Too often digital transformation in Africa is narrowly understood as increasing the use of digital products and services by governments, companies, consumers and nonprofit organisations. In Africa it needs to be broader than that. African societies need to tap into new technologies to also overcome socio-economic divides, improve the delivery of public services, enhance public engagement in policy processes and promote inclusive economic development.

Yet this cannot happen organically. According to the African Union Commission. (2020). Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030): “Governments have a responsibility to create an enabling environment with policies and regulations that promote digital transformation.” This inherently requires the same policy makers to develop dynamic capabilities within their governments to improve policy and the regulatory framework.

Governing a digital society

Emerging digital trends are challenging and reshaping traditional policy approaches. The dominance of big tech in data markets and the associated risks to data integrity, taxation and the participation of small and medium enterprises in data markets are growing public policy concerns.

All over the world, policy makers seem to continuously define the ‘rules of the digital game’. These decisions, however, will have long-lasting implications on the distribution power in the digital economy between governments, the private sector and citizens.

This requires a re-evaluation of how our societies are organised, the norms that should underpin policies and regulations and how to govern digital transformation in ways that yield development outcomes and protect the citizens of these societies.

Digital transformation in a time of crisis

In the current era of polycrisis, there is a pressing need to strengthen the governance architecture of digital change. We need to close divides between urban and rural areas as well as advanced industrial economies and developing nations. Digital inclusion is pivotal to transformation.

Digital governance in Africa must be seen as an indispensable component of anticipatory governance, particularly in a time of extreme social disruptions like the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine and most recently the conflict in the Middle East.

These challenges, which affect the world and particularly Africa, can be addressed by harnessing digital technologies to promote development, enhance supply chain resilience and achieve inclusive outcomes.

An interdisciplinary response

Digital governance requires interdisciplinary conversations that cut across government, private sector and civil society aimed at improving public actor responses to these challenges and prepare for uncertain futures. It is about creating shared values to develop and direct new digital tools at solving complex socio-economic challenges rather than introducing new layers of complexity and inequality.

To facilitate these conversations, The Wits School of Governance created The Tayarisha Research Group for Digital Governance. Meaning ‘preparing’ in kiSwahili, Tayarisha is an academic platform for research, training, policy dialogues and development related to digital transformation. The centre focuses on the interplay between digitalisation, development, public policy, ethics and civic engagement.

Tayarisha, The Digital Afrikan and The Mail & Guardian

Over the next few weeks, Tayarisha, The Digital Afrikan (a content portal on all things digital in Africa) and the Mail & Guardian will run a series of research and data driven articles to bring many of the issues mentioned here to the fore.

Our view is that building digital infrastructure, investing in human capital, accelerating the adoption of digital tools in the public sector and improving regulatory institutions will help to improve the broader ecosystem of tech entrepreneurship in new digital economies. Communities will be empowered to participate more effectively in public policy engagements.

To do this, we must ensure digital literacy among all digital Africans. From policy makers and innovators to investors and guardians of ethics and citizens’ digital rights. Together, we must develop capabilities to steer digital transformation to align with shared African societal values. We must prepare.

Mzukisi Qobo is Visiting Professor at the Wits School of Governance and co-founder of the Tayarisha Research Group on Digital Governance; Karuri-Sebina is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Tayarisha Research Group on Digital Governance at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand. https://www.wits.ac.za/tayarisha/ 

Professor Geci Karuri-Sebina is a scholar-practitioner working in the intersection between people, place and technological change. She is coordinating the establishment of the Tayarisha African Centre of Excellence in Digital Governance, and hosting the African Civic Tech Innovation Network at the Wits School of Governance. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities, a Principal at the School of International Futures, and a global faculty member with Singularity University on the future of cities and governance.

Since the United Nations Climate Change Agreement was signed by 196 nations in December 2015, many countries have announced policies to reduce their fossil fuel emissions.

Their commitments are set out in nationally determined actions they’ll be taking to achieve this.

But the transition must navigate political economy tensions, especially in developing countries.

Take South Africa, for example. It has deep-seated socio-economic problems such as inequality and unemployment. Its unemployment rate (including people who have given up looking for jobs) is unacceptably high at 42.5%. The country is also among the most unequal in the world.

And inequality remains mostly delineated by “race”. The mainstream economy remains predominantly owned by the white minority almost 30 years after democracy.

South Africa is under pressure to move from fossil fuels to green energy, with a strong emphasis on renewable sources. It has developed a just energy transition framework and a just investment proposal that has so far yielded €600 million in concessional finance from France and Germany.

But the country is yet to formulate a systematic transition plan. Such a plan would be underpinned by a social contract, supported by a broad range of stakeholders and affected groups.

Moving to green energy will affect those directly employed in the coal mining sector. This is a fifth of those employed in the mining sector. That means 108 000 out of 514 859 people.

The ripple effects of the transition will also be felt across the value chain, from mines to markets and into people’s homes.

Making the green energy transition a success requires that the government pay attention not just to environmental factors, but also to socio-economic needs. It must pay special attention to the effect on workers and people living in mining areas, and the macroeconomic effects of dwindling foreign exchange earnings and taxes.

Ignoring socio-economic issues risks a populist backlash that could slow a necessary transition to a green industrial economy.

Socio-economic imperatives

The core mission of South Africa’s shift towards green energy should be to achieve economic growth, rising employment and greater equity and inclusion. It must do all this while minimising social risks.

A green energy transition that is not anchored in fairness and inclusivity could potentially multiply socio-economic risks.

Any efforts to move away from fossil fuels must cover three key areas. 

• Retrain workers in the coal industry who will be retrenched in the process, and offer them an alternative source of livelihood. The transition, as the World Bank proposes, requires a “whole-of-society” approach. This should entail engagements with everyone who is affected to ensure that no one is left behind.

• Promote inclusive supply chains to enable greater participation of small, micro and medium enterprises, especially in small equipment manufacturing activities, installation, civil works, retail and maintenance.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development notes that small and medium enterprises can be important drivers of green and inclusive growth. They can be encouraged to adopt green strategies as part of their preconditions for participating in the supply chains of major firms.

• Enhance energy security by attracting investment into other cleaner sources of energy. For example, the European Union is considering reclassifying nuclear as part of green energy. Major countries such as France insist on “technology neutrality” to include nuclear and hydrogen in their energy mix, rather than to privilege solar and wind energy sources that do not have baseload (the amount of power made available by an energy producer). Lack of baseload compromises energy security.

