Eusebius McKaiser is a political and social analyst at the Centre for the Study of Democracy. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Business Day. He also hosts a weekly politics and morality talk show on Talk Radio 702. He writes widely in the local and international press (M&G, Sunday Times, Sunday Independent, Newsweek International, BBC Focus on Africa, The New Republic, Financial Mail, etc.) on issues of SA politics and wider ethical debate. He also regularly briefs corporate clients privately, including investment houses, on political risk assessment about the SA political environment in order to inform operational and strategic business decision-making by helping clients understand how their business may be affected by the dynamics, and policy debates, emanating from the body politic. He is also available as a keynote speaker to issues of political and ethical concern.
Eusebius is a renowned debater and public speaker with excellent international experience and achievement. He has attended six World Universities Debate Championships. He has been ranked as one of the top twenty debaters in the world, representing the Oxford Debate Union. He is a former national SA debate champion, having also been best speaker for two years at the SA championships. He has also coached debate, critical thinking and public speaking extensively in South Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Eusebius continues to give extensive one-to-one executive leadership coaching, aimed specifically at improving the capacity of managers to communicate more effectively within the work environment and the corporate space more broadly. He offers a similar service aimed at larger groups, such as middle management, who seek to improve their skill-set through more effective communication and improved critical thinking. His experience as a former associate at McKinsey and Company, combined with his debate expertise, enable him to fulfil these roles with unique excellence.
Eusebius is completing a PHD in moral philosophy, focusing on questions of racism, racist beliefs and moral responsibility, at Oxford University. He also lectures in logic and argumentation.
In his spare time, he is working towards the completion of a manuscript about his high school reflections, "Confessions of a cultural schizophrenic." This personal memoir is a reflection on his experiences as part of the first intake of black kids into newly created, multicultural schools, so-called (former) Model-C schools, during the early 90s. He also speaks to these issues of culture and identity.
1. Left, Right & Centre: who is really in charge of economic policy in the Zuma government? What are the implications for business?!
Tension within the ruling tri-partite alliance has never been greater. Players on the left had hoped that a post-Polokwane, post-Mbeki government would abandon neo-liberal, free market economic principles, bluntly. Those alliances leaders with business interests, by contrast, jostled to ensure broad policy continuity with former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel’s centrist economic thinking. In the aftermath of Minister Pravin Gordhan’s first budget speech, Eusebius McKaiser unpicks the issues dominating the most important element of political and policy debate in SA presently: has the left’s influence on economic debate been thwarted, decisively? At any rate, what is the dominant view on macroeconomic policy at present? What lurks beneath the budget and behind the closed doors where policy debate happens? What, going forward, are the prospects for change, if any, in fiscal policy? And what are the implications of all this for the cost – financially, and politically - of doing business in contemporary SA?
2. State of the Opposition: prospects for deepening SA’s democracy with more effective opposition
Despite the fact that the ruling ANC-alliance faces a great number of challenges (internal leadership battles; near-intractable policy debates; a reduced majority in 8 provinces in the 2009 elections; growing social unrest due to poor service delivery), the opposition continues to share a relatively small slice of the SA electoral pie. Why? What are the symptoms, and underlying problems, besetting the opposition in SA? Crucially, what can reverse the fate of the opposition?
In this fascinating talk, Eusebius McKaiser analyses both the endogenous and exogenous factors that explain the ‘State of the Opposition.’ Before presenting insights on ways forward, he first articulates why we should all – ordinary citizens, tri-partite alliance supporters, businesspersons – care about the state of opposition politics. It is, in bottom-line terms, in the collective self-interest of all societal stakeholders that the opposition’s fate improves. This talk is therefore as much a socio-political analysis of contemporary SA politics and, quite bluntly, a demonstration to business of why it should care about the state of the opposition.
