South Africa has failed its young people. What can be done about it

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It is more than 40 years since young people, first in Soweto, and then around the country, rose up against the apartheid regime. Initially their protest was against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools. But it quickly spread into a general uprising against apartheid.

Four decades later and more than two decades after democracy, what prospects do young South Africans have?

The end of apartheid should have heralded a new South African dream for the generation born at its demise. The “born frees” comprise about one fifth of the population. If the definition of youth is extended to include those between 15 and 34, they make up almost 55% of the population.

The hope was that this generation would be living radically different lives from the young people who rose up in 1976. But that dream is still out of reach for most. Two thirds of the country’s children live in poverty. About 50% of young people are without jobs.

Without doubt, there have been key improvements. Education is now provided to all, and years of schooling have increased; child support grants have made substantial differences to nutrition and wellbeing; the delivery of public housing has helped many secure a home for the first time.

Yet the quality of life and opportunities for young people are still defined, to a large extent, by the legacies of their parents. This also means that young South Africans are in no position to help drive economic growth. The country is missing its demographic dividend moment.

So what can be done about it? An initiative that connects researchers and local governments, combined with a web tool that draws together detailed local information about young people, could help policy makers take a fine-grained rather than a scatter-gun approach to support youth wellbeing.

Missed chances

Life’s chances are determined by the quality of education. And that in turn is determined by the income of parents. South Africa’s schooling systems has failed young people abysmally. Drop out rates are shockingly high, with nearly half the country’s learners leaving the schooling system before they matriculate.

These numbers are dismal enough. But there’s an added twist. Unless a young person passes matric – or gets a tertiary qualification – their chances in the labour market are slim. An employer generally doesn’t distinguish between three years of schooling or six or eight or even ten.

It has given rise to a desperate group of young people known as NEETS, which stands for Not in Employment, Education or Training. They can include young people with matric, but all are unemployed and few have prospects for further education.

The government has consistently committed to putting youth development high on its national agenda. It has put a number of initiatives in place, including:

• The adoption of a new youth policy in 2015. More recently, President Jacob Zuma promised that all government departments would prioritise programmes that are critical to youth development. There’s little evidence that the national youth policy and the ones that came before achieved anything.
• In 2014 the National Treasury implemented a youth incentive employment tax to encourage employers to give young people their first foot in the door of an increasingly tight labour market. It’s too early to assess whether this is making a difference.
• The creation of a policy-oriented research project on employment, income distribution and inclusive growth at the University of Cape Town (UCT) to look into the stubborn problems of youth unemployment, among other issues. The youth unemployment project is due to present its findings in the next few weeks.

Clearly more needs to be done. Later this month local governments will be asked to play a more proactive role in youth development. This could be a critical contribution.

Fresh attempt

A local approach could be significant because the spatial legacy of apartheid still largely determines a person’s life chances. This means that there are vast differences between young people based on where they live. This includes income, education and employment opportunities.

A web tool, called the Youth Explorer , has been developed to help a host of players, including policy makers, to access information about young people in a particular area. It does this by drilling down into conditions in every ward across the country.

The Youth Explorer also allows for comparisons within provinces and between different rural and urban areas, allowing policymakers to compare one area to the country as a whole.

To illustrate its usefulness, take the information that’s been put together comparing Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma’s rural home constituency, and Sandton, one of the country’s wealthier urban areas. The profile shows that:

• 22% of the population is between 15 and 24 years of age compared with just 10% in Sandton,
• Just under 50% of young people aged between 20 and 24 have completed matric or higher. The comparable figure in Sandton is about 88%,
• the NEETS category is about 31% in Nkandla and less than 7% in Sandton,
• 76% of young people live in households with no access to the internet in Nkandla, compared with 13% in Sandton,
• more than three quarters of people live in households where there is no employed adult, compared with 10% in Sandton, and
• More than 50% of Nkandla homes have no electricity, hardly any have flush toilets (13% have no toilets at all), and 33% live in overcrowded households (defined as more than two people to a habitable room). In Sandton, only 2% have no electricity, everyone has access to a flush toilet and only 1% live in overcrowded households.

