That the international coverage of chaos in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng was superseded by the assassination of Haiti’s president was not totally random. Liberation movements don’t easily spawn demanding citizens.
The large island that Christopher Columbus named ‘Little Spain’ eventually ousted its French and Spanish colonial masters. Later, the island was divided into two countries, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The Dominican Republic’s policies have delivered a large and expanding middle class with its citizens’ incomes being vastly greater than those of their island-sharing neighbours. Haiti’s perpetually ineffective governance has rendered it the poorest of the Americas’ 35 countries.
Revolutions and liberation movements are inherently inconclusive. The 18th century American, French and Haitian revolutions lofted ideals that provoked generations of pain. It took the US nearly a century, including a bitterly cruel civil war, to find its stride. The French Revolution preceded a long series of national calamities until the Fifth Republic was formed two generations ago. Expanding suffrage to the masses seemed recklessly bold.
Haitian pride justifiably highlights slaves ousting a slave-owning colonial regime. Yet that country’s prized export today is hard-working young adults.
Massive sugar exports made Hispaniola (‘Little Spain’ anglicised) France’s most valuable 18th century colonial possession. This involved exceptionally brutalising slave labour amid sharply elevated death rates from yellow fever and malaria. A major gold deposit further encouraged exploitation.
Transitioning from post-liberation toward broad prosperity requires creating a culture of engaged citizenship. The deep cultural shift from slave, serf or subject to being an accountability-demanding citizen requires much time and positive reinforcement. Unfortunately, agricultural and extraction-based economies create financial incentives for the politically powerful to discourage such society-redefining pivots.
A history of the majority being oppressed, combined with exports being based primarily on extraction and agriculture, sets the stage for the politically empowered to enrich themselves while buying political loyalty with public funds. South Africa’s ruling elites do this through exploiting inequality to justify prioritising redistribution. This blocks the emergence of an engaged-citizen culture demanding pro-growth policies.
Instead of advancing education outcomes and accommodating private sector job creation, our political leadership has made a huge portion of citizens reliant on the state as the legal part of its massive – and increasingly unsustainable – patronage network. This is generally consistent with the feudal structures which prevailed worldwide when farming was the primary activity. Feudal-like governing arrangements have since become ever more growth-inhibiting.
Power and wealth
Today’s successful economies have transitioned toward highly mechanised farming while growing jobs in other sectors. They have progressed beyond the tight relationship between political power and wealth which breeds unemployment and dependence on aid.
Global poverty has plunged because so many countries have adopted growth-supporting policies. Economies have evolved from agriculture and extraction toward manufacturing and then services. Digital advances are now initiating another wave of possibilities as climate concerns discourage various industrial and extraction activities.
Expressing indifference toward such developments, our counterproductive policies have increased youth unemployment to a level which will require decades of solid growth to normalise. Such normalisation is however becoming even more distant as our job-creation efforts are domestically concentrated, despite rampant poverty and excessive household indebtedness. Meanwhile our sovereign debt creditworthiness has become dependent on commodity exports exceeding credible forecasts.
A problem with insisting that South Africa only became a democratic country in 1994 is that it obscures recognition that white South Africans, as well as voters elsewhere, learned slowly, over many decades, to associate voting and accountability. Although universal suffrage was finally achieved, the majority of South Africans still have no experience of voting for leaders who campaigned on a growth-and-jobs platform and then delivered. This, along with how our political elites exploit historic injustices while perpetuating massive poverty and dire education outcomes, entrenches our political and economic disconnects.
South Africa has never seriously entertained an economic strategy which would lead to broad prosperity. The 2019 national election again failed to inspire workable plans. The electorate’s capacity to hold the political elite to account is diminished by historical scars and today’s non-viable handouts. This makes it harder, but even more necessary, to advance practical sustainable solutions.
Our currently strong exports echo South Africa’s boom years. The five years of nearly five percent annual growth through 2007 were spurred by China’s massive infrastructure build-out. Then as now, spurts in commodity demand are destined to be temporary.
Rise of Asia
More importantly, our policies, then and now, are polar opposites of those that have fuelled the rise of Asia. Nor do they reconcile with today’s key trends around globalisation, digitisation and environmental sustainability.
Much evidence suggests the ANC cannot self-correct. But expecting most voters to abandon our ruling liberation party in the absence of a compelling growth plan is delusional.
The path to sustained high growth which has become politically viable begins with scrapping redistribution-focused regulations for all new value-adding export initiatives. Entrepreneurs and bigger businesses, collaboratively and independently, must weave our economy far more comprehensively into the value-adding segments of the global economy.
More than 200 years after dispatching its former colonial masters, Haiti remains desperately poor and politically impotent. Across their island’s sole border sits the Dominican Republic whose considerable prosperity began with importing policies from successful countries. As their citizenry experienced genuine wealth creation, they demanded effective governance. Such successes beget further successes.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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