ANTHONY BUTLER: President Samson Gwede Mantashe has a ring to it

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

22 MARCH 2024

A persistent rumour, troubling to some international investors, suggests that President Cyril Ramaphosa could stand down after the upcoming elections. 

Most local observers sensibly view this as implausible. It is true that Ramaphosa was said to have indicated a desire to leave office after the Phala Phala scandal broke. Speechwriters were apparently instructed to write resignation orations, and ANC chair Gwede Mantashe supposedly had to talk his friend out of throwing in the towel. Talk was that once they had considered the dire alternatives, ANC leaders — and many others — rallied round the embattled occupant of the Union Buildings.

Whatever the real story, Ramaphosa still has the job he always wanted. He first declared that he was going to be president more than 50 years ago, as a teenager at a Christian camp on the banks of the Hartbeespoort Dam. He evidently does not yet feel that he has a legacy, and he will surely use any, and all, available time to establish one. 

Those who nonetheless still fear his early departure tend to see deputy president Paul Mashatile as his likely replacement. This may be a miscalculation. The position of ANC deputy president offers no guarantee of succeeding to the presidency. While three deputies in the final term of a sitting president have indeed risen to the highest office since 1994, a law cannot be derived from three cases. 

The ANC rotates offices between regions. Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki were nominally associated with the Eastern Cape, Jacob Zuma with KwaZulu-Natal, and Ramaphosa with Gauteng and Limpopo. Mashatile is also strongly associated with Gauteng, which currently occupies most of the “top seven” offices. Yet the province is only third or fourth in terms of ANC delegate numbers, and it is about to tank in the provincial elections.

Moreover, investigative journalists claim to have uncovered skeletons in Mashatile’s closet. However unjust these accusations may turn out to be — who among us hasn’t occasionally been uncertain who owns the mansions they live in? — the rattling of bones has caused him reputational damage.

Indeed, Cosa Nostra, a prominent business lobby group in southern Italy, is believed to have instructed lawyers to initiate defamation proceedings against any person who insinuates a connection between Mashatile’s commercial activities and their own, for example by use of the phrase “Alex Mafia”. 

The national ANC operates on a two-term cycle, and serious contenders for office have been planning to contest the presidency in 2027. They do not welcome an early Mashatile takeover, especially because he would be a two-term president. 

Even politicians in the Gauteng camp, such as Fikile Mbalula and Panyaza Lesufi, are nowadays unlikely to rescue him if he flounders. They now have their own presidential ambitions for 2027, and rats do not habitually join a sinking ship. 

Who then is the most likely successor in the unlikely event that Ramaphosa stands down? President Samson Gwede Mantashe has a ring to it. While it is not true that Mantashe has held more positions than those in the Kama Sutra, as some critics have alarmingly imagined, he is a two-term ANC secretary-general and chair, as well as being a memorable minister.

His two masters degrees make him, by some estimations, twice as clever as the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu. Mantashe is also a scientific innovator, having made major contributions in the fields of both “hazenile” and “clean coal”.

With his famously low centre of gravity, both political and physical, he will never be a pushover. It is also to Mantashe’s advantage that he will be turning 69 in just a few weeks’ time. That makes him a plausible one-term president: a “safe pair of hands” who various factional contenders would be willing to tolerate as they prepare for the 2027 national conference. 

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: Zuma unravels all the good work done in KZN

Former president’s power has been cemented in part by continued courting of traditional leaders

First published in Business Day

08 MARCH 2024

Former president Jacob Zuma has done much to integrate the province of KwaZulu-Natal into national political life over the past three decades. Now he is threatening to undo his lifetime’s key achievement.

During the democratic transition, violent conflict between IFP- and ANC-aligned groups almost descended into civil war. After the ANC was unbanned Zuma was defeated by Cyril Ramaphosa for the position of secretary-general at the ANC’s Durban conference.

He was subsequently sent by then president Nelson Mandela to ameliorate ANC-IFP violence in his home province, at which he proved remarkable adept. Zuma then switched to national politics, rising to party chair in 1994 and then to deputy president in 1997. Two years later he was deputy president of the country under Thabo Mbeki.

