Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - Another triumph for the hide-and-seek act played by politicians dodging their responsibility to get South Africans out of unemployment, poverty and the many other social ills in our society.
Another round of disappointment passes as details of government inefficiency are revealed in the departmental budget votes in legislative bodies, the latest reports on unemployment and crime statistics, and the painful lived experiences of citizens, due to failed election promises.
The latest employment data, released on May 31 by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), laid bare the dire state of the economy.
While showing that economic activity is broadly normalising from the Covid-19 shock following the removal of most major lockdown restrictions, the returning company profitability is lukewarm. Simultaneously, more people returned to the labour market as improving conditions increased job seekers’ confidence in finding jobs.
Still, the costs of seeking a job remain too high, and the country’s economic growth is too low to dent unemployment and poverty. Instead, the sharp rise in the cost of living is threatening to push many households into poverty.
Rumours are that the government is banking on announcing, this quarter, the much-awaited national social compact championed by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation address to sell South Africa as an investment destination.
It is hard to see what is likely to change in the rising cost of living or what will come from the continuing dithering to align economic policies and improve government efficiency.
Ramaphosa’s tactic of devolving judgement on key policy and administrative decisions to a dilatory set of committees has worked, albeit at the cost of millions of promised jobs and hundreds of lost investment opportunities.
What appeared in 2018 as an economic revitalisation moment has been kicked down the road so many times as to disappear from view.
The government, at all levels, is at a loss about what to do. We hear daily that the economy is in distress.
For instance, the agricultural sector, which accounts for 5.7% of total employment, is responsible for keeping 800 000 people employed.
Industry group Agri SA has pointed to the many constraints to growth. More widely, decaying infrastructure and poor service delivery are stifling economic growth and job creation across the entire economy.
Like all high-profile political sagas, presidential job-creation and investment initiatives look like one of those transient government storms more seismic at the time than in retrospect.
They stand with other “initiatives”, such as the job summit and gender-based violence summit, in the canon of moments when the criticisms of the Union Buildings seemed to usurp those of the electorate.
They display cadre deployment truth about South African politics, that its ethos is that of a political party, not of an electorate. Leaders are at most short-term risk when they offend the political party, not the people.
We know bad news consistently outranks good, but the scale of public-sector performance failure has become a daily dirge.
The national and provincial governments put everything down to the pandemic. They accuse several sinking municipalities, which are under the administration of provincial governments, of poor planning and slow transition after last November’s local government elections.
In turn, the municipalities accuse provincial and national governments of political party cadre deployment controls on the recruitment of competent staff and mindlessly laborious political manoeuvring in forming coalition municipal governments.
The truth is, a traumatised labour market is afflicting both public and private sectors.
In 2022, the economy is recovering slowly to create enough jobs for the unemployed army, many of whom are unskilled.
There were sobering admissions of government inefficiency in recent weeks as budget votes for the security and economy government clusters suffer from staff shortages.
Health Minister Joe Phaahla said the country had a doctor-to-patient ratio of only one doctor per 3 198 people.
Meanwhile, Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi confirmed that the percentage of filled posts was 39%, saying the department would be able to increase the staff complement to only 42% of what was required to serve the 412 Home Affairs offices nationwide.
The irony of politics is the deeper the mess into which politicians take their country, the more secure they probably are in the short term.
The government stumbles from mess to mess, each one somehow overriding the last.
The latest revelations during the budget votes seem trivial against the chaos of the previous years, where the past ineptitudes of the leadership remain critically in need of resolution.
Yet those, too, seem in just a week to have given way to their successor, the spiralling of the living cost crisis sparked by the energy crisis in the form of high fuel prices and rolling electricity blackouts.
Here again, the impression is of politicians fumbling for policy options, with a team of B-grade political heads all nervous for their jobs. It is hard to recall when the economy was in worse custodianship just when it most needed it the best.
As so often in the politicians’ careers, all that matters is the now.
Their judgement is fixed not on interest rates or taxes, energy prices or health spending, unemployment or corruption.
It is set on opinion polls, headlines, and conference delegates’ slates to determine who gets re-elected to an office that dispenses lucrative patronage.
The clouds of mismanagement and indecisions may have cleared after the departmental budget votes, and ministers might think that they are free. One thing is sure of this administration in all three spheres of government: when one cloud clears, another is on the horizon. All these points demand that we call politicians to order.
Nyembezi is a policy analyst and human rights activist
Cape Times