As Maria Ramos completes her first year as Transnet chief executive she is becoming bolder, undertaking an often ruthless set of cost-cutting and repositioning exercises at this most important and difficult of parastatals.
As her axe is sharpened and vested interests feel its cut, the lobby to throw momma from the train is growing louder.
Transnet teems with special interest groups, ranging from a white old guard to an affronted set of black executives not used to Ramos’s working style. “Fiscal Spice” as Ramos was known at the Treasury is anything but nice. Sharp, yes. Adroit, yes. She is known as a taskmaster who keeps up a punishing schedule, setting tough goals for her team.
Spoornet chief executive Dolly Mokgatle, who resigned this week, is the latest casualty of the Ramos working style.Â
Her work ethic is alien to Transnet, comfortable with the slumberous standards of old even after 10 years of “transformation”. This is a failed transformation. Still billions of rands in the red, the transport parastatal desperately needs to be turned around. While Ramos has made a steady start in getting the financials right, she now urgently needs to tackle the operational impediments.
They are numerous, as we outline this week. The exodus from rail to road, which is far more expensive for business but more efficient, is costing the economy. Locomotives are ageing, being on average 10 years older than they should be. And the inefficiencies of Transnet rail division Spoornet are seen as a key brake on export growth.
Ramos has to fix Transnet, of this there can be no doubt. But what is also becoming clear is that she may have to modify her management style or face so much internal resistance that she, too, is forced off the rails.
When Ramos moved into the old government departments of finance and state expenditure, her mandate was to merge and transform them. She did much the same as she is doing now — demanding perfection, with the message of “shape up or ship out”. But Transnet is a different animal, where young black executives have gained great power since 1994. Unlike the unfashionable grey shoe brigade she dealt with in government, the grouping is politically connected.
Ramos has flayed some iconic figures, including the former Transnet chairman, Bongani Khumalo, and Transnet’s former finance director, Sindi Mabaso. Mokgatle fits this mould too.
A clear racial dynamic is coming into play, with suggestions that Ramos is “purging black talent”. Internal resistance seems to be mounting. She would do well to take the political temperature every now and then, as well as to recognise some of the skilled people she inherited. It would be a train smash if she too were to fall victim to Transnet’s politics.Â
The judges’ lodestar
Reaction to the African National Congress’s warning about the judiciary’s alienation from the “masses” has been infected with the hype and hysteria standard in South African political discourse. Let us begin by saying what the ANC statement is not.
It is not a “threat” to South Africa’s judges, in the sense of a prelude to some sort of executive crackdown à la Zimbabwe. The Constitution guarantees the independence of the judiciary, and legislation lays down strict criteria for the disciplining of errant judges — being insensitive to the masses is not among them. In addition, the ANC in government has a record of respecting the Constitution and the court that enforces its principles.
It is also most unlikely that the ANC was trying to “soften up” the Constitutional Court before the scheduled hearing on drug prices legislation, as claimed by the Democratic Alliance. Is the DA suggesting that the court can be cowed by a mere public statement? Whatever one’s take on individual judgements of the court, there really is no case for arguing that its members lack guts and integrity.
The ANC statement almost certainly reflects anger at the racial acrimony in the Cape legal profession surrounding the drug law case — and in particular the perception, right or wrong, that white legal practitioners lack respect for black judges. So far so good. Leaders of the judiciary and legal profession appear to be doing what they can to make the Bench more racially representative and socially aware, but there is no harm in the occasional sharp reminder of the distance still to be travelled in this marathon. Sixty per cent of the country’s judges remain white.
But the ANC is quite wrong to suggest that judges must answer to the “masses”, a tired piece of revolutionary rhetoric that conjures images of judicial officers hauled before people’s tribunals bent on revenging class tyranny. If the masses dictated our law, the noose might be reinstated and abortion banned. Besides, how does the ANC know what 20-million adult South Africans think about the judiciary? Isn’t it saying, in effect, that the party amounts to the masses, by virtue of its overwhelming electoral support?
Our judges are not answerable to the general public — they answer to the Constitution. And they ensure that our rulers comply with its demands, which take account of South Africa’s socio-economic realities, including poverty, homelessness, landlessness and poor public health.
We need neither a narrowly legalistic Bench that ignores the life experience of ordinary citizens, nor one that kowtows to the executive as the embodiment of the popular will. Their lodestar must be our enlightened Constitution, and the socially aware, compassionate spirit in which it is rooted.