Though Mbeki evidently believed he could dispense with Zuma at will, this proved to be a huge miscalculation. Zuma mobilised in KwaZulu-Natal, bringing hundreds of thousands of new members — many of them admittedly ghosts or zombies — to the provincial party, swelling delegate numbers and sweeping aside Mbeki at the 2007 Polokwane conference.

Zuma’s rise to the ANC presidency catalysed a huge increase in KwaZulu-Natal-based votes for the ANC in the elections that followed, and the province became an indispensable buttress to the liberation movement’s otherwise waning national electoral dominance.

On Zuma’s coattails a swathe of politicians and businesspeople from KwaZulu-Natal rose to prominent positions in the cabinet, the senior public service, parastatal boards and BEE consortia.

Despite driving this remarkable transformation of KwaZulu-Natal’s position in national political life, Zuma has since destroyed all that he had accomplished.

His power had been cemented in part by his continued courting of traditional leaders in his province, with various bogus land rights acts cobbled together to secure their allegiance. These later proved costly.

Moreover, by allowing explicit ethnic mobilisation by his supporters in times of crisis, he also presided over a resurgence of ethnic tension, something the ANC had strived for decades to minimise. Such ethnic mobilisation played a major role in triggering the appalling xenophobic violence that has since plagued much of the country.

After his humiliating eviction from office in 2018 under threat of being ousted by his own party, Zuma agitated against what he saw as his politically motivated harassment by prosecutorial authorities. Despite the extremely slow pace of investigation — something critics have seen as deliberate — Zuma forced the hand of the authorities by acting in contempt of the Zondo commission of inquiry.

His needless jailing created fertile ground for criminal mafias and political sympathisers to incite a riot-cum-shopping spree in July 2021 that inflicted more than 300 deaths and tens of billions of rand in damages.

The entrenchment of traditional leaders’ power in trust lands close to the economic hub of Durban resulted in poorly managed informal settlements, flagrant breaches of environmental regulations, degrading water quality and polluted rivers, estuaries and beaches.

In conjunction with climate change-induced weather patterns that have brought coastal storms and inland flooding that has killed hundreds, the beautiful province is being turned into a multifaceted environmental catastrophe.

Now Zuma has launched the uMkhonto weSizwe party. Borrowing the name of the military wing of the ANC and the SA Communist Party is surely a deliberate act designed to elicit a response from the electoral commission.

Zuma’s associates say they will respond to this by initiating a repeat of the violent unrest of 2021. KwaZulu-Natal’s once beloved son is rapidly becoming the province’s worst enemy.

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: When politicians have to shackle themselves to a rotting corpse

First published in BDLive

09 FEBRUARY 2024 – 05:00

In this historic year in global politics, 64 countries accounting for almost half of the world’s population are scheduled to hold national elections.

Of course, most of these elections will be rigged. We should not concern ourselves unduly about the swing vote for the Supreme People’s Assembly in the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea or the presidential elections of the Russian Federation.

At the freer and fairer end of the electoral spectrum it is the old colonial power, the UK, that offers many surprising parallels for SA. Electors are fed up with an exhausted Conservative Party government that is beset by scandal and plagued by corruption. Citizens bewail failing public services, a “cost of living” crisis, a sclerotic economy, and sewage that runs into the rivers.

But in this disunited kingdom the official opposition Labour party lacks the leadership and popular support it needs to secure a majority later in the year. All of this means a coalition government is quite likely before the end of 2024. Like South Africans though, Britons don’t really know how to do it.

After the 2010 elections Labour won a minority of seats but the Conservatives were also unable to form a government on their own. The Liberal Democrats or “Lib Dems”, who held the balance of power, were policy soul mates of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour, and most party members and activists were strongly opposed to a coalition deal with the Conservatives. Nevertheless, the party leaders opted for just that.

