David Duke speaks about the situation in Southern Africa that the
mainstream media would rather have you not know anything about!
Kill the Boers, the song is sung by the majority, and for years now,
nothing is done to stop the killing of farmers. Horrific, gruesome and
senseless murders of innocent people that plague the country, yet the
government fails to act.
To watch the video - please click on the South Africa Today Link -
Department has doubled placement but waiting lists are growing
By Moira Levy
12 July 2017 A year ago, <a
href="http://www.groundup.org.za/article/21-year-old-wheelchair-just-wants-go-school/">GroundUp
reported on 21-year-old </a>Montoedi Nyangweni (photographed here
with his mother, Nokukhuthala) who stopped school at grade 6 because of
his disability and wants to return to school. He is still not in school
and he needs a wheelchair. Photo: Manqulo Nyakombi
At a meeting of the Basic Education Portfolio Committee on the
provision of education for children with disabilities, MP Sonja Boshoff
(DA) raised serious doubts about the department’s claim that there are
11,461 disabled learners waiting for schools.
Boshoff believes the department’s figure does not come close, given that past figures place the number of children not in school
because of disability at 300,000. Waiting lists for special schools
increase every year, and those still waiting are getting too old to
attend school as there are age limits for admission to schools.
The committee had called in the Department of Basic Education for a progress report on delivery of inclusive education and special education for children with disability.
Boshoff said she had seen children with disabilities in Mpumalanga
who are out of school, but the provincial education department informed
her it had no waiting list. The province says all children with special
needs have been placed in ordinary schools until space is found for them
in special schools.
KwaZulu-Natal reports 2,769 children with disability on its waiting list. The waiting list in the Eastern Cape is 2,160.
The South African Schools Act says that no learner should be put on
the waiting list; their names are supposed to be placed on a central
database if schools cannot accommodate them.
The Constitution, the National Development Plan, the Sustainable
Development Goals, and the Incheon Declaration of the World Education
Forum were referred to in the committee meeting. They all confirm that
the state has a commitment to provide schooling for children with
disabilities.
The number of children with disabilities receiving some form of
education has almost doubled over the last 15 years, according to the
department.
It reported there are 464 special schools in South Africa and another
715 “full service” schools that make some sort of provision for
children with disabilities.
The committee was satisfied to hear that the department had reached
its target of placing more than 240,000 such learners in schools at the
last count in 2015.
The numbers may have improved and R477-million was set aside this
year to assist learners with severe to profound intellectual
disabilities to access support and quality education, but even 11,461 is
a lot of children awaiting intervention.
Recent evidence has also shown a number of the “full service” schools
do not have the basic facilities required to qualify, such as ramps,
suitable toilets and support staff.
Often little or no provision is made for children with disabilities
in poor and rural areas. There are only 11 special schools in the
Northern Cape and no units or special classes attached to ordinary
schools throughout that vast province.
Other departments need to play their part
In response to questions from committee members who wanted to know
when the last audit of special schools was conducted, Dr Moses Simelane,
Director for Inclusive Education, said the official number of children
living with disabilities who are out of school is close to accurate
since the department has entered into a memorandum of understanding with
StatsSA.
What also helps keep track is the department’s cooperation with the
departments of social development and health, Home Affairs, and the
South Africa Social Security Agency.
The department said it cannot achieve anywhere near universal
education for the disabled unless other government departments, like
Health and Transport, play their part.
The provision of transport across the provinces is skewed. Provinces
like Limpopo and Mpumalanga do not have enough school transport for
special schools and fee-paying schools are required to fund their buses,
which have to adhere to certain requirements.
Children with disabilities are kept at home for many reasons. These
range from incontinence to the dire shortage of properly trained
educators equipped to deal with possible medical emergencies.
But of most concern to the committee was that the majority of
children with disability are stuck at home because there is not enough
space to accommodate them.
Another concern was that special schools have not been declared “no fee” schools and many parents were unable to pay the fees.
Director General Mathanzima Mweli agreed that the time has come for
special schools to be declared no fee schools. He said the department
needs to prioritise this.
Published originally on
GroundUp
.
On Tuesday, June 27, it will be 50 years since the first automated cash dispenser – which came to be known as an automated teller machine (ATM) – was inaugurated in London.