Detailed information like this could lead to focused policy interventions that are in tune with young people’s local realities, and conversations that may be able to break the inter-generational cycle of inequality and poverty area by area.

It could help ensure that the South African dream of the “Born-Free” generation may not be entirely lost.

Emily Harris and Pippa Green co-authored this article.

Ariane De Lannoy, Senior Researcher: Poverty and Inequality Initiative, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Galapagos giant tortoises make a comeback, thanks to innovative conservation strategies

Giant tortoise on Pinzon Island, Galapagos.
Rory Stansbury, Island Conservation/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The Galapagos Islands are world-famous as a laboratory of biological evolution. Some 30 percent of the plants, 80 percent of the land birds and 97 percent of the reptiles on this remote archipelago are found nowhere else on Earth. Perhaps the most striking example is the islands’ iconic giant tortoises, which often live to ages over 100 years in the wild. Multiple species of these mega-herbivores have evolved in response to conditions on the island or volcano where each lives, generating wide variation in shell shape and size.

Over the past 200 years, hunting and invasive species reduced giant tortoise populations by an estimated 90 percent, destroying several species and pushing others to the brink of extinction, although a few populations on remote volcanoes remained abundant.

Remains of tortoises killed by hunters, Galapagos Islands, 1903.
R.H. Beck/Library of Congress

Now however, the tortoise dynasty is on the road to recovery, thanks to work by the Galapagos National Park Directorate, with critical support from nonprofits like the Galapagos Conservancy and advice from an international team of conservation scientists.

Together we are advancing a broad multiyear program called the Giant Tortoise Restoration Initiative, overseen by Washington Tapia, Linda Cayot and myself with major collaboration from Gisella Caccone at Yale University. Using many novel strategies, the initiative helps guide the Galapagos National Park Directorate to restore viable, self-sustaining tortoise populations and recover the ecosystems in which these animals evolved.

Back from the brink

As many as 300,000 giant tortoises once roamed the Galapagos Islands. Whalers and colonists started collecting them for food in the 19th century. Early settlers introduced rats, pigs and goats, which preyed upon tortoises or destroyed their habitat. As a result, it was widely concluded by the 1940s that giant tortoises were headed for oblivion.

After the Galapagos National Park was established in 1959, park guards halted killing of tortoises for food. Next, biologists at what was then known as the Charles Darwin Research Station did the first inventory of surviving tortoises. They also initiated a program to help recover imperiled species.

One species, the Pinzon Island tortoise, had not produced any juveniles for over 100 years because nonnative black rats were preying on hatchlings. In 1965 park guards started methodically removing eggs from tortoise nests, rearing the offspring to “rat-proof” size in captivity and releasing them back into the wild. More than 5,000 young tortoises have been repatriated back to Pinzon Island. Many are now adults. This program is one of the most successful examples of “head-starting” to save a species in conservation history.

Storpilot/Wikipedia

The Española tortoise, which once numbered in the thousands, had been reduced to just 15 individuals by 1960. Park guards brought those 15 into captivity, where they have produced more than 2,000 captive-raised offspring now released onto their home island. All 15 survivors are still alive and reproducing today, and the wild population numbers more than 1,000. This is one of the greatest and least-known conservation success stories of any species.

Eliminating nonnative threats

Over the past 150 years, goats brought to the islands by early settlers overgrazed many of the islands, turning them into dustbowls and destroying forage, shade and water sources that tortoises relied on. In 1997 the Galapagos Conservancy launched Project Isabela, the largest ecosystem restoration initiative ever carried out in a protected area.

Over a decade park wardens, working closely with Island Conservation, used high-tech hunting tactics, helicopter support and Judas goats – animals fitted with radio collars that led hunters to the last remaining herds – to eliminate over 140,000 feral goats from virtually all of the archipelago.

Building on lessons learned from Project Isabela, the Galapagos National Park Directorate and Island Conservation then eradicated nonnative rats from Pinzón Island in 2012, enabling tortoise hatchlings to survive and complete their life cycle again for the first time in a century.