In the end, the personalities of the party leaders, and the trust between them, were key factors in this decision. The incumbent Labour negotiators, in the words of one prominent Lib Dem fixer, were “arrogant, exhausted, and divided”. He noted that they were simply unwilling to compromise with a smaller party, and governing with them would be like being “shackled to a rotting corpse”.

Earlier this week in SA, social development minister Lindiwe Zulu threw a tentative stone into the political firepool to see if it would make a splash. In Moscow, in the exile days, she had studied journalism and she remains a communications professional. It was therefore of great interest when she appeared on the SABC’s early morning Sunrise programme on Tuesday morning to reflect on coalition politics.

The idea she ran up the flagpole was that the media has been “slanting towards” coalition government. Debate about coalitions is not a logical consequence of the possible decline of ANC to minority status, but rather the malign project of news media determined to “get rid of the ANC”.

Zulu’s tentative thoughts about the intrinsic undesirability of coalition suggest there is a real concern in the ANC that the party’s election prospects are poor. Nonetheless, there is real resistance to formal coalition deals.

This may be because the divergent preferences of different provinces make coalition deals all but impossible. After all, the Gauteng ANC has been making loving eyes at the EFF for years — but other ANC provinces detest it. The IFP might be a convenient partner at national level, but that would surely complicate deals in KwaZulu-Natal.

Moreover, formal coalitions are sure to involve some transparent policy pledges to which the partners would have to commit. Worst of all, coalitions mean politicians who have spent decades ensconced in the comfortable hierarchies of the liberation movement actually have to negotiate with other people and build trust.

As in Britain in 2010, coalition politics isn’t just about arithmetic and policy congruence. It also succeeds as the result of trust between individuals and groups, good or bad fortune and the personalities of senior leaders. Who will be willing to shackle themselves to our own rotting corpse later in the year?

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: Two big factors being underestimated in projections of ANC vote

Water and sanitation services, as well as the MK Party, are issues seeping into the foreground

First published in Business Day

12 JANUARY 2024

A broad consensus has emerged among political analysts and risk consultants that the ANC will secure somewhere between 43% and 49% of the vote in the upcoming national and provincial elections.

Such a scenario suggests easy coalition negotiations for Cyril Ramaphosa. The ANC and SA president will simply need to rope in the IFP, or a group of smaller players, to secure a working majority in the National Assembly.

Analysts therefore envision no need for the ANC to strike a national deal with the EFF or DA. In consequence, there will be no significant shift in government’s overall policy direction.

It is sensible to question the reliability of such prognoses. After all, as sceptics have observed in the past, political analysts tend to agree with one another fully only when they are all wrong.

I believe the importance of two factors is now being underestimated. First, the challenge of water and sanitation services has crept onto the radar of alert political scientists. The 2022 Afrobarometer opinion surveys asked respondents to name the three most important problems facing the country.

A full 30% of those older than 55 chose “water supply” — pretty much on a par with electricity (32%) and in the same ballpark as unemployment (42%). One in five younger respondents, aged 18-55, also flagged water as a priority.

We can be confident that the salience of water has risen steeply since then, as the collapse of infrastructure and maintenance accelerated. Unlike the Eskom problem, where the ANC boldly attributed electricity shortages to anti-coal environmentalism and increased energy for the poor, the governing party has no remotely believable tale to spin.

Living without water and relying on tanker deliveries run by politically aligned mafias is galling. Collapsing sewerage systems are an affront to human dignity in a way that load-shedding is not.

The second key threat to the ANC is its own declining internal coherence, revealed starkly by the rise of the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party, promoted energetically in recent weeks by former president Jacob Zuma.

As ANC chair Gwede Mantashe has hilariously observed, Zuma can be likened to other greedy and power-lusting “militia dictators” on the African continent who promoted rebel movements to regain influence. One thinks of Angola’s Jonas Savimbi with his Unita fighters; Central African Republic president François Bozizé Yangouvonda and his rebel insurgents; or perhaps former SA president Thabo Mbeki and his revolutionary Congress of the People (COPE) armchair militia.

