Why is everyone so glum? The national dialogue actually seems to have made people’s mood worse, not better.

I’ve detected a remarkable setback in sentiment among investors and corporate leaders in the past about six weeks. It feels as if we are back to the postelection worries over growth and when light might be visible at the end of the tunnel.

Recent weak employment data, the US tariffs and the Gordian knot of foreign policy, with wobbling electricity reforms and a rise (again) in personal despair at the president’s leadership style, all seem to have bubbled up together.

Yet aren’t things really as expected? We are in the thick of the complex and messy part of reforms on multiple fronts, with Operation Vulindlela leading the charge in many areas in network industries, and now beyond into spatial inequality and local government.

As the capacity of Vulindlela expands it still faces the same severe capacity constraints as the rest of government, and in the stakeholders it interacts with across the public sector as well as vested interests talking their own book, which is neither a surprise nor a shock.

Fundamentally the issues remain the same, the solutions ongoing and the timelines to completion long, with layers of the reform “onion” being peeled back, often revealing more unknowns that also have to be dealt with.

It is a big ask to expect South Africans to hunker down and have patience. The recently launched Business Leadership SA reform tracker, built by Krutham, makes clear the complexity of change (the number of different areas of ongoing change) and that progress is continuing (each reform has many sub elements) and that few reforms are complete.

While this all focuses on economic and governance reforms, much the same can be said on broader societal changes such as action against gender-based violence, education improvements or healthcare. In all these areas all stakeholders already engage and have a firm sense of what must happen — the national dialogue has therefore been a kick in the teeth to those actually involved in advancing change in any area.

Some people are resisting the dialogue more than I believe is justified — governments listen to their people in formal exercises worldwide. Where the criticism is justified is the president’s opening remarks that somehow new solutions to well-known problems will emerge. This was dangerously disingenuous, and is what has reinforced the glumness in sentiment.

People on the ground in the next 18 months will no doubt highlight “water service delivery” as a key demand, maybe even with a request for more investment and more security and quality of supply. But what then? A large secretariat will dutifully deliver this to the president in solemn language, and it will be worshipped on the altar of dialogue. And then?

The department of water & sanitation and Vulindlela already have highly detailed water reforms under way. Are those to be chucked out because the people demand action faster? Are they doubled down on, but with what new capacity and money in a fiscally constrained environment?

Herein lies the reason the dialogue is creating sentiment problems. Yet we should be careful to segment headline-grabbing sound bites from corporate leaders from wider surveys. The purchasing managers’ index and Bureau for Economic Research sentiment indicators have bounced around but are about flat.

Investors have been happy to buy the rand and bonds, and even equities. Credit growth has lifted marginally, and some key reforms are ticking over — such as the recent announcement of third-party rail access by transport minister Barbara Creecy. Growth is happening, and second-quarter GDP will be marginally positive at about 0.5% quarter on quarter, yet is still vastly inadequate to lift employment.

The nub of the glumness, then, is perhaps the realisation that we will be on the current treadmill for some time. Foreign policy issues will remain the same (or perhaps become worse) for the next three and a half years, growth will tick over but with no labour intensity, political distractions will abound and political rhetoric — as on the dialogue — will make people fume, inequalities will rise but just slowly enough to keep a lid on things, and the chattering classes will be just comfortable enough to moan but not do too much about it.

We are in the danger spot for reform where things are just OK enough for the chattering classes, systemic load-shedding is over in the short term and Transnet rail volumes are off the depths of their floor — yet nothing is performing as required for the faster growth needed in future, or to make change sustainable — like fair and efficient markets in network industries.

After a recent column about the “credibility” of political actors a number of people emailed me saying I hadn’t mentioned “leadership” (“A matter of credibility”, July 30). Indeed! Leadership means communicating between government and business and between government and civil society, to keep the show on the road through this period.

That is not happening. Beyond a defunct government communication & information system, open and honest conversations with stakeholders are often over-formalised (as in Nedlac) or over-legalistic. If we are to host an investment summit at year-end this needs to be reset with honest interactions and communications, not the usual trumpeting of operating expenditure as capital expenditure but a shared conversation about growing the country.

Creecy and cabinet colleague Kgosientsho Ramokgopa recently reinforced the importance of reforms and of sticking with it to an end point, though they have quite different implementation styles.

But the glumness won’t disappear if government fails to improve communications and doesn’t try to spark things back to life — the reform end points are simply too far away. A tonic is needed to tide us over.

What is shocking about the ANC leadership battle so far is how poor the various candidates’ communications have been — talking the internal language of the ANC, navel-gazing and repeating slogans in factional and personality contests, rather than any actual vision for change or doing things differently.

The DA and IFP leadership contests are also coming up soon, and need to be inspected along the same lines.

• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.

This article first appeared in Business Day.

Image Credit: Minister of transport Barbara Creecy by GovernmentZA licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.