ANTHONY BUTLER: Lesufi not ready to be premier, never mind president

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

27 OCTOBER 2023

ANTHONY BUTLER

It is impossible for the good citizens of Gauteng to ignore their premier, Panyaza Lesufi, no matter how hard they may try.

The 55-year-old has been a dynamo of policy innovation since rising to the premiership at the end of 2022. Indeed, he has scarcely spent a day out of the headlines. But many ANC activists have been asking if they backed the right horse for the provincial leadership. 

In February Lesufi announced plans to connect suburbs, townships, business districts and schools with “hi-tech, face and car recognition CCTVs” linked to a “state-of-the-art integrated command centre”. Helicopters and drones would soon patrol the skies, and every ward was promised “a 24-hour patrol car equipped with proper gadgets”. 

He launched a police warden programme that dispatched 6,000 “AmaPanyaza” to “invade our streets” after just three months of training. A wider rolling Nasi Ispani jobs campaign promised to fill 8,000 immediate “vacancies” across provincial departments, to train 6,000 youth as solar panel installers, and to engage in further rolling recruitments over the year ahead. 

Gauteng finance MEC Jacob Mamabolo confirmed that the premier’s dreams of a provincial state-owned bank and a provincial pharmaceutical company were close to fruition.

This October, Lesufi has stepped up a gear, revealing plans to harness “the digital economy of the future”, to construct a new high-speed rail line between Gauteng and Limpopo, and to promote “smart mobility” within the province. To top it all, the premier has promised to establish a “cashless economy” that will end ATM bombings, business robberies and kidnappings. 

Many Gauteng voters are now rather sceptical of such ANC promises. Poorly trained crime wardens have already been implicated in abuses of power. Who needs a provincial piggy bank to fund township entrepreneurs, for example, when existing institutions such as the Gauteng Enterprise Propeller, are already funded to do that job?

Discontent about pre-existing crises — months-long water cuts, collapsing electricity distribution infrastructure, disappearing roads, giant potholes and appalling fires — cannot be eased with Lusufian bluster. Blaming others while shouting “I am very angry, I am very angry”, really doesn’t cut it. 

As pressure mounts ahead of the national and provincial elections scheduled for 2024 Lusufi has moved towards xenophobia — an obviously unworkable employment quota for foreign nationals — and doubled down on his policy of throwing money at job creation scams.

Lesufi’s rise was buoyed by his previous success as provincial MEC for basic education, in which position he mobilised ethnic and language politics in the service of his own popularity. Some critics now suggest that they may have overestimated his capacity to function in a more complex policy environment.

Moreover, his clumsy courting of the EFF — a coalition partner the Gauteng ANC suspects it needs if it is to continue to govern — has triggered a counter-reaction in other, more delegate-rich, provinces. Worst of all, Lesufi made the rookie mistake of saying he is “not yet ready to be president”, a false modesty that every citizen interprets as an expression of entitlement and arrogance. 

The final spanner in the works may be the country’s fiscal crisis. The spoilsports at the National Treasury have insisted that provincial politicians cannot simply employ thousands of new workers every month without justification. Lesufi quickly retorted that “if poor planning on their side led them to where they are, we cannot pay the price for that. We are galloping with all our programmes regardless of what National Treasury is saying.” 

But Lesufi’s constant reiteration of his key political proposition — we must spend other people’s money to advance my own career — is starting to look like the desperate flogging of a dead horse. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.