Black Man's Medicine

Muzi K

uzwayo

black man’s m

edicine

9 781431 405237

ISBN 978-1-4314-0523-7www.jacana.co.za

The title of this book comes from the African adage: ‘The Black Man’s Medicine is the White Man.’ It implies thatblack people won’t do anything right, unless there is a white man around, or that black people won’t be satisfi ed with anything unless it has been done by a white man.

This book is about economic freedom. It introduces theidea that SEE (self-economic empowerment) is the new BEE. Most importantly, it insists that although apartheid was a terrible and lamentable part of our shared history, it should no longer defi ne our present challenges and myriad opportunities for success. It is about moving from mud and dust, through the boardroom and on to a new Africa, where people work hard and life is decent.

Kuzwayo’s self-professed goal is to help us see our own, familiar truths di� erently, just in case they have passed their sell-by date, and to question the rightness of our rituals and to test the accuracy of our adages. Is the black man’s medicine really the white man?

Black Man’s Medicine is the third book written by Muzi Kuzwayo and it follows the roaring successes of Marketing Through Mud and Dust and There’s a Tsotsi in the Boardroom. It will challenge each and every South African to re-evaluate how we think about our roles in South Africa today.

9 781431 405237

Black Man's Medicine FA_6.indd 2 2012/08/02 9:39 PM

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Black Man’s Medicine

First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2012

10 Orange StreetSunnyside, 2092JohannesburgSouth Africa(+27 11) 628-3200www.jacana.co.za

© Muzi Kuzwayo, 2012

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4314-0523-7

Cover design by DerrickCover photo by Simon BarnesSet in Warnock Pro 12/15Printed by Ultra Litho (Pty) Ltd, JohannesburgJob No. 001838

See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

BLACK_MAN_MEDICINE.indd 2 2012/09/17 8:24 AM

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Muzi Kuzwayo


Muzi Kuzwayo


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This is the Un-Kindle book – it will not be made into an e-book.


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Muzi Kuzwayo

About this book

This book is about true economic freedom. It introduces the concept that self-economic empowerment (SEE) is the new BEE. Most importantly, I make the point that apartheid is an unfortunate cradle. Like the Holocaust, our terrible past must never be forgotten, but no one grows by focussing on fixing an old cradle. It’s time for progress.


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Muzi Kuzwayo

Contents

Prologue: The Loyalty of a Black Man .................................. xi

Section I: Food and Freedom 1 Shopping is Freedom .................................................... 3 2 You Pay for Your Freedom at the Till ....................... 7 3 Food and Your Pension Fund ..................................... 14 4 Bye-bye, Colour Line Politics; Hello,

Waistline Politics .......................................................... 23

Section II: Redeeming the Black Man 5 Hard Work ..................................................................... 33 6 “Sir, I am look for Job” ................................................. 40 7 Black Man’s Medicine .................................................. 46 National Medication: Changing Our Situation ...... 47 Making Change Happen: An Ad Man’s Perspective 49

Section III: Self-Economic Empowerment 8 Self-Economic Empowerment is the New BEE ....... 57 9 Etiquette ......................................................................... 63 10 Believe. Do. Package. .................................................... 70

Section IV: A New Africa is Waiting 11 A United Africa ............................................................. 77 12 Advancing Democracy through Advertising .......... 87 13 New Imagery, New Africa ........................................... 94


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14 The Beginning of the Good Old Days ....................... 100 More News, More Woes ................................................ 102 Our Post-Journalist Future .......................................... 103 The Computer as Editor ............................................... 108 Television and Reality .................................................. 109 The Fan as Player and Coach ..................................... 111 What Does It All Mean? .............................................. 113 15 The Luminaries ............................................................. 114 House of Glory ............................................................... 114 The Book of Esther ......................................................... 122 The Wise Woman from the East ................................. 127 16 It’s a Jungle Out There ................................................. 136

Epilogue ................................................................................... 142Select Reading ......................................................................... 143About the Author ................................................................... 144Acknowledgements ................................................................ 145


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Muzi Kuzwayo

Prologue The Loyalty of a

Black Man

“The black man’s medicine is the white man,” goes an African adage: Setlhare sa Mosotho ke lekgowa.