The trouble with the MK Party is that it is not a conventional opposition party at all. It is rather an ANC faction, regionally and ethnically concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, whose ideological positions map directly onto those of the mother body itself. It cannot be undermined by claims that it will withdraw social grants from the poor or return SA to the dark days of apartheid.

Indeed, Zuma has insisted that MK is true to the ANC ambitions and values that Cyril Ramaphosa’s deviant ANC neglects cruelly. The votes the party gains will almost all come directly from a liberation movement that is desperately short of voters.

The conundrum posed by the MK Party pushed ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, hitherto a master of “constructive ambiguity” (you can’t understand what he is talking about), to complain last weekend that “we defended former president Zuma, even going to parliament and saying that a swimming pool is a fire pool… The Constitutional Court, chaired by Mogoeng Mogoeng, issued a judgment against Jacob Zuma, but the ANC stood by him”.

By revealing something we already knew, the man in charge at Luthuli House has, paradoxically, somehow managed to tell his own party’s supporters that they are all idiots.

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: Five areas of concern in general election

IEC and others will have to monitor these to counter electoral manipulation

First published in Business Day

08 DECEMBER 2023

The launch last week of Election Watch, a nonpartisan campaign to protect the integrity of the coming general election, was a welcome development. Given global democratic backsliding, and a moment of potential political transition in SA, a broad mobilisation of civil society that includes business, labour, faith-based organisations and foundations, could help maintain SA’s post-1994 tradition of broadly free and fair elections. 

Our electoral commission (IEC) is somewhat protected. Commissioners are appointed through a three-stage process that includes the chief justice, commissions for human rights and gender equality, the public protector, the National Assembly and the president. This means it cannot be undermined quickly and directly.

Concern about voter misdirection on the day — for example by members of the SA Democratic Teachers Union — are sadly plausible and will no doubt be a focus for Election Watch oversight. Civil society may yet be able to inform voters that new registration requirements are likely to disenfranchise many of them on election day.  

Meanwhile, donors who want to deter big-picture count manipulation will hopefully once again fund a 2024 post-election survey, and so continue our invaluable tradition of internationally acclaimed “SA national election surveys”. 

There are five further broad areas of concern, in which it is difficult for the IEC and civil society campaigns such as Election Watch to counter electoral manipulation. 

The first of these is money. SA’s party funding legislation was a botched job. International studies show that money plays a huge role in elections but in ways we — and funding regulators — simply cannot track. And the evidence we do have also suggests those who spend the most money still tend to win. 

The second challenge is technological. The IEC and the Association of African Electoral Authorities have made a valiant effort to solve yesterday’s problems by drawing up “guidelines” for technology and social media. They disapprove of bot armies and hacking into vote-counting systems, which is all laudable, but it is not clear how such activities can be reliably stopped if sophisticated international actors involve themselves in our elections. Moreover, a new generation of generative artificial intelligence has made it easy for creative party apparatchiks to branch out into fabricated pictures and videos.  

Third, incumbent politicians often lie like crazy to survive, but now they have better advice and capacity. An enormous tissue of interconnected lies about the energy transition, for example, has been disseminated widely and consistently in recent years, with identical — and inaccurate — coal lobby talking points emerging from politicians’ mouths, in traditional media reports, on social media and even in phone-in radio programmes. 

Fourth, there is increasingly blatant abuse of state resources for party gain. Some of this is no longer surprising: bakkies for traditional leaders, unemployment insurance funds to create fake jobs, and government programmes bedecked in party colours. More serious, but harder to identify, are abuses of intelligence agencies, regulatory agencies, powers of state procurement and perhaps some of our courts. 

Finally, democracy’s defenders have to contend with SA’s bewildering world of political ideas. The ANC has always been a bit confused about democracy because its key strategic documents disparage bourgeois or liberal democracy and elevate the ostensibly scientific understanding of the party over the false consciousness of the masses.

Our international partners in China and Russia, where no government has ever lost an election, tend to concur with this approach. Younger ANC intellectuals have added their own twist, sceptical of the merits of “Western democracy” and seeing little reason to defend the integrity of its discredited elections. 