Renewable energy sources provide intermittent power, depending on the availability of sun or wind, whereas average demand requires consistent supply. Europe’s predicament in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine best illustrates this: as soon as Russia throttled Europe’s gas supply, governments rationed electricity to curb demand. Or they ramped up the demand for coal from countries such as Colombia, Australia and South Africa to ensure baseload.

A wide lens

As countries march towards a brave new world of green technologies, they must ensure that those left behind, and trapped at the bottom of the old industrial economy, are at the helm of the new economy. The transition to the ideal state must reflect a broad energy mix, rather than leaning on a narrow set of technologies that may not adequately offer energy security or produce just and equitable outcomes.

South Africa must balance environmental concerns, socio-economic imperatives and energy security in its transition strategies.

For this to be possible, the answer, according to the World Economic Forum, will probably have to be a combination of institutional capacity building, well-chosen policies and a substantial contribution by the international community — technologically as well as financially.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the the full article here

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

The Chinese leadership would, in a matter of three decades, lift over 500 million people out of poverty. Adding another decade, China almost doubled the number of people who escaped poverty to an estimated 800 million. This achievement is historically unprecedented.

Next year, South Africa will be marking three decades since the onset of its democracy. We need to reflect on what would constitute a significant marker of the country’s economic achievement. I will return to the tasks that face South Africa at the current juncture.

China framed its development path differently from the West, preferring heterodoxy rather than a linear, strictly market-based approach. The elites took some lessons from the US in the 1980s on reforming large state-owned enterprises. They drew insights from Singapore on building a meritocratic public service. Yet they gave the country’s reform agenda a local flavour, couching it as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. 

Effectively, the Chinese government practised a model of state capitalism, where the government guided the markets, opening them gradually and keeping them in check, while supporting the country’s development framework. Planning was not an end — establishing credibility through performance legitimacy was the ultimate objective and mode of work. 

As a result, the country had a long-running streak of growth, became a major exporter on the back of cheap labour, invested significantly in infrastructure and structural reforms, and created untold opportunities for many who were buffeted by poverty in the countryside. Later, the country registered productivity gains, gradually progressed up the value chain, and promoted innovation while supporting services and high-technology industries to compete with the West. 

Of course, the Chinese growth model has reached its exhaustion point and is convalescing from multiple crises domestically: its zero-Covid restrictions have eroded its growth base and induced angst in sections of its population. It has also suffered challenges in its debt-fuelled real estate market, exhibiting signs of a bubble. 

Its economy could yet come under severe pressure on the back of geoeconomic rivalry with the US as some of the large Western tech firms contemplate diversifying their supply chains in China as insurance against geopolitical shifts. 

The point is not to copy a Chinese model or any other best practice devoid of context. There are many lessons about how rich countries got to be where they are today and how developing countries got stunted. Some of these emphasise geography, while others stress the role of human capital, technology and institutions. 

The most powerful lesson, however, lies in what Kenneth Cukier and his colleagues refer to, in their book Framers, as the power of framing in decision-making. In policymaking, framing is how reality is conceived and presented. We make better decisions by being better at framing, according to Cukier. Put differently, we will not achieve the desired policy outcomes if we base our decision-making models on wrong questions and assumptions. 

Returning to the South African story, it is clear that our standard practices and their assumptions for governing are no longer working. Some of the examples are assumptions about economic policy; sectors to support through industrial policy; ideas about the role of small enterprises in the economy; investments in the country’s infrastructure and how best to do it; the role of state-owned enterprises and development finance institutions in driving development; and the correct pathways to, and balance between, energy security and decarbonisation. 

When assumptions and their practices do not work, we need to find new frames and adjust our actions accordingly. There are no simple out-of-the-box answers to what precisely our new governing models should be. 

That is never the starting point for those countries that have successfully achieved sustained growth and narrowed the gap between the rich and the poor. They exhibit traits such as flexibility — or pragmatism — in making policy choices, bias towards action and continuous improvement.

The capacity of the state to deliver is one obvious obstacle, but this does not explain why there has been limited progress in addressing South Africa’s developmental challenges over nearly three decades. If capacities are not adequately channelled to deliver on priorities, success will be scant; and if priorities are framed wrongly, there will be much activity but with no notable outcomes. 

For example, when Norway discovered oil in 1966, there was no single petroleum engineer in the country. It imported technical skills but made provisions for skills transfer and diffusion of learning across the country’s budding small and medium enterprises. By the late 1970s, the government was dictating terms to multinational oil companies and had created a decent human capital base, insisted on local content and grew sustainably. 

Within six years of its discovery of oil, it had established a state-owned oil company, Statoil, which grew to become a global powerhouse that is at the frontiers of technological innovation. From being a backward fishing and hydropower country, Norway is among the top 10 richest countries per capita today.

Closer to home, when South Africa produced armoured vehicles, the Marmon-Herrington, in the late 1930s to early 1940s, it had demonstrated possibilities of making a technological leap. The country had no pre-existing industrial capacity for consumer vehicles. Rather, there were clear priorities framed around World War II and a commitment to using this window of opportunity — a crisis for other countries — to develop industrial capabilities and achieve higher employment levels. 

In both cases, it was framing the challenge and solutions differently from the models that had previously existed that provided success. Rather than endless deliberations, getting things done is a source of knowledge for continuous improvements.

South Africa suffers several limitations, apart from the corruption that is becoming endemic. The first is that we allow dysfunction to take root and become a convention. The government departments can be at loggerheads over a crucial decision, for example, restructuring the energy sector, without any traction on decisions made. 

Personalities and factional politics become the frame that creates obstacles to the decisions necessary for reforms. Further, decisions about fiscal allocations are trapped by path dependence. While conventional economic models play the role of a crutch in navigating economic challenges, they do not help us to find new sources of economic vitality.

If the first question that comes to mind is what will the markets think, rather than what could be the best possible outcomes for economic change if we invest in new sources of growth and innovation, then our frames will remain limited. 

In about a year, the new South Africa will be 30 years old. The country will need something to show for in its three decades as a democracy, or the political leadership will face a red card. 

Many, especially the youth, will no longer take seriously the explanations that the socio-economic challenges are due to the apartheid past, even though its scars are still visible in its spatial arrangements and racist practices that continue to persist in society and the economy. The youth will ask, what have you done about the past? And what is your account for corruption and mismanagement of resources under democracy? 

