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JEREMY MAGGS: Muzi Kuzwayo is a well-known business leader. He is a societal thinker and a writer. In a new book called South Africa’s Promise, he asks a very pertinent question: If you don’t change things, who will? He raises issues around the development of a citizen safety service, and suggests that our leaders should focus instead on creating harmony and not division. Easier said than done. Bright ideas, he says, do make the future bright, and he’s going to share some of those thoughts with us today.

A very warm welcome to FixSA. I’m Jeremy Maggs, and our guests [will] in coming weeks be asked how they can make things better, how we can make things better. How do we improve matters? How in the shortest space of time can we once again become a competitive and successful nation? It’s something that we all aspire to. So let’s listen to him … Muzi Kuzwayo, a very warm welcome to FixSA.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Thank you, Jeremy. I hope I can contribute something.

JEREMY MAGGS: I’m sure you will. So let me reference your book first of all: South Africa’s Promise: Creating the Future We Want. You say, ‘Why should you be shackled to the frozen shadows of history that you can’t change when you can bask in the glory of a future that you can create?’ It’s a very optimistic line. Do you think that South Africa right now is shackled to frozen shadows?

MUZI KUZWAYO: Yes, it’s easy. But I think the frozen shadows are starting to thaw as well. This reminds me of 1988, very much 1988 – and probably even earlier.

Well, in ’86 I remember the state of emergency was imposed and the gloom that it created, people not knowing what to do, companies closing down, township businesses shutting down, all we were ever doing was protesting. I come from Springs. I remember one evening about 25 people were shot by the police, or that’s the number of corpses that they released for burial. We don’t know the actual number that night.

When you look back on where we were in 1994, I feel that something big is about to come, something that’s going to change our history or the course of history and make it positive.

You’ve got to go through the winter to get through spring and into summer. We are in a winter season right now. A lot of things have gone wrong. Some are of our own making and some probably outside our own making. But it’s in the course of the history of nations. We are on course, I believe, to be successful. I’ll tell you why.

I was speaking to a diplomat. We’ve got a lot of South Africans who’ve left the country, British diplomats. He said to me, ‘We’ve seen this in London. When a country doesn’t go right, people move to the UK, have careers, and then, when things turn the guys will get a call. It’ll probably be on a rainy day and someone says, ‘Hey, we’ve got an opening for you to come and run our office in Johannesburg’. The guy says, ‘Oh my gosh, this rain when Joburg has sunshine!’

And he packs up and comes back. Then we get people who’ve got experience, who’ve seen the world, who’ve got contacts and things change again.

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JEREMY MAGGS: What is that big change that is coming that you foresee?

MUZI KUZWAYO: I see great success for a lot of young people. I don’t think it’ll be like a bolt of lightning and thunder, as you get on Joburg afternoons. Often change is very incremental. As you drive, a tree was pretty naked and, the next thing you see, it’s all purple again. It’s Jacaranda season and oh gosh, when did it happen? That’s how it happens.

So I think there are certain things that are going to happen, obviously a great many beyond our control. We did not see the Berlin Wall fall until it fell, and they couldn’t keep apartheid going anymore.

JEREMY MAGGS: Much the same with the Arab Spring.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Much the same with the Arab Spring.

You know in a lot of instances there’ll be false dawns, and you think that this is it. But you’ve got to keep the hope alive through all of the other mishaps and false promises that happen. It’s life.

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JEREMY MAGGS: Far be it for me to prick your bubble of optimism. Let me challenge you. You talk about great things happening, potentially, for young people in South Africa. We have a 50%, at least, unemployment rate among that cohort of people. They are impatient, they are frustrated, they are angry. They’re bitter and many have given up. How do you bring them back into the fold in order for them to participate in whatever the great things are that you foresee for that group?