As for the broader citizen body, surveys from Afrobarometer and others suggest many people believe things couldn’t be any worse if SA was an autocracy. This is an understandable — but major — error of popular judgment. 

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: The strange morphing of Motsoaledi into a refugee-obsessed Suella

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

24 NOVEMBER 2023

As health minister during the Jacob Zuma decade, Aaron Motsoaledi came across as a decent person struggling with a difficult portfolio. What can explain his more recent — and mind-bogglingly crazy — initiatives in refugee policy and electoral reform? 

Motsoaledi is a classic ANC leader. Nephew of Rivonia trialist Elias Motsoaledi, he attended the University of Natal medical school, an institution that also produced Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Joe Phaahla, Zweli Mkhize, Joel Netshitenzhe and many, many others.

During the Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki periods he rose through the ranks of the Limpopo ANC. After one setback in 1998, when the premier fired him from the provincial executive, Zuma intervened to restore his fortunes.

In 2007, at Polokwane, he was again a beneficiary of Zuma’s largesse, being elected to the ANC national executive committee and soon after leapfrogging directly into the cabinet portfolio of health minister. 

His record there was really quite good. He focused on preventative health, rebuilt HIV/Aids and tuberculosis programmes, and memorably addressed safe sex fatigue by introducing multicoloured condoms. National Health Insurance, of course, proved terribly complicated.

By 2017 he had also tired of Zuma, and he was a core member of the political committee that drove Cyril Ramaphosa’s election as ANC president. Since then Motsoaledi’s trajectory has been deeply disappointing. 

Retained as health minister, he toured Gauteng hospitals in the run-up to the 2019 elections to lambaste pregnant foreigners for swamping health facilities. He told nurses that once immigrants “get admitted in large numbers, they cause overcrowding [and] infection control starts failing”.  

Motsoaledi moved to home affairs in 2019, where he deployed tactical xenophobia to neutralise ActionSA’s antiforeigner advantage and penalise the EFF for its unfashionable Pan-Africanism. He continued to fuel the rise of populist mafia groups such as Operation Dudula while ignoring court directives, for six years in the case of legislation concerning the detention of undocumented immigrants. In his newly consequence-ambivalent style he then simply “terminated” the Zimbabwean exemption permit. 

Now he has launched a white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection that will further weaponise refugee issues, delegitimise courts that impose constraints on the abuse of executive power and repudiate long-fought advances in international law.  

There are eerie parallels with recently fired UK home affairs minister Suella Braverman. Her Motsoaledi-like initiatives — perhaps they share the same Bell Pottinger-type consultancy? —  have included sending asylum seekers to Rwanda and housing them in flammable barges.  

It is possible that the refugees are not the real issue. For her part, Braverman has been propping up the electoral position of the Conservatives by stoking fears of a migrant wave, while building a personal constituency among the party members who will soon elect their party’s new leader.  

In a playbook now tried and tested — from Budapest to Delhi and Mar-a-Largo — domestic courts and international conventions are viewed as mere collateral damage. Motsoaledi’s Electoral Amendment Act might provide him with opportunities to undermine the courts and flout their prescribed time frames.  

The idea of “independent” candidates did not spring fully formed from the fecund intellects of our brilliant justices, as some dinner-table conversationalists presume. A resolution calling for legislative changes to allow for independent candidates to participate in provincial and national elections was passed by the ANC conference at Polokwane in 2007, most likely to help manage the growing fallout from factional purges.  

In today’s more competitive electoral environment, sustaining the internal coherence and electoral dominance of the liberation movement is the most likely motivation for any such institutional or legislative reform.

To borrow a phrase, a politician like Braverman is a kind of human vampire bat, who will not balk at inflicting collateral damage on the courts, international law or refugees. Motsoaledi, we can hope, is still better than that. 

