Ayabonga Cawe — Entrepreneur, Development Economist, Radio Presenter, Author

Once more, it is what's involved, so good to have you along with us. A special guest today, and I've been looking forward to chatting to him. I've also been a little bit nervous because, well, you'll find out, you'll find out in just a bit. But he's just written a book called "The Economy on Your Doorstep" and my special guest is Aibonga Kawe, how's it Aibonga? Hey David, thank you so much for the invite and yeah, great to be on your show, man. Wonderful stuff, like I said earlier, I hope I didn't butcher the surname too much, but... No, I think you did well, I think you did well. Awesome, man. Okay, so you've written this book, "The Economy on Your Doorstep", the title is intriguing. But before we get into the book, don't you want to tell me a little bit about yourself? Give me your journey. Yeah, so, look man, I was born in Gomani, which is formerly known as Queenstown, and big chunks of the book talk about the economy of that part of the world, and yeah, I'm a child of the Eastern Cape. I've lived now in Johannesburg for over a decade, and my background is in economics, but I always knew I was never going to be an economist who works in a bank, and that's something I sort of decided very early on in my own academic training, and have worked in a diverse set of spaces, anywhere from consulting businesses to NGOs, I now work in broadcasting, so I have the fortune of being a radio host like yourself, and I work quite closely in the policy space as well.

Working with government, the private sector, and the labour movement on many areas of labour market policy, issues related to inequality, and so yeah, that very diverse mix of activities is what I try and get up to most of the time, and really I think what moves me is this understanding, or I guess the pursuit of trying to understand how under very specific conditions in South Africa, issues of money, identity, and power intersect, coming from the history that we do, and I think faced with the challenges that no doubt many of our listeners would be familiar with. Yeah, but listen, I mean, you've got to have your things, and you've been fairly modest about everything, but I mean, you are what is known as a development economist, which I've never heard of before this, so we need to have a look at that. You do run your own talk show, so, you know, I can sit back and relax for this one. You're on Metro, hey? Yes, yes, yes. Metro FM at the SABC. Okay, good stuff. And you're also a writer, I mean, you've written for Daily Maverick, you've written for The Business Day, and a couple of others. So we are, particularly now, in a time in our country where a lot of people that are listening to this would probably look at me and go, what economy? You know, and there's this whole thing about all the unrest, and there's the conspiracy theories and what not going around at the moment.

To my mind, the result of all of this is that we as the people of South Africa, and I like to think of us as the, hopefully, going forward, not so silent majority, but we kind of had enough now, and, you know, we're going to look to books like yours, to people like you, and say, okay, let's have a look. So is there hope for our country and our economy? I, for one, believe there is, and I am a raving fan of South Africa, its people and its possibilities. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think the starting point, David, is that large chunks of our society don't know how the majority live. I think that's the starting point. And I think the second point is that we tend to be very ahistorical in our analysis of why we've got to where we've got to. So you have in South Africa, the most unequal society in the world, you have for a middle income country, record levels, world beating levels of unemployment, even much worse than even poorer nations. And one that question where it is asked, people have often rejected it. I mean, I know I worked in an NGO where we were trying to really foreground this message that inequalities are taking. The market will sort everything out. And this faith, this very blind faith in a very particular type of capitalist framework that is developed in South Africa is what got us here on two fronts.

I think on the first one, the devastating levels of hunger that people are experiencing. And what I argue in the book is you've got a situation where large parts of your population and your citizenry in South Africa have experienced a state led, very well planned system of dispossessing them for more than a century. And dispossessing them of the land, dispossessing them of their livestock, dispossessing them of all of the means they would have to survive outside of wage employment. So surviving outside of going to work for somebody else. Now, if you think about large parts of this country, many of the parts I come from, the sky, the sky, the former homeland states, effectively, those are economic wastelands, horrible land quality, very, very, you know, a weak densification that would allow for economic relations among those societies. In effect, those are economies that exist for the urban economy. And similarly, the township economy exists for the urban core economy. And so in a sense, what you then happen, what you then have happening in South Africa is massive retrenchments in the post-apartheid period due to many issues, market liberalization, shifts in trade policy. But you have a hollowing out of your primary and secondary industry, massive losses in mining, massive losses in manufacture. And that then changes the social base of the society.

