South Africa has not woken up into a world economic crisis in 2008, writes Zwelinzima Vavi.
For many years, the progressive trade union movement, under the leadership of Cosatu before its domestication, has consistently raised pertinent issues worth repeating in response to the unfolding socio-economic crisis.
South Africa has not woken up into a world economic crisis in 2008.
Our crisis predates all of these intersecting crises.
We inherited the socio-economic crisis from colonialism of a special type, which we defined as a dynamic and self-reinforcing combination of white domination, gender oppression and class exploitation.
It is intellectually dishonest for the Minister of Finance to say in his Budget Speech that the challenges we face can narrowly be situated in the 2008 global crisis of capitalism.
We are not in any way denying we were impacted upon by that crisis – of course we were, and a million jobs were lost as a result, and many new entrants failed to gain employment.
But we refuse to allow political leaders to hide behind the global capitalist crisis in order to mask their own failure to address the historical economic demands of the South African people.
So what is the crisis in South Africa?
We inherited an economic structure characterised by the domination of the minerals-energy-finance complex.
This production structure is based on the super-exploitation of the black working class, the exclusion of the black majority from ownership and control.
The minerals-energy-finance complex, although it now contains significant foreign ownership, nevertheless continues to be owned and controlled by white monopoly capital.
The profits generated by this complex are based on the exploitation of cheap black and African labour. Our drive towards national emancipation is bound up with economic emancipation.
We have suffered more than just national humiliation.
Our people are deprived of their due in the country’s wealth, their skills have been suppressed and poverty and starvation has been their life experience.
This cannot be effectively tackled unless the basic wealth and resources are at the disposal of the people as a whole and are not manipulated by sections or individuals.
But we are told most of the crisis at hand is as a result of the 2008 world economic crisis. This is intellectually disingenuous and seeks to pull the wool over the eyes of the poor, whose expectations from democracy have been disappointed.
We
cannot blame all of our challenges on external factors, like those who supported Growth Employment and Redistribution (Gear) during the East-Asian crisis of 1998.
The ANC leaders refused point blank to implement our historic policy positions.
Part of the structural crisis facing South Africa is:
A two-tier education system. On one hand this system is designed to cater for the rich and upper middle strata. It is expensive, but such students can compete with the best in the world. 71 percent of all learners who pass matric come from 11 percent of the schools, mainly the private and former Model-C schools.
The children of the poor majority are trapped in an inferior dysfunctional education system. Children trapped in it cannot compete with their counterparts in Southern Africa or the world. Forty-five percent of them fail first year university.
A two-tier health system.
On the one hand 17 percent of the population enjoys the best of private healthcare, which is also extremely expensive, taking 51 percent of the country’s resources spent on health.
The current market inquiry has revealed South African private healthcare is more expensive than most of the developed world. And yet we heard nothing in the budget speech about it.
When we hear that billions are being spent, there is no talk of how social inequalities will be addressed.
Cosatu was blunted so it can never again mobilise the working class to pursue its radical economic proposals. But we are forging ahead, we are building a new independent workers’ movement that will dust off the 11th and the 9th national congress resolutions of Cosatu, mobilising the entire working class for their implementation.
These include the following demands:
- A radical economic transformation based on the Freedom Charter clarion call that the land and wealth of the country must be shared. And that the structure of the colonial economy must be replaced by a new growth path based on massive industrialisation of the economy.
- The call for decisive state intervention in strategic sectors of the economy, including through strategic nationalisation and state ownership, and the use of a variety of macro-economic and other levers at the state’s disposal, which can be deployed to regulate and channel investment, production, consumption and trade to deliberately drive industrialisation, sustainable development, decent employment creation, and regional development, and to break historical patterns of colonial exploitation and dependence.
- The need to radically overhaul our macro-economic policy in line with the radical economic shift.
- The radical economic shift requires that institutionally, the Treasury needs to be urgently realigned. A new mandate needs to be given to the Reserve Bank, which must be nationalised. The national planning commission must be given a renewed mandate, to realign the national development plan, in line with the proposed radical economic shift.
- Steps must be taken to reverse the current investment strike and export of South African capital. There is currently R1.5 trillion in social surplus which employers are refusing to invest. These measures need to include capital controls and measures aimed at prescribed investment, and penalising speculation.
- The urgent introduction of comprehensive social security.
- The abolition of the apartheid wage structure and its replacement by a more equitable structure
A national minimum wage that addresses poverty and inequalities.
The Budget speech does not represent any new direction. It blatantly refuses to accept the deepening crisis of poverty, unemployment and inequalities or even the scale of corruption.
While the Budget did not represent the full-blown frontal attack on the poor and runaway privatisation demanded by the spokesmen of the rating agencies, it nevertheless represents a consolidation of the neo-liberal economic framework that not only failed the transformation agenda in South Africa for nearly 22 years but actually caused the world economic crisis of 2008.
If anything the Budget sought to cut expenditure on the poor while appearing to be offering meaningless tax breaks to workers. Social grants will grow at a rate less than inflation. Old age pension will be increased by R80 in 2016 and by R10 in 2017, while inflation is projected to be above 6 percent.
The current bloated executive, which only serves to maintain a patronage network, as a reward system to loyal cadres, will not be touched. There is no intention to publicise the ministerial handbook.
In 2013 $29 billion (R459.7bn) was illegally taken out of South Africa in illicit financial flows. The South African Revenue Bank and Treasury should have immediately investigated multinational corporations and prosecuted those like MTN and Lonmin where research shows they have been looting South Africa.
The
working class, when it realises it has been duped, when it observes lack of material progress in its communities, when service delivery stalls, will not point to this budget as a point of their liberation but will refer to it as an instrument of continued enslavement.
Without a second liberation struggle, which should be led by the worker/youth axis, we will be where we are economically for another 22 years.
* Zwelinzima Vavi is the former General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Independent on Saturday