Dr Ramphele asks why our leaders tolerate highway robbery of common resources by a few elites.

ALEC HOGG:  Joining us in this special podcast is Mamphela Ramphele, medical doctor, academic, former managing director of the World Bank, director of Anglo American Corporation, Remgro, Medi-Clinic, chairperson now of Gold Fields Limited - WOW - that's quite a cv and you're also going to be talking for the first time at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit.  How did they manage to twist your arm into this one?

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE:  I'm a great admirer of Adrian Gore because South Africa is all the better for having entrepreneurs like him and it makes us realise just how much potential there is in this country.  He therefore didn't really have to twist my arm very much for me to agree.  But I'm also particularly interested in the issue of leadership because I think this country's performance always lags our full potential except when we really dig deeply into ourselves, then we excel - like we did with the World Cup as we also did with the Rugby World Cup in 1995 - and we do often - we did with the TRC, we did also in terms of the political settlement.  So when we really put our minds to it, we can excel as a nation and so the issue of leadership for me is critical because leaders are very important in helping us to reach for the stars.

ALEC HOGG:  It's very interesting on that point, you've been quoted in many of the media in South Africa, saying that we need to now start preparing for the greatest of our leaders when he leaves the stage, when Nelson Mandela is no longer with us.

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE:  You know the media sometimes likes to distort and sensationalise - what I was responding to was a specific question which was ‘are we abusing Madiba given his age' and this was in relation to expectations that he was going to - not just attend the final of the World Cup - but that he will be handing over the cup.  Now which 92 year old could stand that cold of the night of the final, and to stay right close to midnight to be able to hand over the cup.  Our expectations of that man are just unrealistic, and so my point was simply that we've got to actually grow up - like all people grow up to know that they love their mothers and fathers but their mothers and fathers have done their jobs and they must now be allowed to rest - that was my point.

ALEC HOGG:  From a leadership perspective, there's so much that you've already given to this country and will continue to give in the future and I just wondered if there was much that you learnt at the World Bank where you were responsible for human development side for four years, as a managing director there, on education and health - two key issues in South Africa that you've been able to - if not personally ensure that they get implemented - but at least encourage others to do so.

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE:  I learned a lot from the World Bank but I also think that I was able to enrich the World Bank to think more holistically about human development - remember the World Bank in the 1990s got into the notion that the biggest return on investment in education was in primary education.  Now that's a fact, but over what term - you are a columnist and a financial person - if you stop investing at the high end, who is going to train your teachers and who is going to generate the knowledge that needs to be taught at primary level.  So the World Bank sometimes gets trapped by economic analyses, which are not rooted in the reality of everyday life.  So I was able to bring that reality to the World Bank - but I took away from the World Bank a huge amount of learning - understanding how the global economy works, being able to understand how other emerging economies were tackling some of the problems we have.  Take the issue of the difficulties of dealing with social welfare as a safety net that then allows people to be able to become productive citizens.  Countries like Mexico, Brazil, Chile have learnt that if you don't tie social welfare in with investing in human capital formation so that these people can eventually come off welfare, you are crippling people - you are making your society a dependent society.  Now you know that we have gone right ahead and not learnt the lessons of Brazil or Mexico - we continue to give social welfare without making sure that the mothers of those children who are getting social grants - that the children are immunised, that they're properly nourished and that they go to school - and the mothers, aunts or sisters get trained so that they eventually can be able to earn their own income.  Nothing gives more dignity than a job or the ability to get your livelihood rather than ‘give me, give me, give me'.

ALEC HOGG:  Dr Ramphele if we can maybe dwell a little on the education side as well - you are an academic - you've certainly spent many years in academia - the change away from outcomes-based education (OBE) in South Africa - is this something that you would have encouraged?

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE:  Absolutely - of all the mistakes made post 1994, our choice of curriculum was the most devastating - it is precisely because of that choice which was not matched to the realities on the ground again, it was an ideological decision to say we must make a total break with apartheid education which I agreed with.  But education is education.  In the whole rubric of apartheid education, are certain basic fundamentals - reading, writing, arithmetic - whether it's apartheid or communist education - they all have those common things.  We threw away the baby with the bathwater and we ended up with a situation where even during the darkest apartheid years, people emerged out of primary school being able to read, write and to do mathematics.  Today we have people graduating from high school who can't read, who can't write and therefore are not employable and we wonder why South Africa is having this growing inequality.  It's not because our government is taking away money from poor people.  It is because our education system has failed to become the ladder out of poverty, which it is globally.  If you don't give people the capacity to develop their talents, you are actually killing them.  So we have on one hand, hundreds of young people dying from HIV/Aids and TB and all the other problems that we have on the health side - on the other, we are destroying human capital through this non-performing education system.  So it's really one of the biggest tragedies that one can imagine a country going through, and it is all of our own making.  We made the policy choices which unfortunately many people - educationists, not me, many others - who understood the basic principles of education said so at the time when we made the decision, and continue to say so.  I'm grateful that the current Minister of Education has taken courage in her hands and we are now going to go back to basics.  And I am pleading with teachers who are threatening to go on strike to just stop for a moment and think about this nation, and the need for young people in South Africa to be given a chance.