So in the former era, you were a citizen in so far, for instance, in the republic, as you could prove that you worked for somebody. Now, what happens when that link to citizenship is broken in a context where you can't work, nobody wants your labor, because capitalism can accumulate without a need to employ people? I mean, when was the last time, David, you went into a bank branch and think about how frequently you used to at some stage to go and attend to your matters in a bank branch? That's entirely changed. That's entirely changed. Now, the question is, what implication has that had for many of the people who are working in direct and even auxiliary functions in the banks when the branches have closed down, when everything has shifted towards the apps? And so what I argue, David, that drives what we saw over the last week or so is the systematic alienation of the majority of your society. And so in a sense, when you then have agent provocateers and economic saboteers painting this compelling picture to people who are hungry, who have been locked out of the informal economy, that you can go to the malls and it's really open gates. And remember that, you know, if we're going in hundreds and thousands to the malls, you know, the risks of getting caught or captured or being incarcerated are much lower than if I was just going as a sole person.

So so the collective action de-risks the process, but the collective action itself is foundationally wrong because it doesn't lead to any liberatory or emancipating project. But it's being used and mobilized for people whose real target are our network industries. And you saw this closing off of the entry, hitting of the warehouses, hitting of manufacturing capacity and key parts of KZN and, you know, and even hitting things like water treatment plants. Because what we're seeing here is these logics of exclusion in South African capitalism have created two sets of groups. One is very generalized chaos in the mass of the society. And you saw this and I think the other is a more sinister part of the fratricide or factions that are rolling out in the ANC, where even there, the rationale for organizing that faction in the way that it has is this idea that we've been excluded from the mainstream economy or from the ability to accumulate. And I think if we're going to ignore that and have this very optimistic sense that, hey, if you fix a few things here and there, we can still be a fine society. It doesn't work like that. Think about the crime situation, for instance, there's something unique about Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and South Africa that the crime is a direct outcome of large levels of inequality.

It's not about people being poor. I mean, you know, if you go to the homelands of the trans guy, you will not see the type of crime that you see here. And in instances where you do, there is a massive sort of migration element. So with certain groups that are coming back from the townships of Cape Town and, you know, they'll target one another in particular ways. But the reality is that because there isn't the sense of inequity, there isn't this Santin Alex dynamic, this deep sloot Brionston dynamic, that the crime isn't as bad. And that's why, for instance, Cape Town is the one place where the nature of the crime is so horrific. And you can see it the moment you land from the airport, the moment you go into the townships of Kylie, Chuck, Felipe and many other places. And then you think about Konstantia and you think about, you know, Camps Bay, Clifton, and it's a world apart, yet you're in the same country. And I think what I learned from last week is that we're either going to have to build forward in a more inclusive way or we're going to burn, you know, in this barnyard together. You know, wow. OK, so we're going to come back and we're going to talk more about this and we're going to talk more about the book and why you actually decided to write it as well.

And and, you know, what we can do going forward, my special guest, the author of The Economy on Your Doorstep, Aya Bongat Khaue. And we'll be back with him in just a bit. This is what's involved. And we're back with my special guest, author of The Economy on Your Doorstep, radio presenter and general. What what is it? What do we call you? You're because you're like an activist. But, you know, I think of myself, David, as a cultural worker, a cultural worker, you see that is the idea is operating in multiple spaces to try and shift how we think and how we act on very different things that are critical to our survival. So, yeah, wonderful. Well, that explains it. It's very, very good explanation as well. So, Aya Bongat, why write a book? So, as you said, David, I mean, I've been writing for quite a while and I had the column, you know, at the at the Business Day and before that, the Daily Maverick. And and I must say, I mean, I think what it was becoming quite clear to me, even before I had the discussion with the publishers, who were quite excited about the prospect of of this project, was that I needed I needed in a way to to deal with what I felt was a very foundational tension for me.

So I say in the book, for instance, you know, I went I went and studied economics and finance with a very clear intention that I was never going to work as an investment banker or work in the banks or anything like that. But I was I went there with a particular sort of interest. I needed economic ideas to explain what in my life I felt was the mundane and the significant. So, I mean, I go to bits during the eye of the storm, global financial crisis is around 2009 or so. And we're still really reeling from the impact of that. So I think the economy is still looming very large in the lives of many South Africans have been retrenched, have been laid off. You know, we've had the businesses affected by the weak demand conditions in the economy. And I get there and I think it's a very jarring experience. So the first part of my undergraduate training, I would say I get very little by way of the tools that can explain the mundane and the significant around that comes a lot later. But I think even then it probably this is a book I was always going to write, but it took me as long as it did because I needed to marshal all of those tools to explain the economy of the people I knew around. So mine is not a typical economics book.