One of the first hatchlings on Pinzon Island in over a century (click to zoom).
James Gibbs, Author provided

Restoring ecosystems with tortoises

The argument for tortoise conservation has been strengthened by reconceptualizing giant tortoises as agents whose actions shape the ecosystems around them. Tortoises eat and disperse many plants as they move around – and they are more mobile than many people realize. By attaching GPS tags to tortoises, scientists with the Galapagos Tortoise Movement Ecology Programme have learned that tortoises migrate tens of kilometers up and down volcanoes seasonally to get to new plant growth and nesting sites.

As they move, tortoises crush vegetation. They may be an important factor in maintaining the native savannah-like ecosystems on the islands where they live. When tortoises are scarce, we think that shrubs sprout up, crowding out many herbaceous plants and other animal species.

We need data to support this theory, so we have constructed an elaborate system of “exclosures” on two islands that wall tortoises out of certain areas. By comparing vegetation in the tortoise-free zones to conditions outside of the exclosures, we will see just how tortoises shape their ecosystems.

Building a tortoise exclosure.
James Gibbs, Author provided

Restoring ecosystems on islands where tortoises have gone extinct requires more drastic steps. Santa Fe Island lost its endemic giant tortoises more than 150 years ago, and its ecosystems are still recovering from a scourge of goats. Park managers are attempting to restore the island using an “analog,” nonnative species – the genetically and morphologically similar Española tortoise.

In 2015 the Galapagos National Park Directorate released 201 juvenile Española tortoises in the interior of Santa Fe Island. They all appear to have survived their first year there, and 200 more are scheduled for release in 2017. Española tortoises are still endangered, so this strategy has the extra value of creating a reserve population of them on Santa Fe island.

On Pinta Island, which also has lost its endemic tortoise, park managers have released sterilized nonnative tortoises to serve as “vegetation management tools” that can prepare the habitat for future introductions of reproductive tortoises. These initiatives are some of the first-ever to use analog species to jump-start plant community restoration.

Park rangers releasing juvenile giant tortoises from the Espanola Island lineage to Santa Fe Island in June 2015.
Galapagos National Park Directorate, Author provided

Reviving lost species

The endemic tortoises of Floreana Island are also considered to be extinct. But geneticists recently discovered that in a remote location on Isabela Island, tortoises evidently had been translocated from around the archipelago during the whaling era. In a major expedition in 2015, park rangers and collaborating scientists removed 32 tortoises from Isabela Island with shell features similar to the extinct Pinta and Floreana species.

Now the geneticists are exploring the degree of interbreeding of these 32 distinct tortoises between the extinct species and native Wolf Volcano tortoises. We are hoping to find a few “pure” survivors from the extinct species. Careful and selective breeding of tortoises in captivity with significant levels of either Pinta or Floreana ancestry will follow to produce a new generation of young tortoises to be released back on Pinta and Floreana Islands and help their ecosystems recover.

Removing a Wolf Volcano tortoise from Isabela Island for the Floreana tortoise restoration initiative.
Jane Braxton Little, CC BY-NC-ND

Converting tragedy to inspiration

Lonesome George, the last known living Pinta Island giant tortoise, died in 2012 after decades in captivity. His frozen remains were transferred to the United States and taxidermied by world-class experts. In mid-February Lonesome George will be returned to Galapagos once again and ensconced as the focus of a newly renovated park visitation center. Some 150,000 visitors each year will learn the complex but ultimately encouraging story of giant tortoise conservation, and a beloved family member will rest back at home again.

James P. Gibbs, Professor of Vertebrate Conservation Biology and Director of the Roosevelt Wild Life Station, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Young South Africans aren't apathetic, just fed up with formal politics

Children marching on the
anniversary of the Soweto uprising.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook

South Africa’s youth-led movements such as #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall provided contrasting view to perceptions that young people are apathetic and disinterested in the future of their country. But the protests didn’t quite dispel concerns about their lack of political involvement, particularly during elections where there’s been low youth voter turnout.

So we asked young people what they thought about politics. Our research involved focus groups with South Africans aged between 15 and 25 years of age from very different backgrounds. Sampled areas ranged from the rural Eastern Cape, to peri-urban Orange Farm and middle class Kensington, a Johannesburg suburb, amongst others.

