President Cyril Ramaphosa’s comments in parliament suggest he misperceives where the real alienation, resentment and despair in our society reside, and why.
One of the most encouraging statements by President Ramaphosa in recent times was his saying that he was hesitant to use the word ‘minorities’ in describing one or another portion of South African society.
But the implications of his reasoning are less encouraging.
To be fair, the president was responding to a question by Dr C P Mulder of the Freedom Front Plus on his, Ramaphosa’s, perception of his constitutional role as head of State in promoting ‘the unity of the nation’ and in ‘stopping the current alienation of minorities’.
Thus, the idea of alienation being the condition of minorities was not Ramaphosa’s so much as Mulder’s.
But the president’s reply is nevertheless revealing.
‘If it is true that there are “minorities” that are alienated,’ he said, ‘then we need to find out why, (although) I would hesitate to use the word “minorities”; there are groups of people who feel they are alienated.’
It could be argued that we are moving in the right direction when the president of the country hesitates in using a word that effectively partitions what we know is an indivisible society, whose interests are aligned and no part of which could seriously contemplate going it alone.
But the less heartening insights arise from the contradictions in the rest of Ramaphosa’s reply, central to which is the obsession with race as the lynchpin of African National Congress policy making.
The president began with a plain and creditable setting out of objectives few South Africans would quibble with, and most celebrate: the constitution ‘calls on all of us to heal the divisions of the past, establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights, ensure every citizen is equally protected by the law and free the potential of each person’. The ‘achievement of national unity depends on the advancement of equality in all spheres of public and private life’. And ‘all South Africans must have the same rights and opportunities regardless of race, gender, sex, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.’
At this point, his reply veered into arguable territory when he claimed that ‘since 1994, we have put in place policies and programmes to safeguard these rights and advance these opportunities’.
Elaborating on this theme, he went on to say: ‘Given the huge inequality in our society, which is mainly defined along lines of race and gender, the promotion of national unity requires that we take measures to advance those South Africans who have been disadvantaged by unfair discrimination.
‘That is why we have directed public resources towards the poor, why we have implemented employment equity and broad-based black economic empowerment, why we have massively expanded access to education, and why we have introduced a National Minimum Wage.’
In his own experience, he said, ‘the overwhelming majority of South Africans, regardless of race, class or gender, support the measures we have undertaken – in line with the Constitution – to address the inequalities of our past and to affirm those who were previously disadvantaged’.
It is against the measures taken, and the supposed popular support for them, that the irony of Ramaphosa’s perception that only ‘groups of people’ feel alienated is stark.
The irony contains three elements. The first is the ANC’s reliance on apartheid-era race classification – rather than the actual disadvantage and inequality that need addressing – to determine ‘empowerment’ interventions. The second is that this approach, by definition, delineates the very (racial) ‘minorities’ the president is hesitant to name.
But the third is really the most pressing, which is that the real alienation in South Africa affects not small groups of people, but the very citizens, an undoubted majority, most in need of empowerment, better education and incomes. And, as the Institute of Race Relations has long argued, as long as the bulk of society is unable to participate fully in the economy and in improving their own lives, all of society is handicapped.
The ANC’s attachment to apartheid-era race classification is at the heart of the problem.
In a report earlier this year, IRR head of policy research Dr Anthea Jeffery noted that, just two years ago, the South African Communist Party (SACP) itself ‘warned that the “intra-African inequality” which Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) had fostered was “the main contributor to South Africa’s extraordinarily high Gini coefficient” of income inequality. Added the party: “Enriching a select BEE few via share deals…or (worse still) looting public property…in the name of broad-based black empowerment is resulting in….increasing poverty for the majority, increasing racial inequality, and persisting mass unemployment.”’
Yet, it persists. And among its characteristics, Jeffery pointed out, BEE ‘overlooks the vital contributions that business makes to gross fixed capital investment, foreign direct investment, employment, salaries, tax revenues, export earnings, and innovation. These are by far the most important inputs the private sector can make to economic growth, rising prosperity, and the upward mobility of all South Africans. Yet the BEE scorecard ignores them all.’
Thus, the poor are denied real relief from the disadvantages they labour under, and business is lumbered with punitive codes that undermine its contribution.
This at a time when South Africa’s debt-to-GDP ratio is approaching 60% (state debt, including that of state-owned enterprises, having doubled); the growth rate is below 1% and the country has an unemployment rate of 39%, leaving some 10 million people without jobs. IRR analysts calculate that, on average, South Africa has created in the region of 100 000 net new jobs per point of GDP growth per year, which means the hope of eroding unemployment numbers at current growth rates is impossible.
They argue that the new minimum wage policy, political messaging on decent work, and the advance of technological innovation will deter the employment of younger and less experienced people to a greater extent than ever before.
While cadre deployment and the woefully ineffective approach to employment equity continue, there are no prospects of education reform on which young people must depend for access to the middle class.
Despite competitive levels of spending on schooling, the quality of maths and science education ranks among the worst in the world, and the output of the school system is likely to maintain high levels of poverty and inequality. My analyst colleagues point out that ‘for every hundred children entering the school system, only 5 are expected to graduate from high school with a 50% pass in maths. Given the changing structure of GDP, the remaining 95 will be hard-pressed to ascend to or maintain a middle-class standard of living.’
What’s more, the number of pupils writing maths in matric has fallen over a decade, while the proportion passing with 50% has remained at around 21%. The education offered, therefore, is deteriorating, and this despite the vast investment in corporate social upliftment and other programmes tasked specifically with improving the quality of maths education in schools.
Not surprisingly, key investor and business confidence indices tell the story of an environment that is failing to win enough trust to secure the huge injection of investment on which lifting the growth rate hinges. This sentiment will not change without significant structural reform, while implementation of policies the ANC is committed to – such as expropriation without compensation, prescribed assets, and the National Health Insurance scheme – will likely trigger deeper declines.
Remarkably, despite deliberate racial incitement by some politicians, activists and others, IRR polls continue to show that a majority of South Africans hold moderate opinions and agree on what needs to be done to solve the country’s problems.
But those in power need to absorb these truths, too.
We could not agree more with Ramaphosa’s final sentiment – ‘We are all one nation and let us begin to act as one nation’ – but would only urge his government to live up to it, not just in its platitudes, but its policy making, where it counts.
Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations.
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