We still have an opportunity as a country to get to grips with our challenges and lay a solid basis for institutional change and economic progress. We need to change our frames and get things done. The clock is ticking. 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

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The task force is an intergovernmental body that acts to combat money laundering and terrorist financing and sets international standards for curbing illicit financial flows. 

It was formed at the G7 Summit hosted in Paris in 1989 initially to combat money laundering as it related to illicit traffic in narcotics drugs. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, its mandate was widened to include counter-terrorist financing measures. 

South Africa joined the FATF in 2003. In the same year, the Financial Intelligence Centre was established by an Act of parliament to function in line with emerging global best practices. 

Countries that fail to meet FATF standards and lack robust measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing risk being greylisted or, worse, blacklisted. 

South Africa should not be facing this threat in the first place. That we are countenancing the prospects of greylisting is a sign of failure to act with speed in rebuilding key institutions and overcoming risks created by years of state capture. 

It is also a wake-up call that we should never take the vitality of the institutions for granted and that bad leadership can do harm to society and the institutions that underpin it. 

In 2015, the cabinet took a decision to establish an interdepartmental committee that would give effect to South Africa’s commitment to implement the G20 High-Level Principles on Transparency in Beneficial Ownership and to undertake a risk assessment of the country’s vulnerability to money laundering and terrorist financing as a result of the misuse of companies, trusts and foundations for illicit financial flows. 

These high-level principles were adopted at the summit held in Australia in 2014. They were meant to be an expression of a strong commitment by G20 countries to take the lead in efforts to curb the use of corporate vehicles and other legal arrangements for illicit purposes. The hope was that other countries would follow suit. The G20 high-level principles were aimed at reinforcing the task force’s work in combating illicit financial flows. 

These global standards imposed new regulatory norms for banks and non-designated financial bodies and professionals, for example, estate agents, dealers in precious metals, lawyers and accountants. It was not just the financial institutions that needed to strengthen their supervision of clients and financial transactions, but also those institutions that had intermediating functions in society and that could be used to conceal the proceeds of crime.

The interdepartmental task team that was to coordinate various agencies of government and external bodies affected by the new standards on beneficial ownership was established in 2016, a few months after the cabinet had taken the decision to expedite South Africa’s implementation of the G20 high-level principles.

During this time, I led a small technical team that supported the process of ensuring that South Africa had a clear view of the risks that faced it so that the government could take the necessary steps to overcome such risks. 

Institutions such as the treasury, the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, the South African Reserve Bank, the Financial Intelligence Centre, the South African Revenue Services (Sars), the National Prosecuting Authority, and various other agencies in and outside of the state participated actively in the process. 

There was, however, a lingering cloud of mistrust over Sars given the leadership turmoil and factional tensions that tore that organisation apart at the height of state capture.

In short, the extensive risk assessment we undertook showed the country faced certain high risks regarding secrecy with beneficial ownership of legal entities, mainly companies and trusts. 

There were other risks related to the poor legislative framework, weaknesses in operations, systems and resourcing capability of various institutions that played oversight roles, poor coordination among important government institutions and law enforcement agencies, and risks related to lack of access to, and sharing of, information among government agencies. 

Sharing of information between Sars and the Financial Intelligence Centre was particularly poor, and the reason for this was largely to do with all the major political actors, and politically connected individuals, who were under suspicion of money laundering and the factionalised nature of Sars, which could not be trusted not to alert some of these individuals. 

The Sars ship was steered by Tom Moyane whom the Zondo commission would later implicate in state capture activities. 

There was also a strong pushback by some of the politically connected individuals against measures that were proposed by the Financial Intelligence Centre, which at the time was ably led by Murray Michell, especially those aspects that related to stringent due diligence requirements on politically exposed persons.

The FIC Amendment Act was finally signed by president Jacob Zuma in April 2017 after nearly a year of delay, and it only entered into force six months after it was signed. 

State capture created so much damage and undermined the credibility of institutions. If South Africa was to be greylisted, that would be another reminder of how the state capture era posed grave risks to the country. 

The good news though is that greylisting is not meant to be punitive, but corrective. It places the country under constant monitoring by the FATF until it addresses all its “strategic deficiencies”, especially weaknesses in its financial, regulatory and reporting processes and systems. If it happens, as it is likely, it should be seen as an opportunity to undertake deep financial and economic reforms. 

Countries that were placed under the FATF greylist in early 2020, such as Mauritius, were able to get their house in order within 20 months. The Mauritian government undertook serious reforms that included risk-based supervision plans for the Financial Services Commission, ensured access to accurate basic and beneficial ownership information in companies and other legal entities, and bolstered the capacities of law enforcement authorities in conducting money laundering activities.

In the 2017 report that we produced as the technical team, we deemed South Africa’s risk profile as very high, meaning that urgent action needed to be taken to avoid any adverse findings by the task force. Importantly, we highlighted that there needed to be a sense of urgency in tackling various risks that we identified. 

Some of the actions required included finalising legislative reforms, establishing new institutions, and strengthening coordination across relevant agencies and departments. 

Further, we proposed that the country should have a register of beneficial owners of companies and other legal entities. There was much debate about whether such a register should be publicly available, which would help to enhance transparency and certainly demonstrate a clear intent on curbing the misuse of companies for illicit activities. 

The very fact of having an accessible risk register on beneficial ownership is a powerful signal of the country’s commitment to curbing the misuse of legal entities for purposes of money laundering and other illicit activities. 

Greylisting is not a death sentence for a country, but it should concentrate the minds nonetheless. As countries such as Mauritius have shown, rapid recovery is possible if governments take the right actions within clearly defined timelines. 

Mzukisi Qobo is head of the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

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This year marks 100 years since the promulgation of the Electricity Act that came into force on 1 September 1922 to establish Eskom for the purpose of stimulating industrialisation and improving the welfare of the Afrikaner community. 

Before Eskom, mining companies had their own generation capacity, and power generation, in general, was decentralised at the local level, used mainly by coal and gold miners and for municipal services and tramways.

Jan Smuts had dreamt of South Africa as an industrial powerhouse that was not just known for its minerals. He was fixated on the idea of reducing dependence on the English-dominated mining sector. In the immediate, he was troubled by the “poor white problem” and sought to find a permanent solution that would confine this problem to the ash heap of history. 

