Democracy and Delusion: 10 Myths in South African Politics

DEMOCRACY

AND

DELUSION

10 Myths in South African Politics

Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh

Tafelberg

For my parents

Introduction

Two decades of rainbow mythology have soothed South Africa into a state of chronic complacency. We were sold a lie: that the vote would resolve our country’s fundamental problems, if we only had the patience to wait. Somehow, over the past two decades, we’ve replaced a vision for dramatic social change with another soaked in the ‘tranquilising drug of gradualism’.¹ Today, South Africans are confronted with an ironic problem: appreciating the scale of our country’s problems. This book argues that we require a painstaking reappraisal of the first two decades of so-called ‘freedom’ in South Africa; a hard look at the image staring back at us. To move forward, we must have the courage to scrutinise our situation anew. We must break free from the comforting confidence of orthodoxy. Only then can we begin the long and difficult struggle for a deeper freedom in the future.

Deeply conservative dogmas are holding South Africa back. They transcend traditional political divides, and enjoy wide dissemination through a sophisticated infrastructure of power. Confusingly, these creeds are draped in the language of ‘liberation’, ‘non-racialism’, and ‘prosperity’, while serving the interests of the narrowest elite. They can be summarised in ten myths which, together, constitute South Africa’s democratic delusion.

I will tackle the deconstruction of these myths in this book, and also in the companion rap album of the same name. For each of its chapters, there is a corresponding song. Combining a classic and traditionally esteemed form of expression – the essay – with a contemporary one – hip-hop – is emblematic of the myriad and seemingly paradoxical forces that bind South Africa today. Music can capture the discordant emotion of modern South African life, but it can’t always parse its nuances. Only writing can do that.

In one sense an ‘essay’ – from the Old French essai – is an ‘attempt’ or ‘stab at’ something. A deeper look reveals that the French derives from the Latin exagium, meaning ‘weigh’ or ‘weight’. One root of exagium is agere, which literally means to ‘set in motion’ – as the tongue of a balance scale moves when weight is applied to one of its sides.² The writer and historian Teju Cole makes the same point from a different perspective. He suggests the purpose of an essay is not to settle a debate, or to ‘give one’s take’ on a question, but to bring once-disconnected thoughts into a new, coherent conversation. The best essays, according to Cole, bring diverse ideas ‘into the same room’.³ Essays are both endings and beginnings. Their true value is not in resolving conversations; it’s in triggering them. That’s the aim of this book: to set in motion a fresh conversation about South African politics.

Writing this book in the tumultuous period between 2014 and 2017 has been bewildering. I’ve scratched my head, laughed, and cried – sometimes at the same time. In a 24-hour news cycle, depth is often sacrificed in favour of novelty. This allows and perpetuates a kind of collective political amnesia as room is constantly made for the next new story. In all this confusion, a clearheaded analysis of the South African situation is all the more urgent. Not everything can be captured in a tweet. Even if it could, it would disappear in two hours, buried in plain view at the bottom of a million timelines. This book is not just a collection of essays, but a reference guide. One that sorts through the information we’re all swimming in, and separates the vital from the trivial. The themes I explore here – the ideas I bring into this room – will be with us for a long time to come, even if the events through which I examine them are contingent and fleeting as part of the fast-paced news cycle.

One thing is certain: the time for gentle persuasion has long since passed. Though what follows is designed to be provocative, I hope you will suspend outrage long enough to give it a fair hearing.

MYTH ONE:

Living Conditions Are Steadily Improving

When it comes to ‘people-centred’ development … there has been so much knowledge, so much policy, so much agreement on what needs to be done, and so little to show for it.⁴

– Benjamin Bradlow, Clifford Shearing and Joel Bolnick

In the 2014 election, the ANC campaigned on a short, powerful message: ‘we have a good story to tell’. It was a devilishly effective slogan, perfectly framing the myth of slow but steady progress since 1994. It conveyed the mistaken idea that life was improving for all South Africans; things weren’t perfect, but they were getting better each day. If we were patient, sooner or later we’d reap the abundant benefits of democracy. Sadly, this just isn’t true. This chapter attacks the long-held assumption that living standards have improved dramatically since apartheid. It argues that South Africa made unacceptably slow gains in the first decade of democracy, and that in the second it regressed. I do this by first examining economic indicators like poverty, inequality, and unemployment. Since 1994, these indicators have all worsened. I then turn to service delivery, focusing on housing, water and sanitation, and electricity, and show that there has been inadequate progress in these fields. While there are potential objections to these arguments, to my mind too much use has been made of meaningless definitions of ‘progress’ that don’t focus on tangible change.

