MICHAEL MORRIS: Are we still committed to change? - Business Day

Michael Morris

There was surely a hint of incongruity last week in President Cyril Ramaphosa evoking the “powerful imagery” of the “thousands of women of all races” massed at the Union Buildings 70 years ago, whose “standing in silence illustrated their resolve and commitment to change”.

“We recall,” he said in the opening passages of his state of the nation address (Sona), “the powerful image of Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Sophie de Bruyn and Rahima Moosa carrying armfuls of petitions to lay at the doorstep of a prime minister who did not dare to meet them.”

I always approve of historical recollection — not as an instrument of grievance, which usually only nurtures cynicism and rancour, but as a way of recognising the scale of our journey, the successes, the inevitable setbacks and where our unmet ambitions might lie.

We can see, for instance, that the quantum of resolve contemporary circumstances in 1956 called for must have been daunting. But did Ramaphosa pause inwardly at the start of his speech to consider that, 70 years later, South Africa is no less in need of “resolve and commitment to change”?

Just what sort of change we might wish to see was starkly drawn in two public comments by senior ANC figures in the days leading up to the Sona.

The first was Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi’s unguarded reflection on the undiscriminating impact of Johannesburg’s water crisis. In what he must have felt was a confiding aside that would surely be consoling, Lesufi said: “People think that if there is no water, ourselves and our families get special water. We don’t … in certain instances I had to go to a certain hotel so that I [could] bathe to go to my commitments. We also go through the same inconveniences like any other person.”

Not long after he apologised for his “hotel” remark — but that only seemed to deepen the error; the apology should have been for his presiding over unaddressed dysfunction (and implying that having a bath in a hotel was a penalty for something he had had nothing to do with).

The second public comment was, I feel, far worse and all the more revealing. It came in mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe’s opening remarks at the Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town.

Having just said that while “many say [BEE] is driving investors out, it is not.…”, he went on: “But in exploration we say we will exclude [BEE requirements], because exploration adds no value. You are looking for the quantity and quality of minerals. Therefore, you do not need to carry [the] burden of a black partner.”

For a start, my own colleagues have found that BEE “premiums” in state procurement spending alone cost at least R100bn a year. Scrapping them could allow reducing VAT from 15% to 11.5%. Worse, Mantashe’s unembarrassed reference to the “burden of a black partner” is an astounding affront.

The question is, does the Sona 2026 deal anywhere squarely with abandoning ideological shibboleths that do such harm or repudiating unresponsive politicians who witlessly deflect South Africa from its journey of hope?

Until these things are made central to our politics and to urgent, credible “transformation”, South Africa’s socioeconomic landscape will retain an outline of long familiarity, one that in too many ways we can imagine being damningly recognisable to Ngoyi, Joseph, De Bruyn and Moosa, and the millions who stood with them in spirit all those years ago.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-02-16-michael-morris-are-we-still-committed-to-change/