ALEC HOGG:  Well it's outside of the political arena where your voice is really being heard and being appreciated - the Anglo American plc appointment to the board, and lately now to become chairperson of Gold Fields Limited - but in that area too there have been some signs of concern and corruption that appears within the Department of Mineral Resources.  I guess when you've got something that's so valuable like the mineral resources of this very wealthy country that we live in, there will always be some areas where perhaps some would have incentive not to be entirely honest.  Is there anything on that side that you could recommend - that we need to address?

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE:  We need to be very honest about the nature of the settlement we agreed to in the 1990s - deliberately avoided the big questions of socio-economic justice.  We looked at gross violations of human rights through the TRC - we assumed that the reconstruction and development programme would deal with socio-economic rights issues and the injustices of the past.  We even put in the band-aid of black economic empowerment, but we have actually not had an honest conversation around issues of the ownership of the means of production and what is happening now - the kind of gross corruption - is not just corruption where people do something wrong.  Some of the actions -not just in the Department of Mineral Resources, but elsewhere in government, in the state-owned enterprises - there seems to me, to be the mentality of ‘now is our time' and people often even quote that the apartheid government used state-owned enterprises to enrich Afrikaners and to give them opportunities - that's true.  But the fact of the matter is that I thought we were trying to build a different society post 1994 which means that as much as we want to use state-owned enterprises to broaden the base of opportunities for people - it's got to be done in a way that is transparent and that benefits the largest number of people and not to be hijacked and captured by a few elite people.  This is what is happening now - and this is something we didn't see but we are seeing - where people have got mineral rights given to them under very curious circumstances and/or get to run mines in a way that leaves miners in a worse position than they ever were during the apartheid era.  This Aurora story that we have had in the media in the last while - how can we as a society look ourselves in the mirror when we've got mineworkers sitting there, starving, living in conditions that are worse than the hostels that I described, and Francis Wilson described in his work on migrant labour.  How can we live with ourselves...  All of these calls for a major rethinking and open conversation around what it is that is going on - are we now seeing elites - black elites - using the state to be able to redress what they think went wrong and that now is their time to eat, because others ate in the past.

ALEC HOGG:  And the leadership in this front I suppose is a theme that you do talk about often, needs to be taken by civil society.

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE:  Absolutely because we live in a constitutional democracy where the citizen is the sovereign.  We are the owners as citizens - the owners of this country and its rules and if we don't stand up and require of our leaders an explanation as to why they are tolerating this highway robbery of common resources by a few elites - and where are the voices of the leaders that we have elected at various levels - starting with the nationals, the provincial and the local levels - to make sure that the common wealth which belongs to all South Africans is looked after so that we can become a prosperous and democratic and just society that we say we want to be, in the preamble to our constitution.

ALEC HOGG:  Just to close off with - I live in the rural areas so I see a lot of the consequences of some of these poor decisions that have happened, but you were banished to the rural areas by the apartheid government from 1977 to 1984 to Lenyenye - which I never even knew existed, but near Tzaneen - do you ever visit there?

MAMPHELA RAMPHELE:  Yes I do because some of my relatives - one of my younger brothers came to settle in Lenyenye and sadly we buried him last year because of HIV/Aids which is another one of our bad policy decision points, and so is this denial that HIV/Aids is a problem - he was a teacher.  We know that a third of the teachers are one way or the other affected by HIV/Aids - so I do visit.  What is interesting is that the projects we started together there with the community are still going strong.  Livelihood projects like brick-making which is done by women, and they build their own homes - they're not waiting for anybody to come and give them an RDP house - they're building their own homes and making bricks for the community to build their own homes.  Gardens that we started - no one dies or becomes so ill from lack of vitamins, which used to happen when I got there - people used to be completely mad because of the lack of vitamin B and folic acid.  And of course, with simple vegetables people recognise that you can make your life productive and a well-rounded one by using whatever little space you have around your house to grow simple vegetables and to be able to eat well.  So I am encouraged that if each one of us - you live in the rural areas and by working with the rural people around you, you can start and sustain approaches that address some of the immediate problems in a sustainable way - it is now more than 20 years since I left that place and yet those projects are still going.

ALEC HOGG:  Dr Mamphela Ramphele, it's been a privilege, as always.

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