Some friends asked me not to use this saying as the title of this book. Well, for the record, it wasn’t me who invented it. I understand my friends’ reasoning. Ungajabulisi izitha, “Don’t make your enemies happy” is what we are taught at an early age, which is the African equivalent of “Don’t hang your dirty linen out in public”. Our enemies are inclined to look at the decaying infrastructure and forget about the houses built over the years since freedom.

Give me the loyalty test, and I am sure to pass it with flying colours, and although silence is golden, sometimes it is betrayal. I would be a traitor if I remained silent while children fill up potholes with soil and ask passing drivers to toss them coins. It would be disloyal to Africa and blackness to turn a blind eye to the existence of children who’ve become pros at begging at traffic lights, dancing or cleaning windows instead of being at school.

The loyalty test would reveal that this book is a celebration of the epic of the new Africa – an Africa full of joy and


xii


happiness; a place where people of all shades, shapes and backgrounds contribute to making the world a good place, and not just a better one.

This is an attempt to tell the same dream that great African writers have told more lyrically and with greater eloquence. It is a tribute to men and women who had the courage and the artistry to invent new words and phrases, ones that could paint a passionate picture of possibilities.

Everywhere I go, I see people operating on a higher plane of service and selflessness – starting with the countless caregivers who visit the sick in their homes, the ordinary people who give their money and time doing good.

Indeed there are disappointments. Some say, with good reason, that we have sunk from the time of Nelson Mandela. But there is no reason to despair, greater nations have sunk to their lowest only to rise again.

Although this is a business book, you will not find a lot of statistics here. That is because a statistic is like a G-string. What it reveals is amazing, but what does it hide? That’s where it’s at. So I prefer gravel-road economics to the rosy view enjoyed from the air-conditioned offices of power.

Most of my students at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business are successful executives in business, non-profit organisations and government. So I never instruct them. Instead my role is to make them think again, and help them to see the familiar a little differently. That is what I hope to achieve with this book – to help us see familiar truths differently, just in case they have passed

A statistic is like a G-string. What it reveals is amazing, but what it hides...

That’s where it’s at


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Muzi Kuzwayo

their use-by date; and to question the rightness of our rituals and to test the accuracy of our adages. Indeed, to revisit our articles of faith, if only to say they have stood the test of time.

These days it pays to be a scaremonger – to talk about the impending food crisis and other disasters that will befall Africa and the world. Sadly, sometimes scaremongers are right. Disasters do not happen because we have a streak of bad luck but because we’ve failed to plan for them. Instead of making hay while the sun shone, we preferred to bask in its warmth.

I try to show my students that we live in a world of contradictions. Invariably in a poor area you will find the obese, and in a world of opulence you will find the malnourished. I also try to impress on them that matters of business leadership are seldom matters of wrong versus right. Those are easy. In most instances the issues that confront management are those of right versus right, which is what we call a “moral dilemma”, or in the case of business, a “management dilemma”.

Since I was a lousy student at university, I sought to make up for it by learning how to become a good teacher. I learnt from one of the best, Georges Doriot, the founder of the famous French business university, INSEAD. Doriot veered away from the subject at hand a lot. He would say things like, “You will get nowhere if you do not inspire people.” You will find during the course of this book that I veer away from the subject matter too, because any subject – whether business, religion or philosophy – does not happen in isolation. It is part of a system that lives within a system that lives within systems, and so part of the book is about the business environment in which small entrepreneurs find themselves, especially in rural areas where I’ve recently lived for almost three years.