MUZI KUZWAYO: Jeremy, I don’t have a bubble of optimism. I have a steel ball of optimism. I nearly died when I was three or four years old. I have a scar under my neck. My neck was cut open by a horse with a rope – a horse! All I remember, and I asked this in one of the last conversations I had with my mom, by the way, and it was purely coincidental – ‘Ma, do you remember I got hurt by a horse?’ And she said, ‘Yes, you were with me’. All I remember is screaming and running back home, and then the next thing I remember was bandages all around me. Oh, I remember the ambulance and the bandages around me. So ever since that day, just being alive – I’ve got every reason to be optimistic.

Unemployment is high. We’ve never seen it before like this. We’ve got the worst unemployment in the world according to the World Bank.

When I started working, I can safely say there was practically nobody, no black people, in the middle class. And they happen now. They’re there. So these changes happen.

I cannot come up with ‘This is what is going to happen’. I don’t want to be a sangoma or an economist. [Jeremy chuckles] Economists do that. But I have every reason to believe. I have the faith. We’ve got a largely educated workforce, [but] unemployed. I saw this in India around 1985. I remember reading this in Pace magazine – that people with PhDs were bus drivers. And then when the internet technology came it just grew. They had people who were educated enough to be able to handle it.

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JEREMY MAGGS: I’ll accept the ‘steel ball of optimism’ then, but what I will ask you is what needs to happen in order to catalyse that change?

MUZI KUZWAYO: The first thing that actually needs to go is black economic empowerment (BEE) – of which I’m a beneficiary, by the way. I read a book, End of an Empire, and it talked about how, when they looked at various empires, how they came to an end, whether the Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire or the Russian Empire.

When you start to exclude people or they feel excluded – sometimes it’s perception – they leave the country. Once they’ve left the country, you suffer like we are suffering now.

So you get entrepreneurs, great entrepreneurs, who go and try something else somewhere because they feel excluded. Then people who are not entrepreneurs – who are workers, which many are, most people are – run out of options as well. So if we do that and we get everybody back, [just] imagine if you can get a guy like Elon Musk – he is the easy one, isn’t he?

But there are a lot of other South Africans who are entrepreneurs over there. I had a chat with somebody from Israel who told me that they’ve got what in Israel they call ‘Silicon Valley in the desert’, as it were, and what he did. Somebody went to the US, came back, invested, made huge amounts of money and then the other guys followed.

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So that’s the kind of thing that we need to do. There are certain things that were introduced, I’m sorry to say, by the Oppenheimers.

It started with the Brenthurst Initiative, which brought BEE – which was against the ANC’s policy of non-racialism. But people saw an opportunity to make money and they made money.

So those are some of the things that we must get rid of because they’ve changed our economy unbelievably.

JEREMY MAGGS: That’s not necessarily a popular view in South Africa. It wasn’t popular then. How do you get rid of black economic empowerment, given that the concept has become so entrenched in South Africa? Where do you start if that’s one way of fixing things?

MUZI KUZWAYO: You scrap the act.

JEREMY MAGGS: Which needs political will, which probably doesn’t exist.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Well, the people involved are making money out of it. You did say ‘we’ – it’s not just airy-fairy. We have gangsters running the country – starting with the president. They’re breaking the country apart, stealing money. We know that. And now he’s got his own private police force called the SIU [Special Investigating Unit]. When he doesn’t like you, he goes and investigates you. We see what Pravin Gordhan [Minister of Public Enterprises] is doing to Mpho Makwana [former Eskom chair]. I know him personally. He is one of those people who is just committed to helping other people.

JEREMY MAGGS: We are talking about the chairman of Eskom, who just resigned and …

MUZI KUZWAYO: That’s right, yes.

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JEREMY MAGGS: … who has been in conflict with the minister over the appointment of the chief executives.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Absolutely. So what we’ve got to stop having as South Africa, I must hope we can stop having – and I keep telling people this – there are no messiahs.

Pravin Gordhan is not a messiah. Ramaphosa is not a messiah. I can’t be a Messiah. You can’t be a Messiah. We must have that requisite cynicism.

In science you’ve got to have a certain kind of cynicism when somebody comes up with a new idea or with new knowledge, and we must hold the same with all people in public office.