McKaiser ends the talk with unique analysis on the prospects of greater co-operation among opposition parties, and reveals his own take on the leadership and public face that such an outfit would need in order to succeed, as well as the ideological and policy packages that would enable it to give the ruling alliance a genuine run for its electoral money. Anyone interested in the prospects of a deepened SA democracy has to be exposed to this fascinating talk.
3. Twenty years later: an assessment of the democratic health of Mandela’s South Africa
It has been twenty years since Nelson Mandela has been released from prison. This occasions an assessment of the overall health of democratic SA. It is in the interest of investors to know just how healthy the local democratic system is. It is also, on a more personal level, important for ordinary citizens to have a substantive understanding of the health of their country in order to take informed decisions about their own futures.
With these aims in mind, Eusebius McKaiser outlines a fascinating set of criteria for what counts as a ‘healthy democracy’. He explains the importance of both formal and less formal criteria. For example, formal criteria such as regular, free and fair elections and the existence of an apparently independent judiciary are crucial signifiers of democratic health. Yet, deeper but less formal characteristics need to exist also, including a mature democratic culture, evidence of which includes general and genuine respect for judicial independence, mature and robust political debate, the achievement of substantive equality and social justice, etc. Mckaiser, in this thought-provoking talk, goes on to reveal his own assessment of SA’s institutional and political cultural well-being in light of these indicators of democratic health.
This talk both inspires in its honest celebration of the democratic strengths of SA while setting out practical examples of challenges lurking beneath the headlines that will determine the country’s long-term democratic well-being.
4. Affirmative Action and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment: time to let the sun set on these redress policies?
There are few issues in democratic SA that evokes as much as emotion and debate as do affirmative action and black economic empowerment. Sadly, this same fact explains why anecdote is often substituted for fact in assessments of the relative successes and failures of laws and policies aimed at redressing past imbalances. Worse, the principled arguments (on both sides of the affirmative action coin) often do injustice to both defences of, and objections to, these policies.
Eusebius McKaiser, who has written extensively on questions of racial identity and social justice, cuts through these weaknesses in the public debate in a talk that is not only provocative but also very informative. First, he analyses the most recent data on the application of these policies and show that both the successes and failures of these interventions have been misdescribed. Second, he talks to the moral and political question of whether or not these policies are just and necessary. Finally, he asks what it is that big business, in particular, can do to comply with these policies in a way that does not just avoid legal penalties but in fact enhances a company’s business profile and bottom-line.
This talk is a unique and fascinating demonstration by an excellent speaker and prolific political analyst of how the morally right thing (affirmative action) need not be in opposition with the imperative of creating economic efficiencies and ensuring economic growth.
5. Are there South Africans? Is Tutu’s rainbow nation dead? An analysis of the state of race relations in post-democratic SA & reflections on the possibility of a national identity.
South Africans have fond memories of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Rainbow Nation motif from the mid-1990s. These memories are interlinked with equally nostalgic reminiscences about Rugby World Cup glory in 1995 fresh in the wake of reasonably successful inaugural democratic elections the year before. Yet, some 15 years later, there is a quiet national identity crisis developing. A cluster of questions sum up this identity crisis: does a common national South African identity exist? Do we have a common set of overlapping moral values we all subscribe to? What is the state of race relations – are we more divided than ever before or is multiculturalism now well-established?
In a very challenging talk, McKaiser speaks to the issues of national identity and the state of race relations in the current socio-political environment. Pulling no punches, McKaiser speaks to, and diagnoses, the irrational anxieties South Africans have about finding, desperately, a common national identity.
He speaks eloquently to the impossibility of sameness and why a national common identity is incoherent. But, in an uplifting and surprising coda to the main talk, he outlines the beauty of embracing difference and diversity as an alternative to obsessing about commonalities. This makes the talk an excellent workshop on diversity, including diversity in the workplace, and how to negotiate differences within that space.
The talk provides a unique take on the state of group relations in SA and a new understanding of how to interpret the liberal democratic system we have adopted. Differences need not be inherently divisive. Or so argues McKaiser in this fresh take on questions of identity in contemporary SA.