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There I learnt that our future as a country will not be bright unless the rural areas offer opportunities to the people who live there either by choice, prescription or circumstance. I also talk about the education that our children are getting in far-flung places and how it prejudices them from getting employment or starting their own businesses, and I suggest a way to give them a fair chance.

In class, Doriot would sometimes talk about how to pick a wife or how to become a good husband. I don’t go down that road. Instead I talk about how to pick a good manager.

Business education is like sex education. No amount of instruction can replace the experience: the nervousness that comes with month end, “Will I be able to pay my staff this month?”; the embarrassment of phoning creditors to tell them that you can’t pay them that week, could you split the payment; and the further humiliation of phoning them again when you want to renegotiate their mercy. One needs to experience the excitement that comes with making your first profit and finally having some folding money. It is all so sweet, a big tick that says, yes, you did it.

You quickly learn in business that facts don’t move mountains. Faith does. So this book is a Testament of Hope that the black skin will no longer represent the colour of poverty; and that all Africans – regardless of their origin or hue – will create a great heritage that the world will love and respect. Africa, I predict, will become a lighthouse of success in our lifetime. As they say, if you don’t believe in miracles, then you are not a realist. After all, the last four letters in “African” are “I-CAN”.


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Section I Food and Freedom


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1

Shopping is Freedom

“The most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the

supreme judge of their lives.”– Stendahl

No one in the world is sexier than a woman pushing a shopping trolley. Anyone who disturbs that beauty through giving bad service must be shot. The idea that men and women are equal has fooled us into believing that on the shop floor women are equal to men. On the contrary. On the shop floor women are superior.

Unfortunately, the feminist revolution has banned men from human courtesies such as opening the door for a woman. Thankfully, the shop is a refuge for old romantics like me. No one will chastise a man for pulling out a shopping trolley for a lady or handing her a shopping basket. Good shopkeepers still let their customers go through first, especially women. The shop is the only place left in the world where a black man can still say, “Yes, Ma’am” to a woman of any colour and not be accused of behaving like a garden boy. I am sorry, I choose to stay with the courtesies that were taught to me by


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my schoolteachers, like Mrs Magubane, Messrs Msimang and Nhleko. How to treat a lady was part of the syllabus in the Zulu class right from Standard 4 until we finished high school. Passing a lady by as if you were passing a statue was the ultimate insult. Mrs Magubane was almost fanatical about “ladies first”.

I remembered her at the opening of a crèche owned by the African Self Help Association (ASHA) in Braamfischerville, Soweto. There was a buffet lunch. As I stood in the queue I noticed an elderly woman behind me. She was well into her late seventies, and wore a beautiful two-piece suit. She was one of the founders of ASHA, which ran the crèche. I gave her a plate, and asked her to go ahead.

“Why?” she asked.“Ladies first,” I replied.“Oh, you are one of those,” she began. “But I am too old

for that,” she continued.Instinctively I replied: “That there’s snow on the roof

doesn’t mean that the fireplace is broken.” “Ooh, I like that,” she replied slowly, clearly savouring

the moment. Nothing beats making someone happy. It is something that should be done at all times.

In her ground-breaking feminist book, The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer wrote, “The freedom I pleaded

“Ladies first,” I replied.“Oh, you are one of those,” she began.

“But I am too old for that,” she continued.

Instinctively, I replied: “That there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean

that the fireplace is broken.” “Ooh, I like

that,” she replied.


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Muzi Kuzwayo

for twenty years ago was the freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart.”

Long live Ms Greer!Ms Greer is the first to admit that her book does not

deal with poor women, but with women of the rich world whose oppression is seen by poor women as freedom. This book covers both worlds. It deals with the plight of every customer, rich and poor, woman and man, and everyone in between.

No one can claim to understand women. Even Frank Sinatra confessed, “I’m supposed to have a PhD on the subject of women, but the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I’m very fond of women. I admire them, but, like all men, I don’t understand them.” I truly do not understand why women merrily buy male-dominated products for their kitchens. Why is the multipurpose cleaner called Handy Andy and not Handy Mandy? Why Mr Min and not Mrs Min? Mr Muscle and not Ms Muscle? The bleach that many black women used for whitening their skins was called “He-Man”. Enough said.