JEREMY MAGGS: But you can’t be overly cynical or you are not going to make any progress at all. So you’ve got to find that balance between cynicism on the one hand and a degree, I guess, of your steel-ball optimism on the other. It’s got to be difficult, difficult to find.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Absolutely.

JEREMY MAGGS: But difficult to find.

MUZI KUZWAYO: But that’s what life is, isn’t it? It’s not as Benoit Mandelbrot observed, trees aren’t perfectly circular; there’s a lot of fractal stuff in it, and we’ve got to live with that. We’ve got great institutions that exist, but unless they’ve got statesmen and stateswomen who support them, nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s going to grow. The requisite cynicism is a part of it.

JEREMY MAGGS: Let me pivot to one of the ideas that you suggest in your book: citizen service, you say, will greatly reduce unemployment. You suggest that candidates earn a stipend and the stipend would alleviate financial pressure at home. It rolls very nicely off the tongue. What is citizen service, and why would it help? And can we afford it?

MUZI KUZWAYO: I want to start [with] can we afford something? It’s something that a lot of people experience. You’ve got R20, okay R25, because bread is now [more expensive], and you’ve got to make a call: you take a taxi and go find a job, begging people for jobs, house to house, office to office – or you buy a loaf of bread. Those are the kind of decisions that often we have to make.

Back in the early sixties Germany had to make a call whether they made university education free – for all – or could they [those wanting to study] afford it? They couldn’t really afford it. They’d just come out of a war, which they had lost.

One of the people who opposed it was [the man who later became] Pope Benedict, [Joseph] Ratzinger – I always say [chuckling] he couldn’t finish his papacy probably God was so angry with him [that] He said get off my head. He really opposed it.

Creating opportunities 

You can’t not teach people responsibilities and expect them to be able to handle those responsibilities later on. So how are you going to make people know each other? A guy from Venda, if you make him travel and go and work in the Western Cape – he has never seen the sea, probably – will never get an opportunity to see the sea unless he gets a good job.

It creates cohorts and that’s where a lot of opportunities actually lie – among cohorts. For people who’ve been together, who’ve worked together, been at school together, at university together or even when they first started, as in the case of a civilian service, what it will do is that some will go on to be bankers, others entrepreneurs; they’ll be able to call each other.

And how do banks make decisions? It’s really on trust. With the first loan I ever got from a bank to start a business, I remember this old man saying to me, will you bring your mother to the meeting next time?

So I went and fetched my mom and said ‘Ma [you must come with me]’. So we drove and he said: ‘Mom, we like this boy’; that’s the word he used – ‘we like this boy and we know he can’t afford to pay it back.’ I didn’t have any assets. I had just started working. ‘Will you make sure that he pays our loan back?’ That’s how Saambou was built. That’s how Allied [Bank] was built. That was the model.

But now you’ve got a lot of people who don’t trust the people they see on the other side. ‘Oh, you’re risky.’ How I know this is, in my younger days, I had a private banker, so I applied for a loan. The estate agent picked it up, obviously told somebody in the bank. The interest rate I was getting from my private banker, from the same bank by the way, was 2% lower than that I was getting from the estate agent. I can’t see anything else except for the fact that I’m black, because this is exactly the same application for the same house.

The other ones didn’t know what was happening. My private banker was a black person – so were they going to give me money to start a business? But if you are cohorts and you’ve worked together, you were at a civilian service together, you know when you trust each other.

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JEREMY MAGGS: What would your citizen service entail?

MUZI KUZWAYO: Firstly, you’ve got to move away from home, and you can run it through churches and that kind of thing. Jeremy, there’s a book I read – Stand Up Straight I think is the title – [which relates that] a lot of princes from the Middle East send their children to Sandhurst Military [Academy in the UK], and the first thing they have to learn is how to make a bed.

There are a lot of kids who’ve never had a bed in their lives. How are you going to have confidence in the boardroom if you’ve never made a bed?

It’s all of those little things to give you confidence. That’s the main aim – to teach you responsibility, to give you confidence and then you’ll be able to handle anything. Confidence is the key.