Our findings challenge the widely reported perception that young people in South Africa are despondent and don’t care about politics or their role as citizens. What emerged from our research was a picture of young people with strongly defined opinions and knowledge of current affairs. Many said they were involved in some kind of civic activity.

All of the participants expressed a distrust of formal politics. But they also said they have a keen interest in the future of the country and are staking their claim in forging that future, albeit in different and new ways.

What was clear from the research is that young South Africans are engaging with politics very differently to the way in which young people got involved in the 1976 Soweto uprising. They have found new platforms and ways to share information, make their voices heard and ultimately be politically engaged on the back of growing internet based communication, especially social media.

In 1976 young people taught South Africa that they can’t be ignored. They are a powerful force that can shift the course of a country’s future. Today’s youth are no different. They are interested and engaged.

Distrust of formal politics

The people in our focus groups expressed distrust of formal political mechanisms such as voting, demonstrations, and membership of political parties.

Most indicated that they held little faith in the current leadership of the country. They found political leaders to be self-serving and disinterested in them and their communities. While they enjoyed watching parliament in action, this was because it provided entertainment value rather than serious content.

The discussions laid bare why many young people don’t vote. Most expressed alienation from all of South Africa’s political leaders. They said they didn’t know who they could trust or which political party would serve their interests.

As one put it:

Well, there’s ANC, an old promising party who is no longer keeping its promises, then follows the DA which is led and dominated by white people and you’d think when they are in power they may neglect us and care for whites only and also there is Malema who we think is going to corrupt us, so you just think it’s better not to vote.

They also said they didn’t see any point in voting given that there seemed to be little relation between what politicians said they would do versus what they actually did. A common sentiment is reflected in these quotes:

What is the point in voting? Nothing ever changes anyway.

We are not going to vote either because it’s not going to make a difference.

Personally for me I would vote for a party that I have seen making the biggest difference but everyone is fighting in parliament and they are not going out and making the difference that they are supposed to. And when it comes to voting time then all the municipalities jump up and start to do what they were supposed to do. I think that’s the thing. We don’t know who to vote for because no one is making a big difference.

This distrust and alienation often means that young people opt out of formal political processes such as voting and engagement with political parties.

But this should not be read to infer political disinterest and apathy. On the contrary, young people have found other ways to voice their opinions.

Different approaches

Social media is widely used, across the spectrum of youth interviewed, both to voice protest as well as to engage on issues they care about. And many said they have heated face-to-face discussions with their peers about key issues, particularly those affecting their own communities. All these approaches were more appealing, meaningful and accessible than political party membership and voting.

They also held very fervent issues-based views. The focus groups prompted heated debates about xenophobia and the role of foreign nationals in their communities. The participants also felt strongly about common challenges in their communities such as substance abuse, crime and teenage pregnancy.

Our research shows that young people are thinking about key issues in their communities and that they’re getting involved, particularly where issues affect them directly. The difference between this generation and the 1976 generation is that they’re doing so in non-formal ways.

The #feesmustfall campaign is a good example of this. It arose out of an issue that directly affected the lives of many young people. They did not feel that formal democratic processes served them, leading them to engage in a wave of protests driven largely by social media engagements across campuses.

Political parties trying to win the youth vote need to reconnect with where the majority of young people are, more so because young people will continue to form potentially the biggest proportion of the voter base at least until 2050. It’s time the country stopped stereotyping them as apathetic, disinterested and morally bankrupt and started engaging them in ways that are meaningful to them, and connect with the issues they’re interested in.

_This article was co-authored with Lauren Stuart, Thobile Zulu and Senzelwe Mthembu.

Lauren Graham, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Development for Africa, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why calling for a new climate deal isn't such a bad idea

A floating school in a Lagos Lagoon fishing community is threatened by climate change.
Reuters/Akintunde Akinleye

US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord was greeted with consternation in the rest of the world. Both the United Nations and former President Barack Obama described the decision as a major setback.

I find myself on the same side with the US leader on the Paris Accord, particularly on his call for a new climate deal although my reasons are very different to his. Trump argued that the treaty would affect US jobs and businesses. He also claimed that even if the Paris agreement was implemented in full, its impact on global temperatures would be negligible.