I support women’s liberation, and like all ad men I do so willingly and without any reservations. Often women’s liberation, Germaine Greer observed, means that women are free when they serve their employers coffee at work but are slaves when they serve their husbands the same coffee in bed. Countless commercials portray families eating together, with mom in the kitchen cooking for her family. The freedom to shop and become a mother who feeds her family should be one of the greatest freedoms of all.

Shopping is for the liberation of men too, which is why Valentine’s Day will always thrive, as will Mother’s Day.


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Women’s Day is fast becoming commercialised too. Think about this. Your boss can tell you what to do, how to

do it, what to wear, and can even tell you whether to smile or not, but he or she can’t tell you what to buy. This proves once and for all that shopping is freedom. And I repeat, anyone who dares take away that freedom deserves the disdain reserved for miscreants such as Stalin and Verwoerd.

True, things don’t always go right in the supermarket or in any business for that matter. A maggot will find its way into a peach, and will remain there until some unlucky customer takes a bite. A fly will get into the fridge and die. It happened to me while I was running my Pick n Pay Family Store in Mthatha. The fridge was nicely packed and ready for the afternoon rush when I saw a dead fly inside. At the same time I noticed a customer coming towards me. I quickly picked up the dead fly with my hand and put it in my pocket.

The customer, she is KING, and must never be exposed to the ills of the world. After all, she reads plenty of it in the news. The supermarket should be her shrine of happiness. If, by a stroke of misfortune, the customer is exposed to ugliness, the situation must be rectified immediately. Why? Because at the end of the day she pays for everything, including salaries, taxes and the profits we make.


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Muzi Kuzwayo

2

You Pay for Your Freedom at the Till

Service is divine and the salary is the gratitude of the customer.

The farm hand who has to milk the cow has to be paid the minimum wage. He probably has a family to feed, and if he doesn’t get paid the minimum wage, his children may be doomed to being trapped in the same job. The man or woman who pasteurises the milk must also be paid the minimum wage. The driver who takes the milk to the dairy must also be paid the minimum wage. And so it goes.

The retailer must pay the shelf-packer the minimum wage. The cashier must be paid the minimum wage too. At the time of writing, farmers were paid between R2.80 and R3 for a litre of milk, yet the customer pays R9.95 for the same litre. Who gets the money? I haven’t even included the administrative staff and the labour consultants who have to help us navigate through the labour laws, processes and procedures that make us a world-class country. Well, if you want to be world-class you must pay, and if you want a


8


fair and just country then you must pay up. Senator Diana Mahabir-Wyatt of Trinidad and Tobago said, “Justice is like the Hilton Hotel: anybody who can afford it can get it.” So if we want the luxury of a Hilton Hotel for every citizen, then we must pay for everyone. In a capitalist society nothing is for free. Someone is paying for it. I have a slightly different view. All the people within the food supply chain must be paid the minimum wage and incentive bonuses, and who pays for all this? You, the customer, of course.

Brace yourself: food prices will always increase, and there are many reasons for it. First, greedy corporations, followed by wasteful customers, our desire for justice and freedom plus a cleaner and more sustainable environment.

Freedom, as you know, is not free. People pay for it with their lives and those who survive pay for it in cash. If you believe in the justice of the minimum wage, then pay up!