The economy

There’s no way to sugar-coat it: since 1994, inequality, unemployment and poverty have been on the rampage. Let’s begin with inequality. South Africa is now the most unequal economy in the world. In 1994, South Africa and Brazil vied for this ignominious honour. Their Gini coefficients⁵ – a measure of income inequality – were both around 0.60 (1.0 indicates one person owns all the wealth). In the following twenty years, Brazil managed to lower its coefficient to 0.52, while South Africa’s grew to between 0.63 and 0.69.⁶ Today, the share of total income owned by the top 1% is higher than it was in the late colonial era.⁷

If income inequality is worrying, wealth inequality is downright grotesque. Recent investigations into South Africa’s tax system illustrate the malaise. Whereas the top 10% of income-earners make 50–60% of all income, the top 10% of wealth-earners own 90–95% of all wealth.⁸ Even the so-called middle class owns very little wealth: although they earn 30–35% of all income, they only own 5–10% of all wealth. As economist Anna Orthofer explains: ‘while there may be a growing middle class with regards to income, there is no middle class with regard to wealth: the middle 40% of the wealth distribution is almost as asset-poor as the bottom 50%.’⁹ In other words, the poorest 10% of South Africans have no detectable wealth whatsoever. Put simply, wealth inequality in South Africa dwarfs income inequality, which is already the world’s worst:

Although the top income shares are very high in their own right, they pale in comparison with the top wealth shares. Compared to income, wealth is much more concentrated in the hands of the few. Whereas the Gini coefficient is 0.69, the wealth Gini coefficient is 0.9 to 0.95 – again the most abject in the world.¹⁰

This leads Piketty to lament:

Now that we are 25 years after the fall of apartheid, we are all puzzled by the fact that inequality is not only still very high in South Africa, but has been rising and, in some way, income inequality is even higher today than 20 years ago, which is extremely puzzling for all of us.¹¹

Like income disparity, wealth disparity assumes racial dimensions. The radically disproportionate share of South African wealth is still in a small group of mostly white hands. Wealth disparities among the white population are also significantly lower. On the other hand, wealth disparities inside black and coloured communities are high, given that few have seen tremendous wealth while the clear majority languish in landlessness and poverty. Incredibly, 80% of the black population owns no measurable portion of South African wealth.¹²

Compounding this is the unemployment crisis. In the first quarter of 2016, narrow unemployment¹³ was 26.7%, the highest since the system of collection started in 2008.¹⁴ This record only lasted until the third quarter of 2016, when unemployment reached 27.1%.¹⁵ That record was broken again in the first quarter of 2017 – Stats SA’s latest quarterly labour force survey shows that unemployment had reached 27.7%, the highest on record since 2003. Indeed, in the decade since 2006, unemployment actually rose, remaining at the stubbornly high rate of 25% for five years. This missed government’s own targets by a mile. The so-called New Growth Path (NGP), one of three competing economic policy blueprints for South Africa’s economy, promised to initiate 6–7% annual growth by 2020.¹⁶ In the process, it vowed to create five million jobs and reduce narrow unemployment to only 15%.

The National Development Plan (NDP), launched a year later, set similarly lofty targets. This time, the annual growth target was 5% leading to 2030, with the creation of 5–6 million jobs.¹⁷ Miraculously, these jobs would come from different places compared to the NGP. Whereas the NGP saw jobs coming from infrastructure and large industry, the NDP focused on small businesses serving the domestic market. Despite this, South Africa’s unemployment situation has declined since the announcement of both plans, and remains worse than it was in 1994: ‘unemployment, using the expanded definition, has actually risen from 31.5% recorded in 1994 to almost 36% in 2014’.¹⁸ Worse still, youth unemployment is at the eye-watering level of nearly 65%.¹⁹ The same is true for poverty. In a report issued by Stats SA in 2015, a rebasing of poverty levels contradicted earlier, optimistic census data. Poverty is measured in three incremental bands: first, the ‘food poverty level’ measures people’s ability to buy the equivalent of the minimum caloric intake necessary to sustain human life; second, the lower-bound poverty level is when a person splits income between food and minimal non-food expenses. Finally, the upper bound assumes that people don’t sacrifice any food expenditure to meet their basic needs. All levels of poverty are negative and mean that people are unable to sustain minimally decent lives.