It's a book that starts with an African woman being shot by the police in a township in the 1980s in South Africa. Now, that might not seem like a scene that is befitting of an economics book, but it's a scene befitting of an economic spoke in South Africa, because that's where we come from. That's the reality we continue to face in large part. And so for me, that's that that had to be the starting point. It had to be the starting point for another reason as well, David, in that when we talk about the economy, we tend to just think of firms and entrepreneurs. And that's where the conversation ends. But we don't speak about the household as a major site of economic and social production and reproduction and also a site of redistribution of and reallocation of economic resources in the society. So one of the hallmarks of apartheid and settler colonialism in South Africa was that it had an intentional program for profit of trying to shift all of the costs of producing successive waves of the workforce. To the African home in the homelands or the native reserves so that the costs of looking after the young and the very old continue to be shifted to those areas. And I always use Cape Town as an example of this because one of the big migration corridors of the part of the Eastern Cape I come from goes towards Cape Town.

And you can see it unfold in like real, you know, images. A young person is raised in the trans guy in the native reserve at the age of 16, 17. They go and work as a general worker, be it in the dockyards or somewhere in Cape Town. They live there for most of their life. They have children. The children are sent back because of the horrific conditions that people live under in Cape Town. And so in a sense, you end up having these areas being areas that are deeply characterized by the very old and the very young. And your entire productive layer, that layer of 15 to 64, is effectively drained out periodically from these areas so much so that you can't really have any real basis for production. Although some of these patterns are reversing somewhat because of, you know, the decline in the jobs in urban centers like Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. But it's still a very real sociological outcome of the history we come from. So someone might say, well, why are you stuck in that history? Well, I can't understand the reality I grew up around if I don't go back to that history. I can't understand why it continues to be that this is a place for the very old and the very and the very young with limited productive potential, because effectively you've sort of corralled people into the worst types of forms of land and then stripped them of the productive personnel and human resources and then still expect them to survive.

And so, in a way, that was important, but I think it was important for another reason, that we have to fight this perception in our society, that, you know, social grants are a freebie, that a basic income grant is a freebie in a society that is stripped people using fiscal measures, by the way. If you think about the poll taxes, if you think about the quid rents, if you think about many of the hot taxes that were levied on our people to force them to go and rule it. In a way, it's at one level a reparation, but at a second level, it's a response to a society where capitalism, a very feudal society, where capitalism, you know, has created a situation where for you to eat, for you to be sheltered, for you to survive, you need to have cash and for you to have cash, you need to be in wage employment. But if the majority of people are outside of that, how must they survive so that we don't have this very frequent spillover into what are called service delivery protests and the generalized chaos that we saw in the looting over the last week? It sounds, and just listening to you now, it sounds overwhelming. It sounds like this is one of those things where we throw our hands up in the air and we go, OK, I don't know, because you talk about it.

We don't have a choice, David. We don't have a choice. Let me put it this way. What I'm trying to portray in this book is that I don't stand as a voyeuristically over the scene. We don't have a choice because we don't have a plan B. This is not a reality from which we can have some periodic escape. We can't. I can't escape from the fact that I come from Isingla Grény in Falpang in a part of the Eastern Cape that has been dispossessed of its labor power over decades enough to create a social milieu where people's aspirations are to leave that place and to do so and leave the very young and the old in that place. So throwing up our hands is not a strategy because it's not an option open to us. So I want to underscore that it might be an option open to certain parts of our society and certain classes in our society. But I think to many people who come from these areas, come from the urban periphery in many of the townships, it's not a reality that you have the luxury of thinking you can throw your hands up and ignore it and look the other way. It's not existentially there. Yeah, no, look, by no means am I saying, you know, ignore it and hope it will go away. I think that particular path has been taken and we've seen what happened there.

