The government and the private sector should stop misleading poor people. Any analysis of our poverty-elimination strategies over the last 26 years will show that the poor are continually the last consideration on the agenda of economic growth.
Over the past 26 years, South Africa has had five economic strategies to create equality, equity, access and economic justice for its poorest citizens.
From 1993 to 1996, we started out with the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), which outlined the basis for a just and pro-poor economy.
When global money smelt the success of the South African story, they convinced the Cabinet to scrap the RDP, and we got the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy from Thabo Mbeki and Trevor Manual from 1996 to 2005, which was a macroeconomic strategy.
We got some growth, a growing debt burden but little employment and even less redistribution. Gear was essentially nothing more than a reworked version of trickle-down economics.
From 2005 to 2010 the government moved from Gear to a new plan called the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for SA (Asgisa). Given the growing alienation people experience from the government and the stubborn unemployment figures, it was hoped that Asgisa would allow both the economy and people to benefit.
Asgisa, however, opened the door to a period of rampant wealth-creation for a very elite group of people. Followed on by Jacob Zuma’s New Growth Path (NGP) from 2010 to 2013, it laid the foundation that essentially created the platform for a near-decade of rampant corruption across all government departments and parastatals. It opened the door to what we know today as state capture.
Corrupt people with corrupt businesses made millions under both Asgisa and the NGP. All the rules about redistribution and shared growth were abandoned and reducing unemployment became political rhetoric while the new elite ate sushi off naked women’s bodies and state coffers and the Cabinet positions were offered up for a plate of curry in Saxonwold.
Zuma tried to divert attention away from the looting by launching the National Development Plan (NDP) in 2011. However, for the Zuma government that was all on-the-toilet reading material, without any political will to serve the demands of the NDP’s 2030 outcomes. Today we have a system of poverty so deeply entrenched that just on housing alone it will take us to 2030 to provide homes for only nine million of the 12.5 million houseless people. Some 3.5 million will still be without homes. Given the rising unemployment numbers, those figures will rise to over four million people. Some 13 million people are food-insecure in South Africa today.
So what does sense-making wealth-creation look like for poor people? What eliminates poverty? I recently had the privilege of interviewing Cape Town businessman Sameer Ismail.
With his wife, Shakira, they were moved by the story of an aged citizen in Mitchells Plain who bought R10’s electricity a week to make the food she got from food parcels.
Sameer and Shakira Ismail started a movement to provide poor households with R200 of electricity a month so that they could cook food and create sustainable business start-ups from homes to generate income for families.
In the last month, the Ismails have supplied electricity to 45 households. By reaching out to friends and colleagues, they have started a fund to create a safe home environment for poor people. That’s sustainable development and wealth-creation and active citizenship all rolled up in one.
If we are serious about changing the face of poverty, we will need to get rid of those who brutalised the face of the poor and of those who refused to look at the face of the poor. We need less sushi from the bodies of naked women and more kilowatts of electricity to fuel the ideas of poor people. And many more people like Sameer and Shakira Ismail.
* Lorenzo A Davids is chief executive of the Community Chest.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Argus
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