South Africa’s false transformation: Chris Patterson
Key topics:
Fake transformation policies deepen unemployment, poverty and poor services
Race-based empowerment fails, IRR calls for non-racial alternatives
Real growth needs jobs, infrastructure, property rights and investment
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By Chris Patterson*
South Africa is a place not of grievance, but of opportunity.
I’ve been reading Tony Leon’s Hope & Fear: Reflections of a Democrat and though I wasn’t yet even a thought in my parents’ mind when the book appeared in the late 1990s, I can “feel” the vision, the hope, the potential and freedom that the new South Africa embodied in that period.
But as time has gone by, as dreams have been sandblasted by reality, the future promised by politicians has gone pear-shaped for many. The hopes of millions now lie dashed.
South Africans are sick and tired of fake transformation. The economy is scraping by, and millions are unemployed. Those lucky enough to have a job are living from pay-check to pay-check. Millions are reliant on the government for a social grant falling in value with each passing year. This is no way to live.
Victims of fake transformation
Fake transformation, however, is not victimless. It impacts mothers and their newborn children, unable to access the vital resources they need in hospitals, left to sleep on concrete floors due to a lack of beds. Also toddlers, whose parents are unable to secure access to quality Early Childhood Development Centres, let down by educators who are simply incapable of imparting knowledge. The child then goes to a substandard public school without working lights, no books to write in, no stationery to use. Their parents can’t afford these basics, because they’re two of the nearly 12 million South Africans either unemployed or discouraged work-seekers. The government has wasted the money meant for no-fee schools on a useless court case for a conflict in the Middle East, to name but one example.
By the time the child reaches grade 4 – due to the lack of teachers’ pedagogical skills – they will be one of the 81% of Grade 4’s who cannot read for meaning. The teachers at their schools also can’t do basic arithmetic, because their education was also substandard. If the child makes it to matric – nearly half a million South African children have not in the last year – they will be very lucky to have the opportunity to access tertiary education.
Here, the child will be a bystander in the battle universities are having between merit- or race-based education.
Do universities appoint their lecturers or professors on merit, or the colour of their skin?
This is a question the IRR has asked of all 26 public universities, which either did not respond to our detailed questions, or claimed that they were simply obliged to follow the laws and regulations of the Republic.
Remember, the basis of racial classification in South Africa is the immoral Population Registration Act of 1950, reincarnated in the form of the supposedly “democratic” Employment Equity Act of 1998.
IRR polling has routinely shown over the years that South Africans prefer non-racial empowerment in the form of tax-funded healthcare, schooling and housing vouchers over race-based empowerment schemes like Black Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity. These have done nothing to reduce unemployment, inequality or poverty – the South African Government’s so-called three most pressing crises.
If children successfully make it out of university and into the job market, congratulations. They are now three times more likely to find a job than their matric-only counterparts. But the mountain they face may erode all the achievements. “A mountain?”, you may ask. Race-based employment equity targets imposed by the government.
Having spent years on a government pension eroded by the lack of economic growth, parents are still worrying about their children’s welfare. This is no way to live.
It is cruel, undignified and demeaning.
South Africans – from Cape Town to Musina, from Saldanha Bay to Kosi Bay, from Cape Agulhas to the Kgalagadi – have been deceived and had their hopes dashed by the broken promises of fake transformation.
The State of the Nation Addresses of Mbeki, Motlanthe, Zuma and Ramaphosa are the height of national deception.
While I do enjoy the pomp and circumstance of the occasion, I – like millions across the country – am tired of being lied to.
Again, to illustrate the wastefulness of fake transformation, government will spend nearly R2 billion on fake transformation this year. This money could have:
Covered annual schooling for ~ 326,700 learners.
Funded salaries for ~17,800 teachers.
Provided full annual healthcare services to ~710,000 people.
Employed ~ 4,000 doctors.
Built ~7,700 BNG (RDP) houses.
Built ~ 4,600 social housing units.
Funded the construction of ~ 60 km of new, tarred rural roads.
Funded an additional 374,000 child support grants for a year.
Funded an additional 146,000 old age grants for a year.
This is an example of the transformation that government could embark on. But it is certainly not the best.
The real national dialogue
The best form of real transformation lies in the non-racial, job-creating, pro-growth, bold, fair, and future-focused alternative: the IRR’s Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged (EED).
Deputy President Paul Mashatile recently claimed that the government had “mastered the art of policy making, but the policies are not coming alive where they are needed”.
Mr Deputy President, it is the result of decades of cadre deployment and a systemic hollowing out of the capacity of the state to deliver quality services. It could also be that these are pro-poverty policies aimed at redistributing wealth amongst the elite, rather than creating the upward social mobility that all 65 million South Africans desire.
It is an indictment on the ANC that it recently resorted to calling on BEE beneficiaries to “defend the gains of democracy”.
If race-based affirmative action worked, the ANC wouldn’t need to call on the few BEE beneficiaries and instead would have been able to rely on a groundswell of public support. Instead, they remain deathly quiet, unwilling to out themselves to a public that is increasingly fed-up with the dreadful outcomes of race-based empowerment.
It is also worth noting that less than ten years into democracy – in 2001 – a majority of South Africans believed that unemployment, i.e. the lack of jobs, was the biggest problem facing the country.
Twenty-four years on, the solution remains the same: sustainable economic growth, grounded in strong property rights, investment in infrastructure and job creation.
South Africans deserve the real transformation that only a rising tide of economic growth can produce, creating opportunity, freedom and prosperity.
*Chris Patterson - A student of politics, Chris Patterson is a researcher at the Institute of Race Relations. He enjoys a good political thriller, and has an avid interest in photography as well as reading. The internet is a good friend, too.