What concerns me, though, and what really does affect me is I don't think, you know, there's two things. Once one of the things is a lot of people and I'm talking about people that I know. So predominantly white people would go, we don't understand what the problem is. I mean, we voted the ANC and they just cocked it up. Well, you know, they didn't inherit a terribly good system to start with. But, yeah, there are problems. And, you know, as you say, this this this past time with the looting and the rioting and everything, something needs to be done. And this book covers some of the things that you think can be done. I think when we come back, let's talk a little bit more about that, because we've had we've had the doom and gloom and we need some hope and some light at the end of the tunnel. So when we come back, we'll be chatting more to Ayabonga Trawe, author of The Economy on Your Doorstep. This is what's involved. I'm so grateful to have you along with us back in a bit. And we're back with my special guest, Ayabonga Trawe, The Economy on Your Doorstep. As I said just before the break, we did the doom and gloom, which is true. And this is what I think we also need to do in this country is we need to be able to discuss these cold, hard truths, because most people and are generalizing probably.

But if you if you live in one of the upper class sort of areas and things like that, you've never seen poverty. OK, you've actually never seen the things that Ayabonga is talking about in the Eastern Cape, for example, right up in Pumalanga. There's there's areas there on the border with Mozambique, et cetera, et cetera, where there is literally nothing. If you go there, it's still there's no electricity, there's no running water. People still live in huts and it's all people and it's the very young. And never mind what that does to families. OK, which is to me a huge thing as well. But the fact that we need to do that. So where does where does the hope come from, Ayabonga? Look, look, I think maybe to your point earlier and I like and thank you for being candid about it, that there's this seeming sense of despondency, especially among the white community. And I want to say this, David, I think in large part the white community, if we think about it, I guess, as a group with some common interests, which is not always true, has suffered under a deep lack of leadership. So let me explain what I mean by that. I think towards the late 80s, you had at least some semblance among sections of the white community that we they were preparing themselves for a new type of society and the role that they would play in that society.

But what I think has happened in 1994 is exactly what you suggest, this delegation of that responsibility to the African National Congress and a general demobilization of progressive forces in the white community. Now, what ends up happening is a situation where we retreat into old lagers. So we all retreat into the anxiety and the paranoia of what many, you know, many of my friends at school used to always talk about is the night of long knives. So the sense as any settler colonial class in the society and in South Africa, I guess, you know, our own white community has been here for a lot longer. So in a way, people can't go back to, you know, Netherlands or wherever. But I think they haven't overcome the colonial anxiety, this idea that, you know, set up high walls around yourself, set up an entire enclave economy for yourselves and hope that you'll be able to survive while living in a society where the majority is effectively closed out of that economy. And I'm saying that has reached its own structural limits. Now, if we if we are thinking, I guess, optimistically, I think there's still a lot to be salvaged. And the starting point is for a particular leadership among the white community to emerge that realizes how intimately linked their own interests are existentially with those of the majority.

So this idea and you hear it in the investment community, I take everything off short, do that. Because if you're interested in genuine and long lasting change, you need to also act differently. Now, acting differently is not just about making sure that you go and cross, you know, the line and go to a township and go and see how people live. Many white people do. And of course, a significant part of them don't. But it's also about changing things that have a direct bearing on distribution or outcomes in the society. One of those for those in industries about actually reinvesting some of the profits that have been developed over time in the real economy, the economy that sinks shafts, that gets people into employment and not in finance, insurance, real estate and all of the other, you know, nice paper values that make people very, very rich, but make the society, you know, very lopsided in its own industrial structure. So that's a starting point. But I also argue in the book, David, that I think even for for the ANC, that we're never going to resolve the challenge. And for me, I say the South African economy misfires because the economic and sociological position of the native reserves that Fervut and the settler colonialists, Cecil John Rhodes and others created, continue to be deep economic wasteland.

So a starting point is about subverting the cheap labor basis of those areas, is about subverting the agrarian dualism. And a typical example of agrarian dualism I like is, you know, compare Coxtat and Mount Aleph. And if our listeners don't know it, they might want to go on Google and compare what is produced in each of those areas and the history of both of those areas in the South African formation. But you have to one, overcome that agrarian dualism. And that means you've got to return production to these areas, because many young people are not going to stay in these areas if they've got nothing to do. And these areas are designed for people to not have anything to do because you only want them to go and work in the mines and in the farms. And I think the second one is, of course, what I call developmental local governance. So developmental local governance is a very simple concept. It's this idea of moving away from a situation where municipalities and local businesses have their guns trained on each other rather than working in collaboration. On the part of the municipalities, deep internal fights lead to so much dysfunction that municipalities can't even provide the basics. And I think for investors, no investor is going to go into a community where you can't assure me of electricity, you can't assure me of water, you can't assure me that there's going to be roads that go to my plant.

