Johannesburg was convulsed with riots this week that reportedly targeted African immigrants – part of a persistent pattern of anti-immigrant violence that has been part of South African life since the end of apartheid.
It makes little sense. The day-to-day economic woes of the majority of South Africans cannot be laid at the feet of African migrants. The source of the fault lies a lot closer to home.
It’s no great mystery why SA is still poor. Economists, international institutions like the IMF, and local politicians have been explaining the country’s economic struggles for decades. In short:
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- There is a lack of human capital due to a history of underinvestment in education – and education reforms of the last 20 years have failed to close the gap due to delivery issues, including accountability problems and a lack of skilled educators;
- Many industries are monopolistic or oligopolistic and incumbents use dirty tactics to keep markets uncompetitive, with negative effects on productivity, growth, and innovation;
- Regulations around capital ownership, labour, and government procurement have unintended negative consequences in the context of SA’s level of development – our limited formal sector cannot sustain the costs imposed by regulation (especially given poor productivity);
- Infrastructure is inadequate, badly maintained, and poorly connected, leaving many densely populated areas almost completely isolated from wealthier areas, which makes economic linkages hard to forge;
- Policy uncertainty and governance failures at the national and provincial level have disincentivised investment and encouraged people to pursue wealth through cronyism and rent-seeking rather than through the creation of productive enterprises.
If South Africans want to know why they are still poor more than 25 years after the end of apartheid, this is why. And everyone in power knows it, or should – if they don’t, they have wilfully chosen not to.
What’s more, those currently in power not only know it, they actually want to do something about it. Ramaphosa gets it and his plans since taking power have all been aimed at dealing with these issues.
Unfortunately, the Jo’burg riots highlight a simple fact that is holding back efforts to make the changes we need: Ordinary South Africans don’t understand the problems. If they did, they wouldn’t be burning down the small stores owned by Nigerian ex-pats, they would instead be marching the streets demanding an end to the corruption and mismanagement that has doomed us to decline for the last ten years.
This is not a uniquely South African problem.
In the UK, domestic austerity programmes and failures in the British social system have been blamed, bizarrely, on the European Union, with the result that instead of trying to build a society that actually works for everyone, the Brits are firmly focused on Brexit to the exclusion of all other policymaking and have been for three years.
In the US, the declining fortunes of middle-income America have been blamed on China, rather than on the rent-seeking, finance-dominated structure of the US economy and the failure of the nation to invest in up-skilling its citizens in time for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
In the UK and the US, this misdirection of public anger is leading to the pursuit of policies (the US/China trade war and all the other US trade wars, no-deal Brexit) that will not only damage the international order and make the whole world poorer, but also will not actually fix the problems causing all the anger in the first place.
The same would be true in SA. If the country kicked out every single person who wasn’t born in South Africa, its economic situation wouldn’t magically improve. On the contrary, it would worsen substantially. We would have fewer skilled workers and small business owners, and newly hostile relationships with our key African trading partners. Plus, we would still have all the problems listed above, none of which have anything to do with the national origin of the owner of the local spaza shop.
The world is in desperate need of leaders who will explain to their citizens the actual, real, hard choices that they face. Instead, in many countries, we have leaders who are quick to blame nebulous “enemies of the people” – the Chinese, the Democrats, the deep state, the EU, the immigrants – for domestic failures.
This is a strategy that was effectively deployed in such exemplars as Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia/Serbia. It’s not only likely to result in violence and human rights abuses, it is also futile and solves nothing. Plus, once those demons are out of the box, there’s no easy way to put them back. It took World War 2 to deal with the last time a rich country took the “enemies of the people” approach to domestic problems.
And this, gentle reader, is why Alec Hogg is right. South Africa, despite its litany of problems, has somehow been lucky enough to avoid a leader who passes the buck by blaming groups like foreigners or whites for the country’s problems. Instead, Cyril Ramaphosa is actually proposing policies that will deal with the real issues.
Unfortunately, the ANC has done a p***-poor job of explaining the issues to ordinary South Africans. It has failed to go into the parts of the country where things are bad and tell people why their lives are so disappointing and what must be done to fix things. Worse, it has allowed those who want to whip up hatred to fill this gap with fake news stories about evil Zimbabweans. This is extraordinarily dangerous.
If SA’s leadership fails to unite in telling people the absolute truth about why things are bad and what must be done to fix them, hatred will spread. First, they’ll come for the foreigners. Then they’ll come for other minorities. And eventually, the enemies of the people will be anyone who does not agree.
