So how do you feel about the year ahead? Good, bad, indifferent? Me, I’m not too sure. What I do know though is that if we don’t get the ANC Youth League President Julius Malema off our front pages – and if we don’t get President Jacob Zuma out of the bedroom and behind his desk where he can concentrate on running, growing and leading this country - it’s going to be an extremely boring year. Sure the World Cup is going to inject a spirit of excitement into the country – but that’s only for a month. Already the organizers have realised there’s something lacking and are trying to generate some modicum of excitement in the build-up to the event such as urging everyone to wear their overpriced Bafana-Bafana jerseys on a Friday. But think of it. All we seem to have read of and heard about this year from our so called leaders is Jacob Zuma fathering more kids and wedding more wives, and Julius Malema ranting and raving about everything that comes his way. And now he’s in the middle of another storm having to justify his multi-million Rand lifestyle while pretending to care about the poor. South Africa is being dominated by the shenanigans of these two men and there are so much more important and urgent things to concentrate on. There is so much work to be done and there are people willing and able to do the work but the leadership is just not there.

Take the transport industry as an example. It is a well known fact that road transport has played the most amazing role over the past years in keeping the wheels of this country’s economy turning in the face of the collapse of Transnet’s rail freight services. This is endorsed by the Barloworld Logistics supplychainforesight 2010 survey, the results of which were announced in February, which highlight the fact that 80% of the companies surveyed stated they currently move less than 10% of their goods by rail. But then, 46% of those companies said that if adequate rail capacity was available, they would move over 20% of their goods by rail. So there you have it. It’s not a reluctance to use rail that is forcing goods to road. Rather is a lack of service delivery by rail that has done it. And while this reality exists, what are we looking at? A political bun-fight within the ranks around the appointment of a new Transnet chief who will get rail functioning again. The focus of our leadership is just so much on the wrong things. And also, because of all this, we get the uninformed side-show proposals such as, for example, dropping the axle limit from 9 000kg to 8 000kg so as to save secondary roads which are supposedly being destroyed by trucks. And yet, the true story behind the destruction of the roads is that they have never been maintained properly. The money goes elsewhere. And many of those trucks would not be on those roads if the rail service was functioning adequately. It’s all about service delivery and while we have Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema deflecting accent away from what needs to be done to really grow this country, we are going to go nowhere.

There were many other pertinent points highlighted in the survey and when I asked whether the results would be presented to anyone in Government so as to let them know the real needs out there, I was told ‘no’. This irks me because the Government should know what some 400 executives from some of South Africa’s leading companies are thinking. This is especially true given that at the top end, 23% of the survey sample comprised of multinational businesses with revenues over R5-billion and at the bottom, 23% were businesses with less than R100-million in revenues. That’s a powerful segment of the working economy and their voices need to be  heard in Government circles – and their needs acted on - because all we seem to be hearing from Government is the senseless and inane utterings of Julius Malema and the wailing of Zuma’s kids. My point is, the days of politics and business being separate are over and it is the politicians who have brought this about. The words and actions of politicians on business viability and growth is direct and the PW Botha days of telling businessmen to stay out of politics is gone. I know businessmen are scared to criticize Government for fear of losing out on lucrative tenders but it seems from recent reports that Julius Malema is getting a whack of those tenders anyway so what has business got to lose. South Africa is not just about the ANC and the unions. It is about all of us. The problem is, it is only the voices of the former that are being heard. Business is deathly quite and that scares me. Trucking grows or dies in line with a country’s growth or death. Which is it going to be? Happy New Year.