Nor can you assure me that there's going to be significant, you know, social stability and human settlements for some of my workers to live in. So so we need at that level. So we talk a lot about social dialogue in South Africa, Nedlak. But where are the Nedlaks at a local level that ensure an alignment of interest between local industry and local governance authorities? Because that's what then subverts the basis of the old homeland, native reserve type situation. Maybe then a last comment, I think, relates, of course, to to this issue of co-financing the reconstruction and recovery efforts. You've got four point five trillion all around them in pension fund assets in South Africa. Now, I'm not calling for a raid of people's hard end savings, not at all. But what I am suggesting is that your returns mean little if the country is going to go up in smoke. Your assured incomes in terminal time T when you go and retire means very little if you're living in a society that is a burning inferno around you. So there is a massive responsibility on the owners of capital, you and me, who invest the money in the pension funds and the people who are there as trustees that we all need to hold to account to say, show me where you are investing in the real economy in a way that employs people I can point out and see warm bodies.

Because for me, one of the biggest vulnerabilities and risks is this massive economic inactivity and barriers to participation in the economy. Last comment, David, and I think we saw it. That entry corridor, what used to be called in real terms net cause and Natal corridor Johannesburg and maybe even into the region down to Durban is our main factory. If I can put it like that for South Africa, the warehouses are there, the factories are there, you know, the auto plants are there, the port is there. Now, one of the things we're going to have to overcome in South Africa is this concentration of productive activities in particular corridor. And that creates not just the economic vulnerability, but it also creates a security vulnerability. If you are at war with somebody tomorrow and they hit you in that Natal corridor, they hit you in the Western Cape corridor, the Northern Cape, Saldana corridor. In effect, you're done for because you've concentrated all of your production in concentrated parts of your country and have left large parts of your country. And as areas where you don't have production. So look at how our road network is built. Look at how our rail network is built. I mean, a lot of the roads in the former homelands are main sort of roads that filter people and labor out of the rural areas to go to the mines or to go to the farms.

You seldom find a proper road that links one village to the next because those those economies were never expected to operate like that. It was never expected that one villager will undertake commerce with another. And on that basis, we don't build any telecoms infrastructure, we don't build any roads infrastructure because effectively that economy exists to serve the urban economy. The same thing applies in our townships. Look at how small the roads are in the outside, of course, the high streets that are heavily densified that serve as the transport nodes and effectively where the township economy rests. But if you go into the interior of the neighborhoods on the streets, the roads are very, very small. You have to wait for another car to pass before you can go past. And I think that presents a significant constraint to building economic activity that links, for instance, certain parts of Soweto to each other rather than to the city of Johannesburg. So trying to make sure that an entrepreneur in Piri is able to source some of their inputs from an entrepreneur in Midorlands who is also able to source some of their stuff from an entrepreneur in Diplouffe. It becomes very difficult to do that because all of the goods connecting a network infrastructure is about filtering all of our money, all of our economic activity out of the places we live in to the main core of the city and the urban core.

It's exactly the same in the townships and it's exactly the same in the villages. And I think it's a massive vulnerability of South African life. And if we don't address it, we're going to be faced with the same issues. Wow. OK, more eye-opening stuff there, Iabonga. This is what's involved. We're going to be wrapping it up with my special guest, Iabonga Kawa, author of The Economy on Your Doorstep, back, wrapping it up in just a bit. And we're back with Iabonga Kawa. So if we distill this down, Iabonga, and I highly recommend people read the book and I'm going to say it because I am but a simple man. The initial bits of it, I looked at the graphs and said I'll never understand all of this. And then once you get into it, you actually do. And it makes a whole lot of sense. And one of your drivers there is that we need to do something and we need to work towards building a people's economy. Where, though, do we start? Because amongst I think most of our people in the country, we go, OK, well, it's government's problem. We voted them in, they're stuffing it up. It's their problem. But we've seen now over the last while it's not necessarily their problem. And if we stand together, we can make a difference.