All these reasons have been fact-checked and there are grounds to question his analysis. But his call for a new climate deal or a renegotiation of the agreement would be an opportunity to make the agreement work better from an international law perspective.

The Paris Agreement is weak, lacks an enforcement mechanism and does not clarify liability for climate change. This puts developing countries that have contributed less to global warming at a disadvantage due to the fact that countries that have contributed the most towards global warming are not legally liable or compelled to assist developing nations to adapt to climate change.

The anticipation was that through the agreement, developed nations would fund the adaptation strategies of developing nations. But weaknesses in it mean that the flow of funds isn’t guaranteed. It’s estimated that the cost of meeting the demands of mitigation could reach well over $500 billion a year for developing countries.

The agreement’s objective is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change in the context of sustainable development. The pact requires countries to set goals to reduce carbon emissions. To monitor this, signatories are to meet every five years to report on their respective emissions levels and reductions.

Central to this agreement is the hope that, of their own accord, governments will prioritise the fight against climate change. The programme and targets that each country seeks to meet are nationally determined and implemented, taking into account their respective ability and circumstances.

What this effectively means is that each party has a wide discretion. They can choose what measures they’ll implement to combat climate change. Governments can also determine what financial sacrifices they’ll make. So, if a government chooses to fund its health and education sector rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions it is free to do so.

This means that there’s no institution or mechanism to determine if the measures taken by countries are sufficient. This could lead to a situation in which the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters simply point fingers at one another and while making the least effort to uphold the agreement.

A deal that doesn’t have proper accountability measures built into it and isn’t enforceable can’t be a good one – most particularly for developing countries.

Non-adversarial and non-punitive?

The job of overseeing the implementation of the Paris accord is vested in a committee. The agreement proposes that the committee be expert-based, facilitative in nature and functions in a way that’s transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive.

The use of the words “non-adversarial’ and "non-punitive” point to the voluntary nature of the pact. I believe this renders it ineffective. Even United Nations agreements backed by the threat of sanctions often don’t work. For instance, though the use of chemical weapons is banned, the United Nations Security Council failed to investigate fully, or punish, violations in Syria this year. What drove the drafters to imagine that the climate treaty would receive the attention it deserves with no enforcement mechanisms?

In fact, one would have expected the Paris agreement to rectify the challenges that have plagued the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Under this framework, countries have gathered each year at the Conference of Parties (COP) to negotiate agreements on how to combat climate change. In 1997, the conference adopted the Kyoto Protocol.

This was commendable in 1997 but research indicates that over the years countries actually failed to meet their Kyoto commitments. None faced any consequences and a perfect example would be Canada whose withdrawal from the Treaty extinguished any consequences for non-compliance. In addition, the US failed to ratify the protocol yet it was the largest emitter at the time of signing.

The seeds of the Paris agreement were sown in the Kyoto protocol. The major difference between the two is that the Kyoto protocol has targets for leading economies. This made it very unpopular which led to most states at the Paris conference demanding a more flexible approach.

Accountability

The reality is not every country will be able to combat the adverse effects of climate change effectively while still guaranteeing the well-being of its citizens.

The solution offered by the Paris Accord is to get developed countries to commit funds that will be facilitated through a UN framework to the benefit of developing countries. This essentially translates into vested economies like the China and the US subsidising the efforts of highly vulnerable regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia.

There is fairness in this arrangement since these regions don’t have a history of large emissions.

The World Resources Institute shows that China is the largest polluter followed by the US, EU, India, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Canada and Mexico. In line with the restorative principle, the Paris Accord came close to getting countries that warm up the globe to foot the bill for efforts to restore and preserve natural resources.

Unfortunately, coming close is all that it did.

In his official statement outlining the reasons for the US withdrawal, Trump repeatedly mentions his willingness to re-enter negotiations on a new deal. This call is not necessarily a bad thing. A new round on how we save planet earth would give leaders the opportunity to craft a binding and enforceable agreement.

Hopefully it would take into account actual environmental damage, loss and liability. And developing countries could demand accountability for greenhouse gas emissions.

