Editorial
Johannesburg - President Cyril Ramaphosa will be in Davos, Switzerland, next week at the annual jamboree of world leaders, economists, investors, thinkers, celebrities, poseurs – and supplicants.
But the question on everyone’s lips is: “What story will he tell them?”
In Jacob Zuma’s time, the catchphrase was “we’ve got a good story to tell”, and we all know how that turned out. What will Ramaphosa be telling the great and the good in the Alps? Perhaps more to the point, what will he be telling them that he has yet to tell the people of South Africa?
It’s difficult to sell a country as a place to invest in if there is no guarantee of a consistent power supply to run a business – especially a heavy industrial one that can’t run off a petrol generator on a pavement.
It’s just as difficult to get better-off countries to give us aid to pull ourselves out of the morass we find ourselves in if there is no guarantee those funds won’t just be siphoned off by some extortionist group masquerading as being either politically or culturally significant – and apparently above the law.
So what story is he going to tell them? When he has worked that out, perhaps he could take the country into his confidence, because the truth of the matter, Mr President, is that most of us think there is no plan whatsoever.
What is even worse is that an increasing number of us don’t think you and your colleagues even care, because you don’t have to bear the brunt of the power cuts or wrestle with the spiralling cost of living like the rest of us.
The truth, Mr President, is that this week your New Dawn showed itself for what it really is – a perverse joke, with the people of South Africa as the punchline.
So what’s your story?