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: Kholeka Gcaleka owes us all a more detailed explanation

New public protector’s approach to three proposed initiatives raises important questions, as does her career path

First published in BusinessLive

16 NOVEMBER 2023

Addressing the Cape Town Press Club on Tuesday in her first major event since being formally appointed public protector, Kholeka Gcaleka made a generally favourable initial impression on the assembled media and diplomatic contingents.

She came with positive recommendations. Thuli Madonsela described her appointment as “well-deserved”. Gcaleka’s predecessor-but-one observed that “your professionalism, level-headedness and sagacity will help you navigate whatever life brings your way”.

Positive sentiment was further bolstered by the freshly minted public protector’s proactive approach. She set out a raft of proposed amendments to the Public Protector Act, suggesting that the institution needed the “financial independence” that only direct parliamentary funding could ensure — the office is currently dependent on the department of justice.

She argued that authority to investigate “protected disclosures” by whistle-blowers needed to be supplemented by resources for legal assistance and personal protection. Her COO, Nelisiwe Nkabinde, also set out a defence of the “robust” investigations behind the public protector’s Phala Phala findings.

Most importantly, Gcaleka called for criminalisation of the non-implementation of remedial actions proposed by the public protector. She revealed that only 2% of such actions proposed since March 2016 have been implemented, despite the Constitutional Court’s ruling that they are binding.

Notwithstanding the broadly favourable welcome for these initiatives, three broad concerns were raised by Gcaleka’s approach. First, the proposals for direct criminalisation of noncompliant offenders sit awkwardly with the recent history of weaponisation of the office for the pursuit of factional politics.

Is the rational lesson of Busisiwe Mkhwebane’s term in office really a determination that the public protector should have greater and immediately enforceable powers that can be wielded for who knows what ends? Gcaleka mentioned a brainstorming process that “we” engaged in to generate these ideas, but it is not clear who was engaged in this process and what their deliberations involved.

Secondly, the public protector tidily dismissed as “unfortunate” the remarks of DA MP and spokesperson on justice Glynnis Breytenbach, that Gcaleka lacked experience, had controversial involvement at the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in the case of the late Glenn Agliotti, and enjoyed an excessively “intimate” relationship with then-NPA boss Menzi Simelane. A more substantial rebuttal of these superficially plausible allegations would no doubt help entrench the legitimacy of the new office-holder.

Finally, there is still some mystery about Gcaleka’s career path, and the motivations that led her to this high office. She was an NPA official, doubtless addressing corruption and nailing the dastardly criminals who plague this country, when her career took an unexpected turn. Her public protector profile notes that “Adv Gcaleka has served as a special adviser to the ministers for the department of public service & administration; department of home affairs; and department of finance respectively — with a specific focus in the areas of administration, legal, legislation and policy development, strategy, compliance and governance”.

This columnist asked Gcaleka who these ministers were, why she had taken this fresh career path, and what she had learnt from her experiences inside the private offices of senior government ministers. She explained that her career at the NPA had reached an impasse, and that she had been asked to join a minister’s team.

But she neglected to name the minister. When pressed, she explained that she had first become a special adviser to Malusi Gigaba at the ministry of home affairs. It was no doubt useful for Gigaba to be able to draw on her experiences at NPA to address the scourge of malfeasance that so evidently troubled him. Gcaleka was a sufficiently regarded asset to move with Gigaba to the National Treasury.

That was a difficult period for the nation. Then-president Jacob Zuma was obliged to replace finance minister Pravin Gordhan — probably because of the ageing pharmacist’s intellectual limitations and his consequent inability to understand the technical nuances of Russian nuclear power procurement.

Zuma tried to appoint finance guru and Saxonwold Shebeen chief economist Brian Molefe to the position, but internal party pressure forced the president to find an alternative. In the words of the Zondo state capture commission report, “the Guptas gave President Zuma another one of their friends to be appointed, namely, Mr Malusi Gigaba and he [Zuma] appointed him”.

The commission found Gigaba had received multiple benefits, including cash payments, from the Gupta family, and recommended investigation of Gigaba for corruption and/or racketeering on several counts. It remains a pertinent question what our new public protector learnt about corruption and state capture from her position as a legal adviser in the office of Gigaba.

