A nearly two-decade old speech warning South Africa of its looming economic disaster makes for depressing reading – but more depressing are the consequences of the government’s failure to act in the intervening period.
It’s safe to say that 32-year-old Zanele Ndeya speaks for many jobless graduates when she says plainly: ‘I feel like I’m a failure. Spending three years towards a degree only to feel as if the qualification is useless.’
The brief account of Ndeya’s despair – she worked for a telecommunications company for 30 months, but has been without work since her contract expired – is contained in an IOL report this week fittingly headlined: ‘SA unemployment rate: “I feel like I’m a failure” says Cape resident’.
The report begins: ‘The stress of being unemployed is keeping the South African Depression and Anxiety Group’s (Sadag) phone lines busy.’ It goes on to quote Sadag director Cassey Chambers on the ‘enormous amount of physical and mental stress’ caused by joblessness.
With the latest statistics showing that the unemployment rate has risen from 27.6% to 29% (or, by the expanded definition, to 38.5%) this year alone, it’s fair to assume Ndeya’s despair is shared by millions.
The tragedy, of course, is that though her condition makes her feel like a failure, the failure is not hers at all.
The real failure lies with the policy-making of the African National Congress (ANC) government over a long period, and its wilfully ignoring warnings that it needed to free itself of its ideological affection for policies that would only damage the economy and dash the hopes of South Africans for the better life they had been promised in 1994.
The ANC had been in power for just five years when veteran parliamentarian Ken Andrew, then the Democratic Party spokesperson on finance, delivered a speech in February 2000, setting out crisply where South Africa was going wrong and what it should do about it.
That speech was republished as ‘19 lost years’ on the political website, Politicsweb last week.
Looking back, it’s one of many ‘If only …’ moments that dot the road to decline that South Africa has needlessly followed over the two decades since.
Andrew framed his speech, titled ‘Budgeting for failure’, with a quote from Liberal International’s 1997 Oxford Manifesto, ‘The Liberal Agenda for the 21st Century – The Quality of Liberty in Open Civic Societies’.
It reads: ‘Poverty and unemployment cramp individual lives and present major dangers to society. Poverty breeds despair and despair breeds extremism, intolerance, crime and aggression. The central question in poverty alleviation is how to provide people with the means to fight poverty themselves, to lift themselves out of poverty.’
From the opening lines, it is clear that some in the ANC understood the problem, if not necessarily the solution. Andrew cites the late Zola Skweyiya, then minister of social development, as having warned that ‘South Africa is sitting on a time bomb of poverty and social disintegration’ as a result of ‘persistent and increasing levels of poverty’ and ‘low economic growth’.
What, then, should be done?
As Andrew put it then – and it remains urgently true today – ‘sustainable job creation should be the Number One priority of economic policy in South Africa’.
It says something for how far our national ambitions have fallen that Andrew was able reasonably to urge in 2000 that ‘South Africa can and must get its economic growth rates up to 6% or more per year, otherwise we will not succeed in reducing unemployment and poverty’. (And how sobering, today, to read Andrew’s warning that ‘Government projections of an average growth rate of about 3,4% per year for the next few years add up to more poverty, more hunger, more homelessness and more crime’.)
The key to a turnaround was the simple, universal economic truth: ‘To accelerate our growth rate, we have to make it possible and attractive for both domestic and foreign investors to make fixed investments in South Africa.’
He noted wryly: ‘There are many South Africans making fixed investments and creating jobs. The tragedy is that too many of them are doing so in other countries because, for one reason or another, they have left our shores.’
That has only continued in the intervening time.
What has also continued is the groundless self-congratulation that we have heard too often and which Andrew warned against when he said: ‘It is not good enough that we simply move in the right direction. It is not good enough that we pat ourselves on the back for being better than the appalling apartheid-era economic managers. It is not good enough that we create new elites while unemployment spreads like wildfire.’
What was needed, he said, was ‘courage to take decisive action’.
That would have made all the difference.
Andrew could have been speaking last week when he said: ‘South Africa has the potential to alleviate the poverty of millions of its people, to substantially reduce unemployment and to provide for rising standards of living for all its people – but that potential is not being realised. We must turn the tide against rising poverty and growing unemployment in our country, both of which will have disastrous consequences for our fragile democracy if they are not alleviated soon.’
It was a challenge, Andrew observed, ‘which will not be met by being faint-hearted or by kowtowing to vested interests, whatever they may be’.
Yet, in 2019, the government persists with policies such as Expropriation without Compensation, the National Health Insurance scheme, and threats to prescribe assets. It shows little inclination seriously to trim the bloated state or jettison ineffective race-based empowerment policies that benefit few, even as they deter investment and enterprise. It baulks at labour reforms capable of pricing the poor into jobs.
As a result, the Zanele Ndeyas of South Africa pay the price and, most unfairly, are left feeling that they are the failures.
Morris is head of media at the Institute of Race Relations.
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