Photo: Karabo Mdluli, obtained from Unsplash
Göran Therborn is an ancient Swedish leftie, who has just retired from a professorship in sociology at the University of Cambridge.
Last year, he published a remarkable and long article in the New Left Review, on the “World of the left”. With a unique grasp of detail and a charmingly compact writing style, he set out the history of left politics around the world, and reviewed its present (somewhat parlous) state and its opportunities in the future. On Africa, he was unsparing:
Africa is in several ways a continent of sorrow. Its most developed economy, South Africa, is more unequal than the world itself; and this is the achievement of a national liberation movement putting an end to racial apartheid. There have been moments of rapid economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years, but it is also the only world region where extreme poverty increased in absolute terms between 1998 and 2018, by about 110 million people, much of it due to persistently high birth rates.
Here, Therborn has let out one under-discussed issue. When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, our population was about 40 million. Today, it is about 60 million. We have added four times today’s population of New Zealand to our 1994 population to get to where we now are – put differently, we have added today’s populations of Ireland, Norway, New Zealand and Austria together, to our 1994 population, to get to our 2022 population.
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We drove on a model of governance that saw government determined to provide all South Africans with a dignified home and a basket of municipal services which would be free to those who could not afford either.
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In 1994, ignorant of this future, and on a national consensus of all political parties, we set out to do something that no country before us had done – we set out to deliver a welfare state to a country with a rapidly growing population, in the absence of an oil bonanza or some such.
We drove on a model of governance that saw government determined to provide all South Africans with a dignified home and a basket of municipal services which would be free to those who could not afford either. All youngsters are now to attend accessible schools, with schools in poor neighbourhoods being free; our 300 000 university students in 1994 has grown to a million now, with NSFAS delivering grant funding for almost all needing it; medical care through an expanded network of clinics became accessible to all – we added later, free, the world’s biggest anti-retroviral distribution network to counteract HIV; now we are struggling to get right a programme for a national health service modelled on western European systems, again free to the poor; all are now entitled to an equal state-funded, non-contributory, old-age pension, making us the only country (with Namibia) in Africa with such a system; and poor families get child support grants. The COVID R350 grant is now looking like a trial run for a basic income grant. Today, we deliver nearly 20 million grants monthly, in itself a massive bureaucratic achievement, and over time we have built and then given away about three million houses.
No country has ever succeeded in delivering a welfare state to a population growing as fast as South Africa’s has been. Added to this impossible challenge is the reality that the fastest expanding population cohorts are young people, who do not contribute to the fiscus, instead needing the fiscus to contribute to them.
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No country has ever succeeded in delivering a welfare state to a population growing as fast as South Africa’s has been.
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These are great and historic achievements, hugely costly – the cost of which no political party in South Africa has ever criticised. As a country, we have united in an attempt to drive out extreme poverty, and we have moved a long way to this goal.
But three problems have all but derailed these achievements.
Firstly, as noted above, the rate of our population growth has seen these achievements appear to slip away in front of us. In 1994, there were 8,8 million people in South Africa in employment. In 2022, this number had grown to 15,8 million. This growth is really a great achievement, but it appears to be a mirage when we note that the unemployed percentage of our population has risen from 20% (1994) to 27% (2022) – on the back of our massive population growth. Our population has been growing faster than our resources, leaving us trapped in the Malthusian paradox. And we do not notice this; instead, we are led to believe that our social problems must be caused by governmental neglect.
The second problem is even more dramatic, for all of our achievements are lost in the clamour around disclosures of immense corruption, mostly the work of crooked bureaucrats working with crooked businessmen in a system oiled by crooked politicians. Even a brief reading of the Zondo Commission lays all this out, and is depressing and infuriating in equal measure. We as a nation, and particularly the ruling party, have lost the struggle for morality in a mass rush for the trough – “What can we do for the poor?” has been replaced by, “What’s in it for me?” in our national political discourse. This carnage appears so widespread that all politicians and most bureaucrats are assumed now to be on the take.
That generalisation is both utterly wrong and deeply insulting. Most public officials are honourable and do their jobs. A simple example – anyone involved with a school’s matric year has to attest to the enormous amount of work this event “matric” is, and it has flawlessly proceeded for all these years. That is not just good fortune – it is endless planning and lots of hard work. As is delivering 20 million social grants month by month. And plenty else.
The third problem stems from the ANC’s determination to populate the civil service with its people at any cost. Appointments have proceeded without consideration of experience or capability, and all too often appear as “jobs for pals”. Much of the civil service, particularly our 275 local governments, has buckled under the joint pressures of trying to deliver services of a standard exemplified in the old “white town” to the entire “new town” (which has been impossible), through a bureaucracy now populated with new faces, often underqualified and always inexperienced. It has not worked, nor could it ever have.
So, here we are – a country with corruption everywhere, to the top in the ANC and in government; electricity supply in chaos and most state-owned enterprises on the verge of total collapse; xenophobia often poking its horrible head out in our poorest communities; Jacob Zuma still on the streets by dint of manipulation of the courts and the looting mobs. And the poor and the unemployed everywhere. It all looks so terrible.
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So – where to from here? Either a brief and brutal correction, and back to the welfare state ideal, or a quick drift off to a failed state?
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So – where to from here? Either a brief and brutal correction, and back to the welfare state ideal, or a quick drift off to a failed state?
This week, Jonathan Jansen, a commentator of exceptional sagacity, used his column to pose the question: “Are we better off than 30 years ago?” He stumbles around in his argument, eventually seeming to answer, “No.” Maybe.
My argument leads me to believe that your answer will depend on where you are.
If you are a poor black South African of retirement age but with no personal pension fund; if you are a South African with HIV but no medical aid; if you are a bright youngster from a poor home wanting to enter university; if you are a young family now in your new house with a free package of municipal services; if you are gay or an ambitious woman or, or, or – you’ll probably feel that you want people like Prof Jansen to continue to put their shoulder to our welfare state dream, and shove on with all their energy.