then to ignore them. Its idea of “consensus building” has always been to propose something outrageous, await the public outcry, and then table what they wanted in the first place as a “compromise”.Why would this National Dialogue be any different?It is all about being able to say “we spoke to diverse people, and we listened, and that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing”, when the policy that brought the country to its knees never changes.Actual experts If I were to assemble an “Eminent Persons Group” to address South Africa’s challenges, I’d start with people who have spent their lives thinking about this sort of thing.I’d invite the heads of a dozen think tanks; half a dozen economists, split evenly between working economists and academics; a few political scientists; several engineering-adjacent infrastructure specialists; an expert or two on local government and public administration; an organisational efficiency expert or auditor; and some retired judges, prosecutors, and advocates.Sorry, but no matter how many mountains you’ve climbed, adventurers wouldn’t make the cut. No matter how many world cups you’ve won, you’re sitting this one out. No matter how high your home-made rocket flew, I wouldn’t bet on your solving the country’s most pressing problems.Even businesspeople wouldn’t be on my list, because while they might know the harm that South Africa’s crime, regulatory burden and crumbling infrastructure do to business viability and investment, they have conflicts of interest and have not spent their lives thinking about public policy more broadly.Between the economists and think tank leaders, we’d have those issued covered.Just read If I were president, however, I wouldn’t appoint such a group at all.I wouldn’t be spending many millions of rands on an extravagant talk shop, when everything that I could ever want to know about what needs to be done is already available, for free, in the public domain.Instead of getting the heads of those think tanks together, putting them in swanky hotels and serving them hot buffet lunches prepared by a lucky tenderpreneur, just read the reports they publish.If the president wants to know what’s wrong with the country, he should have asked when he was appointed seven long years ago. Even at this late stage, however, he can freely consult research papers like Enemy of Growth: The ideology holding South Africa hostage.If the president wants to know what actual people want, he could consult any of a number of national surveys. They all conclude about the same thing: prioritise economic growth, jobs, crime, corruption, water, electricity, and education, rather than fighting ideological skirmishes over racism, transformation, and land reform.If he wants to know what to do about South Africa’s problems, and how to achieve the economic growth that will pay for everything else, he only needs to consult expert reports on the topic, such as the Blueprint for Growth series published by the Institute of Race Relations.They cover why South Africa must prioritise growth, reducing VAT, and empowerment premiums, adopting an alternative to failed empowerment policies, reforming South Africa’s public administration, generating jobs and skills, how to escape the investment malaise, and how to address crime.These papers weren’t written by famous sportspeople, or artists, or student activists. There’s not a mountaineer or rocket scientist among them.They were written by people who spend all their time thinking hard about the problems facing the country, and what practical and achievable policy solutions there might be to these problems.All talk, no action This plan to hold an extensive National Dialogue that will last until this time next year and produce a pile of verbiage of dubious value that nobody will read and nobody will action, is Ramaphosa in a nutshell.All talk, and no action. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Ramaphosa talks while the country dies.We don’t need a random assemblage of people Ramaphosa considers “eminent” to tell us what’s wrong with the country, or how to fix it.We all know what’s wrong. What needs to be done to fix it has been written over, and over, and over again.All Ramaphosa has to do is get off his dollar-filled couch and actually read something, and then do something, instead of just talking.Pigs will fly before that happens, and then Ramaphosa will invite whoever put the wings on the pigs for a dialogue on how to save South Africa..*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets..*This article was first published by the DailyFriend and is republished with permission.

Ramaphosa’s ‘National Dialogue’ is just more talk while SA burns - Ivo Vegter

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