Dhlamini: Why all I want for Xmas is devolution

Key topics:South Africa’s diversity complicates national consensus on policy.Black Prosperity Creation could boost local development and reduce poverty.Decentralisation allows policy experimentation without racial conflicts..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Mpiyakhe Dhlamini*.How can a diverse society like South Africa reach a consensus on any policy issue? The issue of diversity matters more than we are sometimes willing to admit. Former leader and founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, often talked about how important it was to get everyone to speak the same language in his country. This helps build trust for difficult reforms.In South Africa today, the most widely spoken first language is IsiZulu, with 24-25% of speakers. India has 40% of the country speaking Hindi as a first language and Kuan Yew believed it would struggle to pull in one direction and compete with China which is more linguistically homogenous. Under this metric, South Africa must really be in a difficult position.But things are not as bad as they may seem. Firstly, the ANC was once able to unite a majority of the country and get them to vote for their party for 25 years. They did this through African nationalism (creating a black identity to supersede the more realistic tribal/ethnic identities that preceded it) and once that was done, uniting that group against a common enemy which was the discriminatory governments that South Africa had from its founding until 1994..Read more:.Woode-Smith calls for federal autonomy: SA’s need for decentralised governance.It helped that the government decided to classify all “natives” under one umbrella. This is also why the ANC’s racial policies are so contentious today, the party knows that the very reason for its existence would evaporate if race were completely removed from policy making. It also means the ANC has a very real incentive to ensure racial inequalities remain.So, the first strategy to get political reform would be to copy the ANC playbook, to use race but in a positive sense. To produce policies that are labelled with race e.g. Black Prosperity Creation (BPC), but these policies are actually just meant to create prosperity for the country, starting with the poorest, which would necessarily be mostly black people. An ideal BPC policy would be to make the poorest areas in the country (the former homelands, townships, informal settlements) into special economic zones with low to no taxes, no regulations except for environment and safety regulations, decentralised administration.This would serve to attract capital into these places from people of all races, while at the same time making everyone who wants to develop black people feel good about BPC because these areas are undeniably largely populated by black people. This would also improve the racial diversity of these areas and help to do away with their role as racial strongholds for parties like the ANC. Of course, a few Karens (both male and female variety, Karen is a non-racial, non-gendered term) would complain about gentrification, but the policy would demonstrably reduce poverty.As credible as the polls are that show that South Africans do not care about race, in the margins they do. People have a fear that if you remove race from policy, then you no longer recognise the disadvantage they suffer from because of their race, basically the black middle-class and those who aspire to join that middle class have this lingering fear that removing race, specifically employment equity, would lead to them losing their corporate jobs.With a policy like BPC, we can offer these people an enticing carrot: you can stay in the township or rural area you grew up in and it will develop into what you need it to be for you to be prosperous, no more exorbitant transport costs, no more expensive rent and other prices, plus you can invest in your community and build wealth too. And in principle, this policy meets constitutional muster because it focuses on disadvantaged areas and not the race of the person, despite the name.Of course, some people who oppose BBBEE will be hung up on the name, they will refuse to see the forest and instead focus on the trees. There is another strategy that can be pursued in a country such as ours; the strategy of decentralisation.For this to work, we need to ensure the decentralised units are relatively homogenous. The current provinces were not created with this in mind. Of course, provinces like KZN are homogenous (with 80% of the population speaking IsiZulu), but on the other end of the spectrum you have a province like Gauteng which can be considered a microcosm of South Africa..Read more:.South Africa’s complicated democratic legacy: Andrew Kenny.However, even with this imperfection, you would still have the dynamic of policy competition leading to policy experimentation and hopefully convergence to the best set of policies. The advantage of this approach is that you do not need to label it by race and the fights that inevitably arise when race is brought up will not be there.Both ideas could work, either as standalone ideas or as a combination. But what is clear is that we are in an intolerable situation with so many young people living in poverty. This is not just a drain on the fiscus, it is a significant risk to the stability of the country, we already see violent gangs popping up all over the country to fill the gap that productive employment would normally fill. Something needs to be done soon, and it is no use making policy that does not account for the diverse country that we are..*Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a libertarian, writer, programmer and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.

Dhlamini: Why all I want for Xmas is devolution

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