Appoint 100 of SA's best people to fix the country – Mark Barnes

• Published date: 06 July 2022
• Author: Ryk van Niekerk
• Publication title: Citizen, The (South Africa)

Yesterday Barnes sent out a tweet saying President Cyril Ramaphosa must appoint the 100 best people to fix the country. He said the president should start with 10 people, and that it is the last chance for South Africa

He joins me now.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us. What was the context of this tweet? Was it a tweet in anger, or have you been considering making this proposal for a while?

MARK BARNES: Well, I had just finished watching the news and, in fact, reading the papers on Sunday and I couldn't find any good news whatsoever. Every element of our construct seems to be at risk, ranging from education to electricity, to water, to social order, to economic order – and you just get the sense that everything we look at more closely looks worse than we expect it to be. And so you go, 'What is the root cause of this, because we have so many things in our favour in South Africa?' We are gifted with natural resources, we have wonderful weather, we have all of those good things.

Now we have to go to the root cause, which is leadership. We have not yet managed to intersect political and economic power in South Africa, in the new South Africa, in the post-1994 South Africa. That is where the gap is. So we sit on opposite sides of a table with an inferiority complex about business on the one hand, and a superiority complex about business on the other, with levers of power that are not wishing to intersect with experience.

We must get over it, man, because what we really need is to hold hands and we need to get over our baggage and our continuing divides, including racism which continues, including poverty and inequality and all those things which we need to leave at the door. We need to sit down and face the realities of this beautiful country and fix them together.

So I thought, how do you do that? Let's infiltrate the current ecosystem with expertise. There's a famous saying in flying, which is 'airmanship'. We need airmanship to deal with a crisis. The technology can all be there, the weather can be for or against you, but in a crisis the pilot has to have experience. So why don't we acknowledge that experience and expertise, no matter from whence it comes, and do a three-year deal which says, 'We're going to transfer not shares but expertise'.

We're going to sit around a table, listen to what the new South Africa wants, and give back what the old South Africa had learnt, and somehow find a combination because, in the real world, Ryk, when you walk around and you greet people and you go and watch rugby together or whatever it is that we do, we are friends already. We are over it. If you listen to our children, they speak similarly, some of them. Of course we haven't addressed all of the issues but we who live here and who intend to live here forever want it to work, and we need to cross our divides now. It's enough already of the polarisation between political power and economic urgency.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: Do you have a relationship with the president? Do you know him well?

MARK BARNES: No, I wouldn't say that. There was a time I think when many of us had a relationship with him, and I would argue that that has faded – that would be the most polite way of describing it.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: There are many perceptions regarding the private sector and government. It seems almost as if there are two silos not working together as they should be. But do you think there are leaders within the private sector who would be willing to serve in senior government positions in the context of fixing South Africa?

MARK BARNES: It's worse than silos, Ryk. We're in opposition, practically. Whenever there's a private-sector idea, it's regarded with suspicion: 'They're trying to destroy Eskom so that they can privatise it,' or they accuse me of destroying the Post Office in the interest of buying it. By the...