In envisioning Eskom, his goal was to promote integrated industrialisation through cheap electricity, create full employment among Afrikaners, and ignite entrepreneurial activity among this community to ensure they permanently escaped the clutches of poverty. 

It is inconceivable that South Africa would have built any industrial capacity of note without cheap electricity.

The skill to create a complex energy utility was outside the country. Smuts turned to Hendrik Johannes van der Bijl to shoulder the task of creating the new utility and overcoming the fragmented generation of electricity, to the anxiety of municipalities, which would lose their revenue. 

Van der Bijl studied in Germany, where he obtained his PhD. At the time Smuts called him, Van der Bijl was plying his trade in America. He accepted the call to return to South Africa and aid its industrial development. 

It is worth noting that this industrial civilisation had its dark underbelly — it excluded the majority of Africans from electricity. The patterns of electricity consumption were skewed in favour of a tiny white community, and the gains of industrial production were distributed in favour of white-owned businesses.

In his book, Electricity, Industry and Class in South Africa, Renfrew Christie reflected on the inequities of that period: “Power reaches almost every corner of South Africa except the homes of most of the black workers and peasants”. 

Yet the creation of the power utility was revolutionary for its beneficiaries at that point in history. So successful was Van der Bijl in powering households and industries that the government asked him to start another state-owned company — a steel manufacturer. 

According to Alice Jacobs, his biographer, Van der Bijl persuaded the government to introduce a Bounties Act, which would effectively inject subsidies into state-owned steel production. In 1923 the Bounties Act was promulgated and paved the way for large-scale steel production. The ultimate goal of the government subsidy was to accelerate the development of local content. 

Today there is strong pushback against local content and a belief that South Africa can build new industrial capacity, including in new green industries, by becoming reliant on imports instead of developing a sound plan for local capacity. No doubt, it takes a while to build industrial capacities, but there has to be a burning intent to produce this with a clear, time-bound plan. 

Five years after Eskom was formed, a new bill establishing state-owned Iscor was promulgated and by 1928 Iscor was in business. Iscor stimulated many other steelworks in the country, especially components and intermediate products. These included bolts and nuts, pipes, chains, agricultural implements, ferro-alloys and plenty of others. 

At the time of the establishment of Iscor, the private sector was sceptical and hesitant to contribute to this endeavour. Business leaders held the view that South Africa would not succeed as a steel producer, that its climatic conditions were unfavourable, the country was uncompetitive, and it would not be able to weather the deluge of dumped steel, especially from Britain and Belgium. 

Dumping did occur, but this galvanised the state to impose tariff measures to protect steel production in South Africa. 

Thus import substitution industrialisation became the centrepiece of industrial development protecting infant industries from steel to chemicals, clothing and textiles, and, later, the automotive sector.

It is worth noting that Iscor came to life during inauspicious times — the world was going through depression and the poor-white problem in South Africa was intensifying with worrying signs of more political upheavals, especially against the backdrop of the 1922 labour strike that the Smuts government had quelled violently, and which cost him politically in the elections two years later.

The macro-economic conditions were inclement with high interest rates threatening to put brakes on capital formation. Yet there was no stopping the Afrikaner elite from pursuing its mission.

So determined was the government to build industrial capacity in South Africa, it reached out to the German government to send technical expertise to South Africa. The idea was that foreign experts would train South African workers so that the country would not be perpetually dependent on foreign skills and technologies. 

By the time World War II broke out in 1939, South Africa was in an advantageous position to be a pivotal actor in supplying goods to the battlefront. Van der Bijl assumed the powerful role as director general to coordinate supplies through a new state-owned enterprise, War Supplies, which, at the end of the conflict, helped to drive production for civilian use, producing items from electronic goods to clothing and textiles. 

This state institution also paved the way for medical science as the country expanded into the production of vaccines. 

Less than a decade after the end of the war, Van der Bijl was again asked by the government to create an industrial financing instrument to support the entrepreneurial activities of Afrikaners so that they would not be wholly dependent on the state. In 1940 the Industrial Development Corporation was formed, and it became instrumental in creating various industry initiatives, including Sasol. 

Some of the important lessons in this industrial trajectory included a commitment to a clearly defined vision. This was to create rival capital to the English businessmen who were hogging the mining sector, eliminate poverty among whites, restore their dignity and create a new class of entrepreneurs. 

The Afrikaner political elite imposed heavy taxes on the English mining industry to support an Afrikaner-led development path. 

Ideas and human capital played a vital role in this project. Afrikaner nationalism was hitched to a long-term industrial vision rather than as an idea for its own sake. Ethnic consciousness was mobilised to realise a grand industrial vision.

While history cannot be reconstructed, especially given its highly racialised nature, the state has a major role to play in forging economic inclusion and nurturing conditions for wealth creation among black industrialists and small and medium enterprises that are supported to integrate meaningfully into mainstream economic activities. 

For the state to succeed, those who run it must be motivated by a clear vision to overcome economic deprivations facing the black community and to build a thriving society, rather than be fixated on extracting rents for their personal benefit. 

They must also take seriously the importance of building bureaucratic efficiencies in the state by sourcing and deploying skills that are not defined by narrow party political affiliations. 

Mzukisi Qobo is head of the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

Bain & Company hold many lessons for the private sector and global consulting firms on how to set boundaries when working with the state. Its apology is another example of the wrong kind of atonement ritual companies should never participate in — offering hubris instead of sincerity. 

Businesses have a bigger role to play in enhancing public value by upholding a high standard of ethical conduct in society.

Stephen York, Bain’s managing partner in South Africa, recently published a defiant “appeal for constructive dialogue” in various newspapers. This came on the back of the UK government’s decision that Bain cannot bid for state contracts for three years because of its involvement in South Africa’s state capture project. South African public institutions should follow suit.

In its qualified public apology, Bain sets out to split hairs over what was true and not true in the accusations levelled at it for its role in state capture. York seeks the company’s atonement without taking full responsibility for its ethical failures. Even his reference to the improvement of internal controls and governance system is too vague to be believable. 

If Bain does not think it colluded with politicians and Tom Moyane, the then commissioner of the South African Revenue Service (Sars), to weaken the tax authority, then whatever measures it has put in place are merely cosmetic.

York, and by extension Bain, seem not to gasp the gravity of the actions of the consulting firm in the destruction of value at Sars, and just how bad a name this gives to global consulting companies and businesses. He confidently states that Bain’s business was about helping “South African organisations grow, innovate, and excel”, a far cry from what actually happened in the relationship between the consultancy and the revenue authority. 