So people like you, people like me, how do we start to do something to create this this change and to rebuild in a way that is sustainable? I think the starting point, David, is to admit much of the responsibility does rest with government. And it's not the responsibility of some comrades that sit somewhere to fix how government operates because it's a government of all of us. So part of our fight is in strengthening the capacity of the state as a vehicle and sharpening that vehicle in the hands of the South African people to sort out their lives. So that's the one part. I think the other part is what I was trying to speak to now with the example of the spatial design of townships and rural areas. I think it's important that we we attend to that because you can't build any viable economy if you don't resolve some of these spatial questions. And take take a comparison, for instance, of a dormitory style township like Soweto and compare it to some of the neighborhoods, even sort of lower middle class neighborhoods formerly for what were seen as poor whites. Yeah. One of the things that you see that is different in those neighborhoods is that there is a diversity of land use. So you've got land that is zoned for business purposes. You've got land that zoned for certain public amenities, recreational facilities, and then you've got land that zoned for residential settlement.

Now, in townships, all the land, aside from maybe a few pockets, but all of the land, because it's a dormitory style township, is zoned for residential stuff. So the moment you start to do a business, as we encourage a lot of people to do in South Africa, in your home, you're effectively doing something illegal because that land is not zoned for you to do that. But for that land to be zoned, you're probably going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of rand to just go through that process. So we need to fix things like that. I think the second thing is we need a very genuine program of localization. I am yet to be convinced that the best way to, as a food secure country, to make sure that everybody doesn't starve in the society is our mainstream food system. I'm not convinced. We pay 18.1 million grants every year, sorry, every month in South Africa, different types of grants. And all of those end up in the mainstream food retail system. Now, what we haven't done is to use all of the skill and the expertise that exists in this country to create alternative food supply mechanisms in our own communities. So anything from your garden in your home to the garden at the back of the church to shared spaces in the community.

I think if we would start to build a culture of production, so go out and produce for needs. Go out and produce for the ECD center. Go out and produce for the old lady who lives in her home alone. Go and produce. You would then be able to, one, get people to participate and get meaning and the transfer of skills. But also, I think the second one is that you would be able to give people the tools they need to survive, even when they can't find jobs. And that's our reality. Maybe then the last one comes back to the point I was making about finance. We have an allocational problem in South Africa. You have very deep, sophisticated capital markets, but more than half of your population lives under the upper bound food poverty line. So less than 2000 rand a month or so. Now, that shows you something. It shows you that we've got a massive, highly capitalized stock exchange where seemingly a lot of the capital goes to and where the capital is raised. But you also have a massive challenge of underutilization of your productive resources, chief among those being your people. So I'm interested in how do we get all of the people in that value chain to start to think about that as the primary imperative.

Inflation is not our problem, right? The JSC being down is not our problem. Our problem is that you've got overwhelming majority of people in your society who are not interested in how South Africa has developed, enough for them to not have a stake in that system. And in a sense, they have nothing to lose. And so when you see that now on your TV, it looks shocking, but it's something that's been building up over a long period of time. And the starting point has to be about fixing government, in particular local government, fixing our neighborhoods, making our neighborhood spaces, not only where we just live, but also spaces where we can work and play. And then I think the last one is fixing this crisis of the misallocation of capital in South Africa. And it starts with you and me asking our trustees and saying, "Bruhr, or sister, what is happening here? Where are you allocating this capital?" And I can tell you, having spoken to many workers whose pensions finance large industry in South Africa, many of them are open to taking a slight shave on their returns if you are going to assure them that at least people that they know or even their own children will be economic beneficiaries of the knock-on impacts of spending money in different places or spending money in different ways.

It's not about getting more malls into our townships. No, it's about making sure that we widen our roads, we make sure that our streets are well lit so that you can have a nighttime economy that is able to make sure that the township economy operates 24 hours and not just as a dormitory-style township that has a massive outflow of people in the morning, massive inflow back, and come 9 p.m., switch off the lights, and that's it for the next day. Wow, lots and lots of food for thought. The thing that struck me, though, in what you've just been saying is in terms of this, because I am a big fan of entrepreneurship, creating entrepreneurs, creating small businesses, investing in small businesses. But I mean, if your area is not even zoned for that, and as you say, it's illegal, the mind boggles. The fact that, as you say as well, there's this whole idea of some semblance of food security where we all chip in and do what we can and start decentralizing that, I think is fantastic. Before I let you go, though, you're also, if I'm not mistaken, a member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council. Yes, for all of my sons, yeah. Shared by President Cyril Ramaphosa. Yes. In terms of the president and what he says, do you think he's got what it takes?

