Super Sepp and the Chinese solution

Despite widespread antipathy towards Sepp Blatter, it must have crossed many minds that over the past month Fifa, the international football association, has called the shots on running South Africa better than any government has managed in half a century. Admittedly, it was made easier for Fifa that they stepped into a leadership vacuum.

SA’s first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela, was inspirational, but indifferent to administrative follow-through. He was followed by absentee landlord Thabo Mbeki, always chasing glory in foreign fields. And now there is President Jacob Zuma, who prefers to muddle along, pushed and pulled by ever-changing currents within the African National Congress and its allies.

In contrast, Comrade Septic Bladder has commandeered the administration well. Crime is down and national pride is up. Political discourse has edged marginally from bad-tempered abuse to occasional civility. And not only is the Gautrain operating, but it actually runs on time.

As Zuma confides in an interview with Fifa, the primary lesson that the SA government took from hosting of the World Cup has been “how to work with strict timelines”. This is akin to identifying punctuality as the most useful legacy of school, but essentially Zuma is right.

The ANC has always been awash with admirable intentions but frustratingly inept at carrying them out. Working to a Fifa script, project implementation was, for a change, largely seamless.

What happens next, as Thiefa pockets its $3.2 billion loot and turns its piggy eyes towards 2014 target, Brazil? Following Zuma’s epiphany regarding how to engineer delivery, will the ANC apply its newly discovered skills to implement the literally thousands of upliftment projects announced since 1994 but that have since petered out?

It would mean getting the public service into gear and dealing with the problems of ANC cadre deployment, cronyism, inertia, and a general lack accountability. These, however, are stumbling blocks that could be addressed relatively easily, if there were a chain of accountability.

Government ministers had to exercise managerial oversight during the World Cup because they, in turn, for the first time were being held accountable. Not by a vacillating president or an endlessly forgiving electorate, but by the mandarins of Fifa and a demanding tourism market.

But national success depends on more than managerial best practice. As importantly, SA must become a post-ideological society — as has happened in virtually every successful modern economy — since slavish adherence to rigid, formulaic mantras strongly inhibits economic growth.

Zuma has often expressed admiration for the Chinese developmental model and with good reason. Over just 32 years China transformed from peasant society to the world’s third biggest economy, as a direct result of the jettisoning of doctrinaire communism.

In contrast, the ANC and its tripartite alliance have always preferred ideology to pragmatism. When it comes to joblessness, if it can’t create the “decent work” demanded by the trade unions, it seems to be perfectly content to preside over no job creation at all.

Similarly, in education, it spent years pondering educational philosophy and how outcomes-based education (OBE) would deliver Utopia, instead of fretting about basic literacy and numeracy. Consequently, half of OBE pupils dropped out before Grade 12 and 40% of those who made it that far, failed their matric.

Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga this week at last scrapped OBE, saying “We are removing the last ghost of 1998,” the year it was introduced. In the interim, millions of lives have been blighted by educational ideology, which in turn has been compounded by poor management — in most disadvantaged schools, teachers simply don’t bother to teach or even turn up.

Zuma’s pal, Super Sepp, wouldn’t tolerate it for a moment. Nor would Zuma’s heroes, the Chinese.