Bain’s letter casts Sars leadership as duplicitous while framing the consultancy as a deceived rather than a colluding party, despite the fact that Bain was dancing with politicians even before Moyane’s appointment at Sars was confirmed. 

In his ponderous letter, York blandly offers that Bain “regrets in playing any role in the damage to this critical institution”. It is not just that Bain played any role but actively colluded with Moyane in destroying governance, in flouting procurement rules in a self-serving manner and fomenting a culture of fear and mistrust in that institution, which set off a skills exodus. 

Bain may have repaid the fees with interest but that does not fully compensate for value destruction whose effects will be long-lasting. 

The Zondo commission is clear in its portrayal of the precise role of Bain in state capture, and no amount of white-washing will change the facts about the company’s role in the reversal of South Africa’s fortunes. 

In discussing the relationship between Sars and Bain during that sordid state capture era, the commission report notes that “the actors in question weakened and misdirected the revenue gathering function of Sars”. 

The Zondo report states that “there was collusion between Sars, the executive [including the then president, Jacob Zuma] and the management consultancy, Bain & Company, with a planned and coordinated agenda to seize and restructure Sars, well in advance of the appointment of either Bain or Mr Tom Moyane …” This is serious stuff.

Given the fraught political climate in the country at that time, any consulting company doing work for sensitive state agencies should have put its guard up, asked tough questions or walked away from the “opportunity”. Bain enjoyed proximity to political power and it stood to benefit financially; it thought the music would go on forever.

The Sars contract inexplicably grew from just over R2-million to more than R160-million, and a way had to be found to corrupt the procurement processes even though the Bain team working at Sars had no demonstrable experience in working on tax issues. Bain’s executives had politicians in their pockets; they had met Zuma about 17 times, according to the Zondo report. 

No doubt, at this point Bain saw itself as having captured a crucial state account, with more business to flow in its direction. It could not be outshone by its erstwhile competitor, Mckinsey & Company, also implicated in the state capture report, which had seized the accounts of Transnet and Eskom. 

Bain saw Sars as a stepping stone to various state-owned enterprises and to reshape information and communications technology, energy and infrastructure.

In 2008, Sars was recognised as one of the best and most efficient tax administration services in the world. Even by 2013, it was still winning accolades. Sars needed no intervention from a quasi-management doctor in the form of Bain, whose role would turn poisonous. 

Usually, management consultancies come to fix broken institutions; in this case Bain did the opposite. It found an efficient and well-respected organisation and rendered it dysfunctional. Management consultancies promise to offer ailing companies turnaround strategies, fix bad management practices and support leadership teams. 

It is the practices of companies such as Bain that give consultancy firms a bad name and that cast a shadow on business ethics. Businesses are agencies that are supposed to create value in society.

When reading York’s non-apology, it beggars belief that companies would take the sorts of risk Bain took in cultivating politicians and doing something that is unethical, if not criminal, in participating in the state capture project. 

There is the perverse idea among some businesses that “when you are in Rome do as the Romans do”, which is often taken to mean you must adapt to the temperature of values that exist in the country you operate in. According to this paradigm, if corruption is a prevailing norm, adapt rather than maintain a high standard. There is a higher way.

Multinational firms such as Bain see the African continent as a hive of corruption and if they can get a piece of the action of a state account through surreptitious means, they can coin it quickly. 

They use intermediaries to broker high-level political relationships as Bain did through a shadowy company, Ambrobrite, which had no trading history and was run by two creative artists from whom Bain believed it could obtain “strategic advice” on the positioning of state-owned entities in South Africa. In return, Bain paid these brokers millions of rands.

There are important lessons for companies doing business in countries that are manifesting institutional voids and corrupt practices. It is important that companies do all they can to defend their values and guard against the lure of short-term success. A reputation that took years to cultivate can be destroyed in an instant. 

Companies should be a force for good and help enrich public value rather than sow bad practices, which take years if not decades to weed out. Rather than projecting hubris, Bain should take its responsibilities to stakeholders seriously and be genuine about its journey to renewal. Its appeal for constructive dialogue is not evidence of a contrite spirit.

Mzukisi Qobo is head of the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

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Whichever country or region of the world you look at, you are greeted by a palpable sense of a leadership void and pessimism. 

The ratcheting up of hostilities between Russia and the West in the face of intensifying sanctions have induced supply shocks with the attendant inflationary pressure that, in turn, have led to precipitous rise in interest rates. Wars always leave scars. The ones that tend to endure are economic scars. Poorer regions of the world, including Africa, already countenance a real threat of food insecurity, with some facing the precipice of debt crisis. 

The world has been on similar terrain — in the 20th century during the depression of the inter-war years and the oil crises of the early and late 1970s that culminated in the world economic recession and the advent of Africa’s lost decade of the 1980s. What offered small solace back then was that multilateral institutions offered buffers to preserve and reinforce the international trading and monetary systems, and African countries were given the crumbs of aid. 

A coterie of Western powers, including the United States, France, West Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan, helped to maintain an international economic order that was anchored on the US’s leadership. Later they would add Canada to complete the G7. These countries worked together to coordinate their responses to global crises.

However much this concert of countries may still pretend to be powerful, they are today the shadow of their former selves, especially since the emergence of China and other rising powers. The G7 countries can no longer command others to dance to their tune. They have to manage their tone, compromise, build bridges and use the power of persuasion to gain traction on global issues. 

When the world is on the brink, as it is today, and with no clear path out of the current stand-off between Russia and Ukraine, a new consensus is required. There are limits to what Western powers can achieve on their own in quelling major conflicts and in creating global economic stability. This is clear in the face of the Russia-Ukraine war where sanctions on Russia and additional military support to Ukraine are not producing the desired effect. 

There is instead the danger of widening hostilities as tensions between the US and China flare up over what China perceives to be US meddling in China’s backyard in Asia, and the US’s counter-accusation that China has become more aggressive in intercepting US military aircraft in the region. 

The West may find itself overstretched in countering both China and Russia, two major economic and military powers that have sprawling diplomatic and commercial footprints in other developing regions of the world. US President Joe Biden has taken to discussing the “China threat” in the same vein as Russia whenever he meets other global leaders either bilaterally or in the context of the G7, a tactical miscalculation that draws Russia and China in close embrace. 

