MICHAEL MORRIS: Ramaphosa’s take on BEE is ‘off nominal’ at best, wrong at worst - Business Day
Michael Morris
Perhaps because I am not a rocket scientist, I heard for the first time only last week the surely prizeworthy euphemism that was relied on by one of the two brimmingly unalarmed SpaceX functionaries to whom it fell to finesse the latest test-flight failure.
Blinking forgivingly at the camera as the wayward rocket careened towards the Indian Ocean, she coolly reassured us of the aborted flight that “we do plan for if something goes a little bit off nominal”.
“A little bit off nominal” is so wonderfully awful and transparent that if you’re not tempted to burst into applause you must deduce that only a fool would hereafter try anything as bland as plain old “goes horribly wrong”.
But at least it’s headed in an honest direction; an elite few versed in space talk probably understand immediately the calamitous implications of the non-nominal, and even the rest of us eventually get there after an excursion through the usual fog of specialist idiom.
If “off nominal” still seems almost comically dissembling to me, I can at least appreciate that it forms part of a discrete grammar that does actually serve rationality, and a process of observation and correction.
What we say is true, or not true, must matter most when meant to show that when something goes wrong we recognise as much as the first candid step towards fixing it.
Just a few days ago — perhaps around the time of the SpaceX rocket’s delinquency — the Financial Times in London noted of SA: “One year on [from the formation of the government of national unity], with the economy growing at a little more than 1%, optimism is waning.
“Now business leaders are arguing that the White House showdown [between US President Donald Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa] has to be a catalyst for a new approach. They also hope Ramaphosa has returned aware of the need to act more decisively to open up the economy and keep populists on the back foot.”
An unintended answer was given by fellow columnist Peter Bruce last week, when he wrote: “Just back from a gruelling trip to Washington, [Ramaphosa] spent the first few days of this week promising a trillion rand in infrastructure spend, lecturing an Afrikaner MP on the economic rewards of BEE and, far away from Donald Trump, being outraged at the very thought of preventing Julius Malema from singing ‘Kill the Boer’ to large crowds in football stadiums.” (“Fact is BEE is a cruel joke on the poor”, May 29).
As Bruce went on to say, the president’s “defence of BEE in parliament ... was a peach” — not least in the context of national debt being so high we have to pay “R1.2bn a day in interest, R48.4m an hour”, and first-quarter joblessness of a record 32.9%, or more than 40% on the expanded definition.
“It’s a catastrophe,” Bruce writes, “and you would have thought that after so much failure someone in the ANC might wonder whether they need to change.”
But here’s Ramaphosa’s leisurely assessment: “We are on a journey of moving away from the shadow of our horrible past, which defined us as separate groups and separate entities.
“What is important is for us to see ourselves first and foremost as Africans, as it constitutes our being as South African. We need to rid ourselves of those divisions. It will take us time, but we are on a journey.”
This identifies neither our crisis nor its correction, and most know it. Increasingly, South Africans think Ramaphosa’s interpretation is, to borrow a phrase, just a little bit off nominal.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.