After the Bell: The Manchester United theory of the Cabinet reshuffle

7 Mar 2023

On Monday night President Cyril Ramaphosa finally announced a Cabinet reshuffle. To me, it was significantly underwhelming. We are Manchester United and two-nil down; we are Jana Novotná at one set all, blithely unaware of what is about to happen next.

As every soccer fan knows, Liverpool inflicted the most extraordinary, humiliating defeat on Manchester United this weekend, putting seven goals past their old rival. The defeat is unprecedented in a whole range of different ways; it was United’s heaviest Premier League defeat and Liverpool’s most decisive defeat of United, topping their 7-1 victory in 1895 when the Red Devils were still known as Newton Heath. And so on.

As my podcast mate, investment banker Mark Barnes, commented in our latest Stand Up! Business podcast (please do listen and send any feedback you like), he wasn’t sure at first why Liverpool had decided to play a rugby game.

It was a big day in sport, but an even bigger day in analogy. As Daily Maverick’s sports editor, Craig Ray, commented, there is a question about how and why mere defeat often transmogrifies into complete disaster. It’s a question psychologists have examined in detail because it says so much about people’s mental states and the human condition. At some point, you just want it all to stop, and for everyone and everything to just go away.

One of the most studied examples was the 1993 Wimbledon women’s tennis final between Steffi Graf and Jana Novotná. Novotná was leading and seemed to have the game wrapped up. Then she double-faulted a few times, after which she fell to pieces, losing every one of the final five games and the match. Everything went wrong. It was hard to watch.

After the match, Novotná was accused of “choking”, a rather unpleasant characterisation. But according to the psychological theories expounded at the time, it was more complicated than simply a failure of motivation.

What was happening in her head is, of course, hard to fathom. But according to one theory, it wasn’t that she “lost concentration”, but rather that she was concentrating too much. We tend to learn in stages, and these stages are underpinned by different knowledge structures. As a result, everything that was smooth, unconscious and deceptively controlled suddenly floods into the forefront of your mind, and you inadvertently take a step backwards from all those stages of learning over many years of training. Instead of concentrating on the things that matter, you have to go back to concentrating on things you learned years ago, like your footwork and your racquet position, stuff that previously you would have done unconsciously.

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Novotná rarely discussed the 1993 final, but when she did, she blamed the loss on the failure of her game plan, not the failure of her coping mechanisms. It was almost as though the admission of mental fatigue would have been an acknowledgement of embarrassing personal failure, rather than an impersonal tactical flaw. Yet it was pretty obvious to everyone else that was what had happened.

So, does this perhaps remind you of anything? On Monday night President Cyril Ramaphosa finally announced a Cabinet reshuffle. To me, it was significantly underwhelming. Of course, there was an acknowledgement of the electricity crisis — more than acknowledgement, the positive creation of a new ministry to deal with the crisis — and a whole string of other personnel changes. And yet, the President himself suggested it was more of a holding action before the election next year when all of the deck chairs would again need rearranging.

For all that, he seemed to glide over the real and deeper roots of the crisis (and not just the growing evidence of outrageous corruption and ministerial involvement in Eskom, but elsewhere in society). The key ministries of education, health, police, mining, finance, trade and industry, and public enterprises remain in the hands of the existing ministers. And in all of those ministries, the track records of the ministers concerned, with the possible exception of finance, have come up short; they have perhaps “choked”.

The lack of real redress demonstrates only a partial acknowledgement of the specific nature and extent of the existing crisis and little awareness of the broader issues at hand. And ironically, the day after the Cabinet reshuffle, Stats SA announced a GDP contraction that was three times worse than even the worst pre-announcement prediction. We are heading for a recession … again.

We are Manchester United and two-nil down; we are Jana Novotná at one set all, blithely unaware of what is about to happen next. DM/BM

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