The actions of Western leaders have not helped to douse the flames of war. Instead they have fuelled them. Europe has not become stronger as a block in response to the Russia-Ukraine war. Whatever appearance of unity there is, it is tenuous and masks fundamental differences over tactical approaches. 

Germany, for example, would have preferred a less painful route, to explore diplomatic solutions, than for it to endure an energy crunch and possible recession as a result of a throttled supply of gas from Russia.  

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor lacks the gravitas of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, and is seen as more comfortable in obscurity than projecting himself as a powerful figure in Europe and the world. He is presiding over a country that is unhappy with energy shortages and will soon enter a winter of discontent — Russia has announced it will slash gas supply to Europe through its largest gas pipeline in Germany to 20% of capacity. If decline in Germany’s industrial growth and export competitiveness persists, and business confidence slumps further, that could render Scholz unpopular. 

Elsewhere in Europe, we are seeing unpopular leaders falling. Mario Draghi, Italy’s technocratic prime minister, tendered his resignation as his reform proposals lacked support from his coalition partners amid the energy crunch and harsh prospects of a recession. 

Before him, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, though felled by his own duplicitous and sleazy character, was no longer seen as the kind of a leader his country needed to help redefine its vision post-Brexit and lead it to economic prosperity. In Europe there is much political uncertainty because inflation, and the hawkish monetary policy in tow, are creating a fertile ground for populism. 

European countries face another risk that is hard for them to express publicly: the unreliability of US leadership given the fickle nature of that country’s politics and the seeming transience of Biden’s administration. 

Biden’s approval has plummeted. He is increasingly unpopular with his party and the public is turning its back on him. According to an Ipsos/Reuters Poll, Biden’s approval fell to 36% during the second week of July this year, and is not expected to improve. Some have suggested that his inability to get through congress signature bills such as the climate change Bill signalled the beginning of the end of his political authority. No doubt, this also weakens his moral authority on the global stage to push for higher emission targets by other countries when he has no congruent base to stand on.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin will be watching Europe and the US’s political tides closely and find ways of exploiting the emerging fissures. The state of hostility among major powers makes it harder to revive confidence in the global economy and for international trade and monetary systems to normalise. 

There are both downsides and potential upsides in the current state of global politics. The biggest menace is the rise of populism with its atavistic rhetoric on immigrants, trade protectionism and other illiberal predilections. Populism always finds a fertile ground in desperate economic times. Populist leaders tend to be inward-looking rather than searching for international cooperation. 

On the upside, the current situation opens up a space to rethink the terms of global order and the broken multilateral institutions. For many years these institutions have been presided over by a few countries that have largely used them in the service of their own interests. 

Since attaining independence in the late 1950s, African countries have been on the margins of multilateral institutions. They have struggled to shape the multilateral trade agenda to address their development problems. 

For African countries, the critical success factors to participating meaningfully in shaping the global system is to reduce reliance on major powers and to realise their agency through building sound domestic institutions, improving governance, building human capital and state capabilities, deepening regional economic integration and cooperation, and honing their capabilities for participating in economic diplomacy with the outside world from the perspective of Africa’s interests.

Mzukisi Qobo is head of the Wits School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

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The Irish political scientist, Benedict Anderson, talks about nations as “imagined communities”. Such collective imagination imbues nations with myths and a healthy dose of pride that fuels social and economic progress. 

Stirring collective imaginations and energies towards a positive end is one of the defining features of great leaders. 

What enables leaders to do this is their ability to cultivate connectedness based on trust and shared interests between them and those they lead. Citizens can only trust leaders when they feel a sense of proximity, real or imagined, with them. When societies perceive a divergence between their interests and that of their leaders, confidence erodes, and a chasm of mistrust opens up between the leaders and the public. 

Since the democratic change in South Africa, and especially at the end of the Mandela era, we have endured a series of leadership disappointments in ways that cut deep and scar our collective concept as a nation. 

In its more than 25 years of existence as a democracy, South Africa has had only fleeting moments of superb leadership, the kind of leadership that elevates the public spirit, enriches the ethical quality of society and flickers the hope of economic progress. 

Such moments were evident during the embracing of the constitutional order and nation-building during Nelson Mandela’s era, a period of high economic growth and the African Renaissance project under president Thabo Mbeki, and when President Cyril Ramaphosa stopped president Jacob Zuma’s state capture project in its track and pulled the country back from the brink. 

During those phases, when we saw a light of hope, there were also intractable tendencies that contained seeds of institutional decay. These tendencies included the arms deals corruption case that began under the watch of Mandela’s presidency and haunted the Mbeki presidency, an unfinished business because some of the politically powerful perpetrators are yet to be prosecuted. 

The Zuma era of state capture was particularly corrosive because it set a new — and much lower — standard of what is acceptable in public leadership and ethical conduct. At the end of Zuma’s tenure, the only credential for leadership was simply to be slightly better than Zuma, a dismally low bar. As long as you are not stealing from the public coffers, you are considered fit and proper for leadership, according to this fallen standard. Leadership is now a stampede of the average.

This erosion of standards has also filtered into the bureaucracy at various levels of government. 

At this rate, it will be much harder to establish a new framework of ethical leadership in the government, because many who, under normal circumstances, would judge themselves not qualified for leadership will now be convinced that they are worthy giants. 

This debasement of leadership virtue counts among the worst legacies the previous administration has left us with since the onset of democracy. 

But we have new challenges to leadership, such as the recent events of criminality on Ramaphosa’s farm and its implications for ethics and leadership in the country. 

It has been widely reported that there was a theft in the president’s property that the public did not know about for two years, which has raised a dizzying amount of speculation. 

There are unanswered questions about the source of the foreign currency stolen from the property and whether this was declared under the South African Reserve Bank regulations and speculation that various individuals may have used the president’s property as an avenue for laundering their money and that tax laws could have been breached either by the sellers or punters in the game industry or both. 

These are matters under investigation by law enforcement agencies, and the law can grind slowly as fragments of leads and evidence are painstakingly pieced together.

Aside from what the law enforcement authorities may conclude, the president has a social contract with the citizens. The public has a certain expectation of how he ought to conduct himself. They want to know that they can trust him. 

If the president has erred, they want him to be candid so they can find it in themselves to reconcile with him and have proper closure rather than tarry in suspense. The cloud of smoke and silence is not helping to rebuild trust and may instead risk creating an unnecessary blot on the legacy of the president.

