A democracy well fought for has the side effects of a blessing and a burden. To be clear, it is a burden black people still bear.
In its inception, our democracy had the idealism to liberate everyone psychologically and socially. However, in practice, an important ingredient of emancipation was left out of the cake mix. So the cake flopped.
No amount of freedom is complete if it is not economic in its nature – especially for the previously disadvantaged. We live in one of the most unequal societies.
Conventional wisdom says a shared economy in which more people are participating in the formal economy is the solution to many social ills.
Yet black people, who are the most abundant demographic of South Africa, are still fighting for a seat at the table, happy for the bread no one else will eat.
The Reconstruction and Development Programme was formulated in 1994 and its successor, the National Development Plan of 2012, was modified for the Vision 2030 summit. Both carry a core message of economic liberation.
It appears our government doesn’t lack the school of thought to create policy and yet many South Africans are barely scrambling above the poverty line.
Surely, it is the height of arrogance for our leaders to seduce us with slogans and provide no real results.
The Freedom Charter echoed the principle of “a better life for all”. Our people need far more than an initiation into the mainstream economy. They need the education that will qualify it, sustain it and spread their influence on that economy so they can truly add value.
Economic access is more than the ability to physically survive in a robust capitalist society. It more intensely speaks to a human dignity inherent in all of us: the need to feed our families.
We need to afford our offspring a good head start through opportunity and access. We need decent shelter and, at the most basic level, to be able to walk into a store and look at the bread and milk we know we can afford.
There is a deep human dignity many South Africans have never experienced and they cling to the hope that they will one day. Nelson Mandela’s dream was simple: all South Africans have the right to hope and the right to a future that is built on equality, fairness, dignity and respect – and I emphasise the inclusive “all”.
As a proud nation with a liberation movement of heroes and leaders who sacrificed so much for our freedom, we have experienced humiliation.
This came, first, in respect of our principles and adherence to the morality of human rights and justice, then as a blow to our economy, in the form of a downgrade.
We now need to start implementing reforms such as:
- Re-engineering the labour markets to ensure fair competition and dramatically enhanced access to skills, especially for blacks.
- Having smaller governments to create bigger wealth participation. Reducing the size and impact of public sector wage costs on the budgets of the three tiers of our government would dramatically free up resources.
- Undertaking a fundamental reform of the education and health-care systems to ensure that we have an educated and healthy labour force, aligned with the needs of our economy.
- Fostering a strong, growing economy – 6% real growth in our annual gross domestic product is not far-fetched – to allow for foreign direct investment.
- Restructuring the economy away from dependence on commodities and mining, as a priority for policymakers.
- Putting in place superior education standards that will enable deep critical thought and a budding entrepreneurial spirit in rural areas, townships and other disadvantaged communities.
However, we cannot make broad and confident policy statements without a proper root-cause analysis for, if truth be told, context is critical and we must accept the truth that the apartheid government set up the ANC for failure.
By providing education for black children that was sub-standard and critically poor, and ensuring that black people were equipped only for menial and domestic labour, the basic skills to grow the nascent democracy were palpably absent.
This was a steep hill to climb, especially taking cognisance of the socio-economic and political circumstances of the time:
- Sanctions that had almost crippled the economy.
- Mismanagement of funds by the then ruling party, with wealth almost solely in the hands of whites.
To address this, the ANC introduced black economic empowerment and overhauled the civil service, with white employees given packages and replaced by black cadres.
But after placing them in position, the mistake we made was that there was no adequate training and mentorship, no development, and no focused and dedicated capacity-building. Cadre deployment was and remains a failure of the ANC.
The drive to integrate black people into the economy through efforts like BEE and affirmative action has become deeply flawed. Corporations have employed strategies like “fronting” to meet quotas while applying no actual empowerment – just legal puppet strings that could be manipulated.
Choosing an elite circle of black people to occupy positions of power does not equate to any real impact or sufficient representation; it creates a social divide of “haves” and “have-nots”.
This implies that private education, the right connections and a polished accent qualify a minority of black people to make it into the right economic clubs. The psychological impact on those without such a privilege is a gaping wound that fuels the belief that corruption is the only way to get ahead.
It is our government’s responsibility to give every child a fair start in education and the more mature generations redress from starting out on the back foot. These solutions need to be sustainable in nature and add to their human dignity.
The world economy is an open-ended playground, but not everyone can currently participate in the game because the rule book is still tightly held by a handful of people.