Do you think he is genuine in wanting to get this sorted out? My feeling is he is genuine. Sometimes, well, a lot of the time, he gets a lot of flack. But I think there is a very deep mind there. Yeah, I don't know, David, I don't know how helpful a question that is. So I can answer it, right? No, no, let me explain what I mean. I can answer it and say, you know, my experiences of him also having worked with him on the national minimum wage process is, is that he's somebody who has a deep commitment to this country. And I think even his earlier life is testament to that. You know, the staring down of mining industry as a young person leading one of the biggest strikes that we've ever seen in this country, shows you that, you know, we're not talking about somebody who doesn't have the gumption to do it. I think even back record in business shows that. But I think the question is unhelpful in this sense. That it's not the subjective factors of sort of Ramaphosa as a person that influences economic outcomes in the society. Because then you would have to be a dictator, right? But the question I think we should be asking is, you know, the African National Congress believes in democratic centralism and leadership of a collective.

Now, the question mark we should be asking is, is that collective the agency, the alliance, the social partners, which include business, labor and others and the broad, I would say, leading correlation of forces in a society. Is that correlation of forces in the right shape to lead the necessary social change that we need to see to build this economy on a different basis? And I think, you know, the answer to that is mixed. There are pockets of capacity that have been built over time that have been worn down. There are pockets of capacity that are emerging now. And I must say, on balance, I am more optimistic that that collective is able to marshal enough moral authority and all of the energies and resources of the society to achieve much better outcomes than maybe where we've come. And having learned from all of the missteps and the mistakes that have happened. And I do think that President Ramaphosa is a critical part of that, you know, as the person who leads that, as the political steward of that process, and of course, as the first among equals. But I do think that if we want to understand whether or not we're in good shape, it's really about looking at the entire collective, I guess, rather than looking at, you know, the one person that we think is at the wicked.

Well said. Well put. And you're right. It's all about asking those difficult questions and asking better questions. I have one more before I let you go. Your book is available, as we like to say, in most good bookstores. Also online, is it available? It is indeed. We have the e-book and the Kindle version out online. You can check that out. We also have the book on Google Play. It's on Rakuten Kobo, Amazon, and many of the other platforms where people get their e-books and, you know, the Kindle versions of the books. And the paperback version in all reputable bookstores. And, yeah, thank you once again, David, for having me on the show. Really appreciate it. It's an absolute pleasure, mate. Thank you for taking the time out. Last question before I let you go. What's next for Ayabonga? Seemingly a lot of work. Yeah, I mean, I'm already sort of in my head confronted by some of the themes that might come out in a subsequent book. So there's that. I'm still on radio every weeknight on Metro and doing a lot more policy work at the moment, which is sort of quite exciting because I guess you get to get into the thick of things and also, you know, work with some of the great South Africans that are doing really, really great things. So that's in large part what I'm busy with at the moment.

But we've got a fascinating project we're also doing out in the Eastern Cape. And I can't not use this opportunity to plug it. It's called Iziko Connect. And we've set up a series of Wi-Fi hotspots in Gomani and in Tofimwaba, really to try and, I guess, you know, contest the space in the digital economy and take, you know, large communities and high football areas, you know, and lower the access barriers and some of the barriers that there are to connectivity at a time where I think the highways and byways of the Internet are a mechanism through which people work and operate. And so, yeah, that's that's that's what I'm busy with. And we I guess on the 1st of August, we'll be completing a year of operation for that Wi-Fi project out in the Eastern Cape. And, yeah, look, I mean, hoping we can get as much support as we can for that. We ran the pilot and we're hoping that we can scale that across the district. So those are some of the things I work on. And I guess in between all of that, I also try and, you know, get some exercise in, take some images. I'm also a photographer and try and I guess continue to do what I can to contribute to the reconstruction efforts of our society. Wonderful stuff. Now, if somebody wants to find out more about that project you're busy with, is there a place for them to go and find out more?

Yes, there is. So we have a Web site for the for the project. It's called is equal. So I said I K O connect one word I said I K O connect dot zero dot zero. And you should be able to find all of the information about it on that on that you are wonderful stuff. So that's is equal. Connect dot CEO dot Z a Bonga car. Thank you so much for your time. And we wish you all the best. I look forward to chatting to you again when the next book's out, if not before then. Yes, definitely. Thank you so much, David. And I really appreciate, you know, the invite to the platform. Wonderful stuff. Well, that wraps it up for this particular part of what's involved to each and every one of you. Look after yourselves. Take care. And thank you for listening.