People should not be fired willy-nilly from work. We want everyone to have a fair hearing before they are fired. That is justice. So you pay for the protection of both the hard worker and the foot-dragger. You also pay for the protection of the staff member who gives you bad customer service. That’s justice, and damn right you should pay. Holding a low-paying job in South Africa is very costly. The baker in the supermarket has to wake up at dawn, and in many instances he or she has to walk a long distance to the taxi rank to stand in a long queue. In the rural areas it is worse. Many staff members are mugged or chased in the early hours of the morning. Palesa, who worked as a deli supervisor in Sterkspruit, told me how she was chased by men at 5:30 on a winter’s morning. She ran into some bushes where she lay down and hid herself. She arrived at work full of dust and her beautiful, expensive-to-maintain black hairstyle was covered in dead leaves that looked like curlers in her


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hair. In Mthatha, MaDlamini, who was a cleaner in my supermarket, was mugged and all her monthly pay taken away from her. There are many such stories and the bottom line is that workers must be protected. Some complain about the toughness of the labour laws of the country, but we can’t forget that we have a bad history that must not be repeated. These laws were enacted to guard the poor against the employer who wanted to perpetrate apartheid under a thin disguise. Contrary to popular opinion, the lazy person who saw freedom as his right to become a freeloader can be fired through our labour laws.

Ugliness has no colour. Some black employers can be exploitative too. To paraphrase my friend and fellow director at Spur, Mark Farrelly, “We must be dragged kicking and screaming back to ubuntu.” Add to that the malady of xenophobia that grips this country and see the conditions in which foreigners live and work; you cannot help but support the labour laws. Firing people should not be easy. Indeed it should be the last resort. The economy cannot grow if everyone has been fired. If you agree with me, then vote with your cash, and pay more at the till.

Thieves are also to blame for the rising cost of food. About one per cent is set aside by most retail companies for their actions. Shoplifters are not necessarily alone and outside the shop. Staff can be bad too. In Mthatha I had a young man who was studying auditing at the local university. He used to steal Ultra-Mel and drink it in the freezer where we kept chicken pieces because there were no cameras. This happened for quite some time. Then one day his colleagues decided to put him on the spot. Once he was inside the freezer they called me. They didn’t tell me what it was about. They kept me there for about 15 minutes by which time he


10


was freezing. Eventually he came out, unable to stay there any longer. He walked out, didn’t speak to anyone, left the shop and never came back to work.

Wasteful customers also increase the cost of food because they create a false demand in the market. According to research, about a third of food bought by customers is thrown away. Think about that: A third. Among the top culprits are bread, fruit and vegetables, as well as salads and yoghurts because they have short sell-by dates.

The sell-by date is a big swindle. In the past when bread was stale we toasted it. These days we throw it away. Milk was turned into sour milk to be enjoyed with uputhu or curry but these days it is poured down the drain. It was also turned into cheese or yoghurt. So if you want to keep prices low do your part: do not throw food away. It is sad to think of the fact that every Sunday millions of people around the world go to church to say the Lord’s Prayer and ask, “Give us this day our daily bread,” only to throw it away on Tuesday because it has passed its sell-by date.

If you believe in a greener planet but throw food away, you should be thrown into the same basket as polluters such as Union Carbide (whose gas leak killed more than 8 000 people and injured 558 125 in Bophal, India), food dumpers and other greedy food corporations. Perhaps the worst hypocrites are those who throw away meat. Millions of animals are killed in abattoirs around the world, and a third of them end up in landfills. What a shame.

The fact that people still throw food away shows that food

Wasteful customers are also to blame for

high food prices.


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prices aren’t high enough. I bet if milk was as expensive as a good Scotch whisky no one would be tempted to pour it down the drain.

Speculators have been blamed for riots that followed a spike in onion prices in India. They have also been blamed for high food prices in Egypt and Uganda. In the eyes of many people, companies such as Cargill, who trade in food commodities such as salt, sugar and grain have become the new “evil empires” and many want to see governments curb their influence. Indeed when speculators started getting into the age-old cotton business prices shot up overnight. My view is contrary – thank God for speculators, because they go where angels fear to trade, so to speak.