Ilyayambwa Mwanawina, Senior Law Lecturer, North-West University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

South Africa will need a government of national healing after Zuma leaves

A government of national unity has served South Africa well before. It should consider forming another after President Jacob Zuma leaves office.
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South Africa’s march into a democracy was greatly helped by a multiparty government of national unity established after the 1994 elections.

The government of national unity, which governed from 1994 - 1999, has been largely credited with fostering unity of purpose and relative confidence between previously warring parties to build trust in a joint future. It laid the foundation for healing wounds as well as remarkable socioeconomic development. During the period it governed the country enjoyed an economic growth rate of close to 3% per annum.

Given the damage that’s being caused by President Jacob Zuma’s administration since he assumed power in 2009, the country will need elements of a government of national unity when he goes.

The fact that South Africa is in recession is only the latest in a growing list of Zuma-induced catastrophes. Others include credit rating agencies downgrading South Africa. Their decision was linked to a cabinet reshuffle widely seen as an attempt to capture key state institutions.

The state capture allegations have been corroborated by a number of credible parties including the former Public Protector, the South African Council of Churches as well as a group of academics who produced a report titled Betrayal of the promise: How South Africa is stolen.

These reports make it clear that high levels of corruption are at the root of the economic crisis gripping the country. Corruption has driven away investment, and as a result economic growth has suffered. It has also led to an erosion of trust in the government.

It’s therefore necessary to start debating what happens when Zuma goes. South Africa will need a government of national healing, administered by a government of national unity. This is the only way in which its citizens will be able to learn to trust one another again, as they did after 1994.

Healing will be needed

Governments of national unity have served some countries, including South Africa, well. Israel had several governments of national unity, while Kenya had one from 2008 to 2013. Greece had a government of national unity in 2011 to help the country deal with the aftermath of the international financial crisis.

A South African government of national unity should include representatives of all major political parties in parliament. Its role should be to:

• focus on restoring confidence in government institutions and in the government itself,
• restoring trust among people, and
• eradicating any form of corruption which, in turn, will restore trust in the government.

National healing requires sacrifices from all citizens to ensure a better future. A government that represented all key players in society, run by leaders appointed for their technical expertise rather than their political party loyalty, would be much better placed to ask people to make these sacrifices.

The question of a wealth tax is a good example. Already on the table for debate , a wealth tax could work well if it was presented as a contribution to the interests of the country has a whole.

But people would need an assurance that the money would be put to good use and not wasted. Only a freshly minted government could provide this.

A wealth tax could play an important role in national healing if it was implemented with the necessary circumspection. Given the fragility of the country’s economy, a number of key considerations would need to be taken on board. These would include whether there should be a once-off restitution tax for wealth redistribution, or an annual wealth tax.

Successes since 1994

The new government could draw on the considerable successes the South African government has achieved since 1994. This includes the fact that millions more people have basic services such as electricity and running water. The percentage of households with electricity has increased from 58% to 90% while those with access to running water has more than doubled from 7,2 million in 1995 to 15,2 million.

Institutions have been built to safeguard the country’s democracy. South Africa boasts an independent judiciary, despite attempts by the Zuma administration to undermine it. And the country’s central bank remains independent.

On top of this, there’s the goodwill of millions of South Africans with dreams for a better future for their children.

Dreams of a post-Zuma era

The government of national healing would have to create conditions for sustained economic growth, particularly a reduction in the country’s high unemployment rate. Strong but caring leadership will be needed to deal with a number of sticky issues that are limiting investment and job creation.

For example, the country needs to make it easy and attractive for entrepreneurs to do business. This will require a relaxation of labour laws, particularly for small business that suffer under the burden of cumbersome regulation. At the same time the removal of red tape for small and medium enterprises would help greatly.

Bold decisions, including privatisation, would also need to be made to deal with the country’s decaying state owned enterprises. Most, such as South African Airways and the national power utility Eskom, have become an unnecessarily heavy burden on the state.

Addressing the crisis in primary and secondary education would also have to be a priority. And devolving powers to the provinces from the central government would be another.

South Africa has exciting prospects and can look forward to rapid economic growth after the Zuma administration. South Africans need to start dreaming, planning and working towards a government of national healing.

Jannie Rossouw, Head of School of Economic & Business Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand

This article was originally published on The Conversation.