In 2011, government celebrated ‘decreasing’ extreme poverty to ‘only’ 20.2%. After Stats SA reviewed the cost of living, South Africans were startled to learn that the already devastating figures were underestimated. Instead of 20%, it emerged the figure was closer to 21.7%.²⁰ To put this in perspective, that’s a million more living below the breadline than initially thought. Clearly, people need more than just food, which is why the measure is called ‘extreme poverty’. But the story worsened when the upper-bound poverty line was also underestimated: instead of being at 45% in 2011, it was over half the population at 53.7%.²¹ This is a staggering figure: more than half the South African population lives in poverty, two decades after ‘freedom’. That’s about 27 million people.

What about economic growth? Under Zuma, it was tepid for the first term; anaemic in the second. But government is neither willing to admit failure, nor change course. Instead, it argues that ‘global forces’ have blunted South Africa’s growth prospects. This is totally disingenuous. First, the South African government announced its economic plans well after the 2008 global economic meltdown. It knew full well the global economic climate when it made glossy promises in the elections of 2009 and 2014, and it has known these conditions ever since. Second, other economies more directly affected by the global economic crisis – not least the United States – have grown faster and reduced unemployment quicker than South Africa. Developing economies in Africa and elsewhere have recovered and prospered while South Africa has lagged.²² There have certainly been global headwinds since 2008, but the overwhelming blame for South Africa’s economic morass lies squarely at the door of our own government.

Government also argues that economic progress needs more time. Again, this is disingenuous. In the 21 years between 1994 and 2015, South Africa’s real GDP per capita increased by a relatively modest 31%, from $4 520 to $5 917. Let’s compare what other countries have achieved in similar periods. In 21 years, Malaysia expanded GDP per capita by 119% between 1965 and 1986. Singapore did it by 324% in the same period. Since 1984, Vietnam has expanded GPD per capita by 166%. Namibia’s economy between 1990 and 2011 outpaces South Africa’s, with GDP per capita growth of 53%.²³ There are many other examples. So, the notion that South Africa could not have moved any faster is clearly unfounded. It’s time we looked facts soberly in the face: whether it’s unemployment, poverty, inequality or economic growth, South Africa has drastically underperformed since 1994. In the next section, we examine South Africa’s record at delivering basic services, especially to its poorest people.

Service delivery

In 2014, then Minister of Human Settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu, admitted that ‘the delivery of houses has dropped drastically across all provinces, some reaching lows of a 30% drop in delivery’.²⁴ She continued, ‘this, we have been informed, is due to a number of what my officials call blockages in the pipeline, whatever that means’.²⁵ Sisulu was reflecting on a particularly bad year, but the story was all too familiar. For the entirety of the Zuma era, government has consistently failed to meet its own housing targets. According to the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute, government has targeted 200 000 houses per year since 2010.²⁶ But, every year, it has failed to meet its expectations by about 100 000 houses. More puzzling is the attendant problem of underspending, another phenomenon that accelerated under Zuma. In the 2009–10 and 2010–11 fiscal years, underspending by the Department of Human Settlements was in the order of 13%, already alarming considering the dire need for housing in South Africa. But in the following two years, underspending shot up to 34% of the proposed budget, or approximately R5bn.²⁷

Moreover, government has failed to reduce the percentage of people living in informal dwellings, which remained roughly constant between 2004 and 2012.²⁸ The problem goes deeper than this: government’s housing failures have reinforced apartheid spatial planning. Today, housing policy is based on a rigid distinction between shacks (informal dwellings) and ‘formal houses’. Government’s policy mantra is therefore to ‘build houses and eradicate shacks’. But this creates a perverse incentive to evict shack-dwellers. Moreover, formal houses are just new townships on the outskirts of cities, which residents don’t own. Instead, as in colonial times, citizens in desperate need of housing are only allowed to occupy government houses, unable to convert them into assets:

For more than a decade, the state has turned informal settlements into illegal built environments. It has then tried to address these informalities and illegalities by governing them through institutional arrangements that blame poor people for the failures of the state, punishing them through evictions and relocations to newly constructed slums and still sub-standard housing stock.²⁹

Another crucial pillar of service delivery is sanitation, also a disappointment since 1994. Over the last 23 years, access to an improved water source has only increased by 10%, from 83.4% to 93.2%.³⁰ This is below Botswana and Brazil, who have reached