The best and the brightest shy away from farming because it doesn’t pay. Of course, if it paid bonuses similar to investment banking they would get into it in their thousands. The problem is, farming isn’t investment banking, and so it attracts little capital and perhaps even less talent. Because of this, those who do dare to invest in it have every reason to demand higher returns. Unless things change drastically, the world is facing a famine on an unimaginable scale. To avert it, food prices need to increase enough to attract new farmers and investment.

Some activists blame the increases in food prices on the cost of marketing. What do you think the people who sell Clover Milk and Parmalat eat? Do you think they do what they do for free? I am not talking about the people in the marketing department at those companies. I am talking

If you believe in a greener planet but

throw away food, you are no different

from greedy food companies.


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about the radio announcers who you listen to on your way to work. Khaya FM, Metro, 702, Ukhozi FM, East Coast Radio, etc., all make their money from advertising. They pay their staff from the money they make from selling advertising time. Clover or any other milk company must take their marketing cost into account when they put a price on the product. Everyone in the value chain must be paid the minimum wage, and the stars must be paid a star’s wage.

Perhaps the worst culprit when it comes to food prices is the government itself. Except for non-VAT foods such as pilchards and bread, 14 per cent of all food prices goes to the government as Value Added Tax. It is not likely to come to an end soon. We have a big government that employs many people in various departments, some of whom do absolutely nothing. Recently I called an old friend to catch up. He is a bright fellow who had been a successful journalist.

“How are you?” I asked him.“Good,” he replied. “I’ve got a new job.”“Congratulations!” I replied. “Where?”“In the Department of Arts and Culture,” he replied.“What do you do?” I asked.He laughed uncontrollably.I waited on the other side of the phone with great

anticipation.He muttered something I couldn’t understand, which

was buried in his laughter.“What?” I asked again.“I don’t know,” and he continued laughing. “Someone

said there was a job going here, and I thought this would be a good place to park while doing my master’s degree.”

Your taxes, and most probably VAT, pay his salary.The government has introduced different kinds of grants, such as the child grant that some people refer to as Imali


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Muzi Kuzwayo

yeqolo, literally implying that it is the money that the government pays you for carrying your own child on your back. Future generations will consider such grants their constitutional right. In order to pay for these grants, taxes and levies will be introduced and hiked to ensure that there is enough money to pay for them. Businesses will pass those to the consumers, and it all ends up at the till.

If we really want to reduce food prices to ensure that more people eat, we need to change our ways and stop throwing away food. It is better to give food away than throw it away, and the government needs to eliminate VAT on all foods.

To some activists, the cost of food is a simple matter. The culprits are known and should be lined up and shot. The reality, however, is different, but what would this world be without activists? Activists catapult us into a better world that our current minds cannot contemplate.


Muzi K

uzwayo

black man’s m

edicine

9 781431 405237

ISBN 978-1-4314-0523-7www.jacana.co.za

The title of this book comes from the African adage: ‘The Black Man’s Medicine is the White Man.’ It implies thatblack people won’t do anything right, unless there is a white man around, or that black people won’t be satisfi ed with anything unless it has been done by a white man.

This book is about economic freedom. It introduces theidea that SEE (self-economic empowerment) is the new BEE. Most importantly, it insists that although apartheid was a terrible and lamentable part of our shared history, it should no longer defi ne our present challenges and myriad opportunities for success. It is about moving from mud and dust, through the boardroom and on to a new Africa, where people work hard and life is decent.

Kuzwayo’s self-professed goal is to help us see our own, familiar truths di� erently, just in case they have passed their sell-by date, and to question the rightness of our rituals and to test the accuracy of our adages. Is the black man’s medicine really the white man?

Black Man’s Medicine is the third book written by Muzi Kuzwayo and it follows the roaring successes of Marketing Through Mud and Dust and There’s a Tsotsi in the Boardroom. It will challenge each and every South African to re-evaluate how we think about our roles in South Africa today.

9 781431 405237

Black Man's Medicine FA_6.indd 2 2012/08/02 9:39 PM

Black Man's Medicine

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