We saw that during Covid. I read an article in Harvard Business Review that if someone can’t show their face on Zoom they certainly don’t have the confidence to make a decision. If you don’t have the confidence to show your own colleagues your face, you will not have the confidence to make a decision.

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JEREMY MAGGS: So part of what you’re suggesting is very utopic, it is very aspirational.

But you also go on to say that Africa, and by that I mean South Africa, is – I have the chapter in front of me – a hard hood. You go on to say that we have problems with rebels and bandits. How do you marry that vision of Utopia that you are proposing with the hard reality that exists on the continent and in this country?

MUZI KUZWAYO: Well, you start small. You start in a small place and you create a centre of excellence.

I was reading your book, My Final Answer, and here is [Jeremy’s] dad thinking, man, this guy [Jeremy], I want him to be a banker to work in Edenvale.

JEREMY MAGGS: Thank you for reading the book. I appreciate it.

MUZI KUZWAYO: I read it online. [Your response to your father was] ‘Don’t try and force me into banking’. But my point is the route – you probably saw I’m speaking for him here – of course the route was banking. But hey, you’re successful. At least you don’t need his pay to take care of you. But that’s the kind of thing. We can’t control how people are going to live and give, and straight-jacket them. What we want is responsible citizens who don’t have to depend on grants.

JEREMY MAGGS: Let’s move on to the ideas economy, if we can – a place that you have played in a lot during your career. You talk about bright ideas, making the future bright. There’s no doubt that South Africa and Africa are brim full of bright ideas. Often the problem though, Muzi Kuzwayo, is taking those ideas into reality. You say that young people have got to play their part in building and developing the future of the country. How do you optimise good ideas?

MUZI KUZWAYO: The first thing you need is the ideas.

You need a bank of ideas, lots of ideas, and kind of throw them on the wall. Some will succeed and some won’t. The problem comes when bureaucrats decide which are great ideas, and then they try and force those down.

So what you want to do is give young people as many opportunities as possible to have to come up with ideas.

I remember at Hunt Lascaris, the agency where I worked and was CEO of TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, we had about 20 young kids from Soweto. They could come up with a lot of different ideas. Some work and some don’t.

But firstly, you’ve got to give them the opportunity to come and dream, make mistakes.

After working on so many ideas, I think it’s hard to pick this one and say this one is going to work. You’re going to have some failures along the way. I think the internet was invented in the early 1970s and then there was a big dot-bomb. Now we can’t live without it. So if somebody died immediately after the dot-bomb and you met them in heaven, and you told them that the internet was resuscitated and it worked, they are going to say, ‘What? I lost a lot of money on that!’. That’s how ideas work.

JEREMY MAGGS: Part of it, I guess, is the ability as well to fail forward. It’s difficult to teach young people how to fail, because often there is a despondency that sets in. Again, predicated on your big argument that it’s up to young people who are going to fix this country, we’ve also got to learn, surely, how to deal with and recover from failure. It’s easy for the likes of you and I who have tried things and failed and moved on. But often a sense of demoralisation sets in when you fail, and that can be very debilitating towards the big fix.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Well, we were young at some stage; we weren’t born old [even though we were born] a long time ago. Again, it goes back to the confidence; you will make mistakes. I mean, kids fall all the time and they get up and then they move on.

I think South Africa is changing. There was a time when, if you were a failure, nobody wanted to touch you. And now it’s like get up and do it again. We’ve seen – with a lot of people going into business and tough times coming – so many failures that it’s kind of common now.

You know, thankfully we don’t have the problem that we hear about in Japan where people commit suicide when things have gone wrong. Things go wrong and you fail, but you do know that you can come back and try again.

JEREMY MAGGS: Not always the case in South Africa; you can’t always just spring to your feet again. You know that, Muzi.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Yes, but I think it’s changing. That’s what I’m saying. I know of someone – well, I knew him well, actually – who committed suicide when his business went under. We still have some of those problems, but I see a lot of people who will tell you that things haven’t gone well. I met a guy whose [cell] number was an 082 990 number. The first guys used to have a Vodacom number. I said, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you. What’s your number?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a 078 number. If a man has a 078 number, you know that he has gone through some really hard times and he has learned and has bounced back.