After a brief period working for another minister, Gcaleka moved to the office of the public protector in 2020 as its deputy. That  left her curiously well placed to move up to be promoted when Mkhwebane was finally and predictably removed in 2022.

The public’s understanding of this career trajectory would benefit from some further explication on Gcaleka’s part. It is an unfortunate consequence of the recent history of ANC governance that the word “deployment” will spring to mind among many ordinary citizens.

A fuller description of her past experiences, her motivations for new career choices, and her experiences in positions as legal adviser to controversial politicians, would all help clear the air and re-establish the legitimacy of her important but troubled office.

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

ANTHONY BUTLER: The truth behind the platitudes inspired by Boks victory

Thousands of Siyas remain undetected by the rugby system

10 NOVEMBER 2023

The Springbok victory at the Rugby World Cup generated a vast outpouring of heart-warming commentary. An army of columnists, editorial writers and, sadly, business school professors, treated us to their thoughts about “the lessons we can learn from the Springboks”.

With the assistance of artificial intelligence it is possible to crystallise their millions of words into simple principles: South Africans of all races must come together to achieve a common goal; camaraderie is forged through what unites us rather than what divides us; excellence is a jolly good thing but requires hard work; and stop sulking when you get dropped, it’s (probably) not because you’re white or black.

As the Sunday Times, the nation’s reliable voice of truth, has observed, “as a nation we are, indeed, stronger together”. Admittedly, these platitudes come across as less profound when they are condensed in this way. But they can provide a basic framework for building on the amazing Springbok achievement — so long as we bear in mind three additional lessons, each pointing to the need to think harder about resources.

First, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s effective running maul in Paris allowed him to achieve a Webb Ellis Cup turnover soon after the final whistle. Veteran — and arguably out-of-condition — DA forwards such as First XV captain (and head prefect) John Steenhuisen and gentlemanly Edgemead bruiser Geordin Hill-Lewis, displayed their low centres of gravity in stretchy Springbok jerseys and photobombed the celebrations.

Meanwhile, the ANC Women’s League in KwaZulu-Natal accused provincial chair Siboniso Duma of stealing the cup from premier Nomsa Dube-Ncube — according to the #tallistprovincial secretary, “too short” to participate — during a trophy tour in eThekwini last weekend.

There is no way to stop politicians claiming the credit. What sports authorities must do, in return, is force them to commit public resources (if we can find any) to broad-based sport development.

Second, the present model of Springbok success has probably reached its limits. There has been much talk about the diversity of paths to the squad. In all honesty, however, top rugby schools such as Paul Roos Gimnasium, Paarl Boys High, Hoërskool Tygerberg, Paarl Gymnasium and Grey College continue to generate a stream of elite players.

Diversity in the squad came not from the broad school system, but from sporadic talent spotting and the efforts of a range of “formerly Afrikaans schools” with a rugby culture, including Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool, Boland Landbou and Hoërskools Pietersburg, Florida and Waterkloof.

Elite schools, a rugby culture and concentrated coaching resources are crucial to top-tier success, but talented players still have a narrow path to tread. Most need incredible luck to get them onto this path. While so few schools continue to generate SA’s elite players, a majority will continue to be white and a minority black.

Third, determination, grit and talent are all crucial for success, but so too are resources. Some schools, universities and clubs can provide for living and training costs, coaching and support staff such as physiotherapists and nutritionists, training facilities and modern equipment, but SA has pitifully few broad-based programmes across the country’s schools as a whole.

SA nurtured Siya Kolisi and Cheslin Kolbe, but how many similar talents have been lost among our thousands of public schools and 12-million pupils?

An ambitious school sports programme that embraces pupils, teachers and parents across the public school system could improve public and mental health and boost social cohesion. It would create the support structures young people need. And it would provide a broader feed of talented youngsters, women as well as men, into all sporting codes.

Given voluntary support, maybe it wouldn’t even cost that much.

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