There is a level of esteem with which Ramaphosa is held in society even outside the political office. Most people know that he was a businessman when he took office and that he is wealthy because of his commercial enterprises that are not entangled in the state. 

Very few people consider the unlikely possibility that the money on the president’s property is a result of proceeds from corruption. 

 It is not about the theft of public money that disturbs those who trust him and who are genuinely asking tough questions. 

Rather, what is of great concern is the ethics of his dual role as a businessman and president and his perceived lack of transparency and accountability on the more specific questions that the public has rightly raised about events that took place after his money was stolen. 

These incidents and how the president eventually responds to them — and not what the law enforcement agents find — will be one of the country’s significant tests of leadership and ethics.

He must choose whether he wants to be remembered by history as a cattle auctioneer or as one of the finest leaders who not only turned the country from the brink but set it on a path to prosperity. 

If the latter, he may need to use all his energies to run the country, especially given the difficult economic times it is going through, and work on honing his legacy. He must close the door to private auctions until the end of his term.

Where to from here? In search of new pathways to renewing leadership and values, we must hold on to radical pragmatism and not shirk our responsibility to squeeze the president hard for accountability and transparency by appealing to his conscience — but stopping short of taking the pressure to its logical conclusion, namely, to call for him to step down, precisely because we are facing a precipice as a country and many of those baying for his blood are vultures in the garb of radical economic transformation. 

Those implicated in state capture activities will be keen to weaken Ramaphosa or force him out prematurely. If they succeed, they will set the ground to further erode independent institutions in the same manner they did after the recall of Mbeki in 2007. 

These revelations about the theft that took place on the president’s farm have conveniently come at the time when the governing party is gearing itself up for its December conference and the Zondo commission is releasing its explosive reports on state capture. 

When leaders avoid public scrutiny, their actions negatively shape public ethics and conceptions of leadership. The president must rebuild public trust in his leadership. The best way to do so is by being candid about the events that took place on his farm two years ago. 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

This war will have a long-term adverse effect on African countries if it continues for much longer. Further, it will weaken multilateral institutions that have maintained a semblance of global stability for a long time. It will also magnify social and economic risks for many years to come. 

The Ukraine war has quickly transformed from a neighbourhood conflict to one with a broader geopolitical dimension. This has severe implications for developing countries dependent on a stable international trading environment for their economic well-being. African countries fall under this category, and several of them have weak social and economic resilience. They are vulnerable to global supply chain disruptions, which we witnessed at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

History offers us some clues about the economic effects of war. The 20th century was marked by horrors of violence, instability, economic failure and famine for the world’s poorer regions. The Cold War era that lasted for four decades after World War II stunted the economic progress of many countries outside of North America, Western Europe and Japan — and, to some extent, the Asian Tigers that benefited from the US economic largesse.

The last quarter of the 20th century saw significant economic disruptions, from the abrupt and chaotic decoupling of the gold standard from the dollar during US president Richard Nixon’s administration in the early 1970s to the lost decade for African countries in the 1980s. 

The recession of the 1970s and the 1980s was marked by low growth, high inflation, and high levels of unemployment. It condemned many African countries to an abysmal state of underdevelopment. 

In his work, The Age of Extremes, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm reminded us: “The last part of the century was a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis — and indeed, for large parts of the world such as Africa, the former USSR and the formerly socialist parts of Europe, of catastrophe.” History might repeat itself virulently as the crescendo of the war drums rises from a distant corner of Europe.

The US has cast this war as a conflict of techno-democracies versus techno-autocracies, painting Russia and China with the same brush and castigating them as dangerous for the world. There is the failure of self-criticism in the West to reflect on the role of Western countries in furthering global instability, the defects of the existing global order, representational weaknesses in multilateral institutions and the projection of Western power in unattractive ways, which triggers backlash from non-Western countries. Before the Ukraine war, the US painted China as a strategic rival. 

There is no doubt that Russia violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but the West has displayed a failure of leadership to create a bridgehead that would pave the way for a peaceful accommodation. 

Under the Biden administration, the US kept up the anti-Chinese rhetoric. The Trump administration placed more than 20 Chinese companies on the entity list for exclusion in the US market. Many of these companies are high-tech and others produce artificial intelligence applications in heavy manufacturing. The status quo has, by and large, remained intact.

For all of the US’s talk about the need for the rising powers to assume greater responsibility in global leadership, it has never been comfortable with a formidable competitor in the global system. 

Russia represents a new battlefront for the US. Biden’s visceral hostility towards China has pushed the two countries to each other’s embrace. Even though China is not Russia’s natural ally, the dictum that the enemy of my enemy is my friend could be its pragmatic operative lens in navigating the friction between the Western powers and Russia. 

The two countries share their mistrust of the US, their suspicion of its global hegemonic ambitions and its selective use of liberalism to pursue narrow interests to sustain unipolarity. The US has long demonised China as a strategic rivalry that must be contained in its region and whose global ambitions must be choked. 

We now have two major economic and security powers on a collision course with the US and, by implication, its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The US views these two countries as representing a threat to liberal democracy internationally and that their technological rise could eclipse its pre-eminence in the world. 

The cessation of hostilities and peaceful negotiations seem a remote possibility. The more the US builds military support for Ukraine and unveils fresh sanctions, the more Russia will become recalcitrant. And the more intense the conflict becomes, the less wriggle room for diplomacy. 

The gradual decoupling of Europe-Russia energy interdependence will sustain the permanence of the tensions and render global stability tenuous. The revitalisation of Nato and reinforcement of the European Union security architecture could reproduce the conditions of the Cold War, with more tensions and uncertainties on the horizon. 

Multilateral organisations will become weaker and indecisive as they become theatres of geopolitical tensions rather than avenues for deepening international cooperation and strengthening the system of global governance. International cooperation over finance, trade and security will be hard to achieve in a climate of broken trust and simmering tensions between major powers. 

The Ukraine war is disrupting the financial markets, fragmenting supply chains and increasing the price of food and commodities. Just as in the crisis of the 1970s, the African continent will be a casualty. The war is generating new economic shocks and risks. Increases in the price of energy, metals and food on the back of the Russia-Ukraine war are raising inflation concerns around the world and with food security implications for many African countries. 