JEREMY MAGGS: Muzi Kuzwayo, we are recording this conversation in front of a television screen and South Africa is currently playing Australia in the Cricket World Cup. By the time our conversation ends, or by the time you listen to this, obviously we’ll know the result.

The reason why I raised that is you also talk about the importance of sport in fixing South Africa. You say it can help address race issues, gender-based violence. The global sports industry is worth US$615 billion. You call on government to invest in sport, to create employment. We are a country, again, brim-full of sports people. We haven’t looked at the sports issue on the FixSA series before. How can sport help fix a country?

MUZI KUZWAYO: Well, it’s a huge industry. The tail end of the industry is big. There’s broadcasting, there’s a lot of other things. Firstly, we have a lot of people who haven’t finished matric or for whom I think [some]one will fix our education system.

So we need to build sports academies. Now, not everybody’s going to be a cricketer, but there’ll be groundsmen, cricket groundsmen. They’ll learn, they’ll know how to take care of the grass. They’ll know how to take care of the stadium, how to build a lot of those kinds of things. They’ll know how to broadcast.

This is particularly important now that there’s been the democratisation – excuse the cliché – the democratisation of media.

So you’re going to probably have very localised sports companies or organisations. Those things keep people employed.

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The first thing to consider is that we want people off the street. They may not be mega-millionaires; that’s all right. But they’ll be able to be somewhere between seven in the morning and nine at night, and they’ll have some money to be able to buy their own bread and afford a place to stay. So that’s what we need in soccer.

If you go to a lot of townships where there used to be sports grounds, now you find shopping malls and some RDP houses and squatter camps. Those things are really necessary, but they’re not creating jobs. Soccer fields and cricket grounds are as good as factories. They’re absolutely important.

JEREMY MAGGS: You can learn how to fail when you play sport, and you can learn how to celebrate success. I guess you learn the power of collaboration. It’s a metaphor for many things in life.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Absolutely. If you look at Larry King [host of Larry King Live, CNN’s most-watched and longest-running programme] – Larry King became a great broadcaster. He used to sit up there while his friends were playing sport and he’d be the announcer. It excited him. So he did not end up in sports as a sports broadcaster, but he ended up in the media business. So those are the kind of opportunities it offers.

JEREMY MAGGS: I met Larry King many, many years ago. I did a magazine interview with him and I was quite amazed because he came down to the interview wearing a dressing gown. I thought to myself, come on man, you’re doing an interview here. And he absolutely insisted, he gave me 10 minutes to do the interview because he had to go to the spa. I’m not talking about S-P-A-R, I’m talking about the spa. I never forgave him for that.

[Chuckling] Muzi Kuzwayo, unfortunately like all good things we are limited by time. We’ve come to the end of the conversation, but I want to end with this.

You conclude in your book that people by nature are both fragile and fallible. You go on to say: ‘Don’t let the cracks and crevices of human imperfection imprison your spirit.’ Let me have some closing thoughts here. You are confident we can break the shackles of that prison and enter your iron dome of optimism.

MUZI KUZWAYO: Without a doubt. I think we –I know that we – are going to be one of the greatest nations in the world. It’s a question of time. I mean, we punch way above our weight in the kind of people who’ve produced and the kind of politics we once commanded. We’ve slipped, without a doubt. But that’s what happens.

That’s why the liberating parties often lose after 30 years, because there’s a generation that does not understand what the organisation was about, its ideals within the organisation and outside, who don’t have the sympathies for the problems that caused the liberation in the first place.

JEREMY MAGGS: Do you still ride horses?

MUZI KUZWAYO: No, I’ve never ridden horses. I was outside, just standing with my mom. It was just a horse. Just a horse, just a wayward horse.

JEREMY MAGGS: [Laughter] Muzi Kuzwayo, thank you so much for joining me on the FixSA podcast here on Moneyweb. I enjoyed the conversation. I’m Jeremy Maggs.

Listen to previous FixSA podcasts here.