The old problems of sovereign debt risks will loom large for many African countries that no longer have much fiscal space to support their development programmes. There is also the risk that European countries will divert most of their aid to Ukraine, essentially tying them to their foreign policy interests, with Africa left behind. 

Africa’s worsening conditions could spell the return of the lost decade of the 1980s that triggered famine, political instability, and governance failures. African leaders should think more seriously about strengthening Africa’s agency, which requires improvements in the governance architecture, enhancing the capabilities of the state, building social and economic resilience, and pursuing external relations on a pragmatic and diversified basis.

The world needs far-sighted leadership that can transcend narrow self-interest and consider the collective well-being of the global society. Global leaders must work harder to find diplomatic solutions to the current war, search for new bases for building trust, and shore up international cooperation. As world leaders attend to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, they should also do everything possible to prevent another terrible economic legacy for the African continent.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.

This shift is not only taking place in Europe, which countenances the threat of throttled energy supplies from Russia. Several Asian countries have also had to reconsider their net-zero pathway. 

Some European utilities resorted to using coal to keep homes warm and industrial activity steady, underlining how vital energy security is for economic prosperity and social stability. Meanwhile, the nuclear reliant countries such as France have been slightly less affected. This nuclear pivoting by some countries is also a mark of proliferating global risks and uncertainties.

Within a few weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, countries such as Colombia, South Africa, Australia and Indonesia became attractive to traders for their coal as gas prices shot up and supply from Russia looked increasingly uncertain. Of course, Europe’s appetite for coal is transient, induced mainly by an urge to reduce reliance on Russian coal and gas. 

But the bigger story is not the redemption of coal from all the climate sins it has committed over a century and a half, nor its restoration as an attractive fuel of the future. Instead, it is about the importance of energy security and that this cannot be provided solely by solar and wind. 

Currently, solar and wind suffer intermittency — there is no perfect matching of demand and supply; there is also no utility-scale storage system that could ensure a steady supply through all seasons. Although attractive as clean energy, wind and solar are not reliable partners for countries that are latecomers to industrialisation and that still need to overcome socioeconomic problems. 

Against this backdrop, nuclear energy has become a hot topic of the day. The debate on energy is increasingly turning towards energy security as a crucial part of national security. 

Recently, the minerals and energy minister, Gwede Mantashe, mentioned that his department intends to call for proposals to build new nuclear capacity. He is likely to encounter resistance, with some brandishing the corruption card while others advance safety and cost rationales. 

Regarding corruption, this should not prevent policy from planning for the long-term. It is myopic to oppose large-scale infrastructure programmes or development plans because they might be corrupted instead of formulating strategies to combat corruption. We need strong governance norms, tighter procurement and greater oversight by independent institutions. 

On the cost side, now that regions such as the European Union are reclassifying nuclear as green energy, and there seems to be growing acceptance of nuclear as a carbon-free source that can help countries leapfrog their energy transition and offer baseload, it is possible that the cost of financing could come down. Technological breakthroughs aimed at bringing down costs, responding to safety concerns, and meeting the sustainability test are spearheaded by new tech companies that enjoy significant financial backing from impact funders and venture capital. 

The EU Taxonomy, which now reclassifies nuclear as green, has signalling power: if technology is classified as meeting clean energy criteria, it could potentially attract a lower cost of finance from financiers that are looking at meeting environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) requirements. 

Institutional investors, including pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, have been chasing ESG criteria recently, with the low cost of capital dangled as a carrot. 

Energy security and national security considerations drive much of the policy shift around the world. The majority of EU countries, except for Germany, Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Spain, are in support of the inclusion of nuclear as a form of green energy in the EU Taxonomy. 

Germany is caught between a rock and a hard place because it finds itself having to decelerate its exit from coal to calibrate down its gas dependence on Russia. Belgium has made an about-turn on its earlier decision to shut down two reactors and now swears by nuclear power as the future. This is more so for those countries in Russia’s backyard — Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic. 

The EU has always prided itself as a global norm-setter — what is good for Europe is also good for others. 

The reclassification of nuclear as green energy raises interesting questions about whether the EU will direct some of its finance for clean energy to nuclear build programmes in developing countries. 

If nuclear energy is reclassified as green energy, surely the slice of the yet to be delivered $100-billion a year climate finance should go towards nuclear energy? This is also a question that financial services companies and institutional investors will have to ponder, especially given the likely ESG benefits of nuclear energy. 

Outside of Europe, other countries are exploring nuclear energy as a green investment of the future. In South Korea, the incoming leadership of Yoon Suk-yeol has decided to pause the previous administration’s programme of phasing out nuclear energy and will instead allow more operators of nuclear power stations to extend their service contracts well beyond their expiry dates. 

Singapore is also exploring nuclear options as a key part of its decarbonisation. The government’s high-powered task team commissioned by the Energy Market Authority is looking at an energy mix where nuclear will make up 10%, with hydrogen comprising the bulk of energy production. 

The nuclear movement has serious backers. Investors such as Bill Gates also took a bet on nuclear energy through his company Terra Power. Gates characterises nuclear as “the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost, anywhere on Earth, [and] that has been proven to work on a large scale.”

There is a new wave of venture-backed tech start-ups emerging as part of the growing efforts to advance a new generation of safer reactors, Generation IV, that, according to the Silicon Valley investor John Doerr, could deliver safety, sustainability, efficiency and lower cost. 

For many developing countries that are still lagging behind industrial development, nuclear power might provide a clean energy pathway. 

In the African continent, countries such as Kenya are ramping up efforts to build commercial nuclear reactors near Kilifi, north of Mombasa, and with a long-term goal in mind — to commission the first reactor by 2036. 

Resource dependent African countries may need to turn to nuclear to achieve their industrial development plans since the window is gradually closing on fossil fuel-based energy sources. Countries such as Angola have recently unveiled ambitious plans for ports rehabilitation, the building of large-scale infrastructure and diversification from oil dependence to developing new industrial sectors — all of which cannot be achieved by relying solely on solar and wind, as necessary as these technologies are for mitigating climate-related risks. 

South Africa is not condemned to anaemic growth; if it is truly ambitious, it will need to plan for long-term energy security where nuclear is an integral part of the energy mix and thus powers its industrial development.

 This is even more important given that South Africa does not have the security of supply for gas as a transitional fuel that offers baseload.

When you don’t have energy security, the quality of your economic sovereignty is, as we have learnt with many European countries, at the mercy of other countries that may be hostile in the future. 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.