Just thinking about it brings a smile to my face. I belong to the generation who stood 45 minutes to an hour to deposit or cash checks in the pre-ATM era. I remember getting yelled at for taking my bicycle through the drive-up line at the National Bank of Detroit to avoid the much longer line inside. It did not take me very long to become an early adopter of the magical cards and 24-hour banking.
Later, in my work as a historian of American religion, I extensively studied the role money has played in religious life. In my book, “In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism,” I retold the American history of the nation’s largest religious stream in terms of the search for money to pay for religious ministries and the purposes for which churches spent the money they collected.
So, what impact did ATMs have on church life?
Giving to the church
Fundamentally, the legal separation of church and state in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States did more than simply assure freedom of religion – it privatized what until then in Europe had been a public good and provided funding under the auspices of the state. In the U.S., religious leaders and their ministries had to increasingly depend on voluntary donations and to appeal ever more strenuously for those gifts.
Over the 19th century, various church support schemes were tried and abandoned. What in Europe had been a discreet offering with alms boxes kept at the back of the church (alms for the poor) became a central ritual activity in America. In most American weekly church services, offering plates were passed around to finance all of church activities. As giving became very public, one of the features of the weekly offering was, of course, that all gathered could see who was giving, if not how much.
Once the age of plastic money arrived, all of this ritual and financial necessity in American churches was jeopardized. ATMs began appearing in churches, providing a way for people to come up with the ready cash to give to God and their church.
Nature of money
There are social and moral dimensions to money. Andrei Korzhyts
So, why did people need cash in the first place? To answer this question, it is important to first understand the nature of cash in context of religious life.
The German sociologist Georges Simmel famously noted that the essential, almost magical quality of money is that it is fungible – that is, it is exchangeable or replaceable. Individuals can use the same US$100 to buy drugs, feed a frugal family for a week, buy a designer scarf or give it to God in an offering plate.
To illustrate, Zelizer narrates the striking example of Marty, a 1950s Philadelphia gang member who would donate to the church only the 25 cents that he got from his mother – not money from robberies. When asked, Marty provided a clear distinction between different sets of money. He said,
“Oh, no, that is bad money; that is not honest money.”
But the money he got from his mother was earned through hard work so “he could offer it to God.” Marty is the kind of person who, when asked, “Who would know? would reply, "God would.” The point is, not all dollars are equal – individuals have some strong ideas about clean and dirty money, or just appropriate and inappropriate money.
Here is where ATMs come into the story.
Donations in the age of ATMs
Automated teller machines started to make their first appearance in the lobbies of evangelical churches just over a dozen years ago. It was important for churches to have something to put into the collection plate, and it was important that it be cash that people actually possessed – not a promise to pay someday on their credit card accounts. Thus, the ATM allowed evangelicals who didn’t carry a checkbook or a wallet full of cash not to be embarrassed when the offering plates or baskets came around.
ATMs began to appear in churches to increase donations. Mingo Hagen, CC BY
Marty Baker, pastor of the Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Georgia, was widely credited as the first to install two ATMs in the church lobby in 2005. The first year the donations produced $100,000. They more than doubled by the next year to more than $200,000. He was so successful in increasing giving by making cash available (up 18 percent over pre-ATM machine levels) that he took it one step further, by introducing the “automatic tithing machine” that took cash out of the giver’s account and deposited it directly into the church’s coffers. This new ATM was beginning to virtualize the all-important collection. Some users responded by placing their receipts in the plate at the appropriate time in the service.
The tithe, of course, refers to the tenth of one’s income conservative Protestants are largely taught to pay to the church in gratitude for what God has done. It is a sacred obligation, and the cash money is a serious matter.
There are two interesting dimensions of this appearance of ATMs and churches to consider. One is the strong affinity between cash and conservative evangelicals. For many evangelicals debt is a form of bondage – a message conveyed through conservative radio financial guru Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University to tens of millions of his followers on AM radio each week in his call-in programs. Ramsey teaches how to “dump debt, budget, build wealth and give like never before!” The building of wealth is a corollary to eschewing debt and it makes Christians free, in Ramsey’s view to be godly.
The second dimension for consideration in the appearance of ATMs in the lobbies of evangelical churches is that they signaled something by their very presence: America was in fact becoming a cashless society. The debit card that people carried in their wallet could be just as good as cash anywhere else, but in the sanctuary, cash was the appropriate offering.
So as in the ancient world where Jews from all over the world exchanged their secular coins in the Court of the Gentiles in Jerusalem’s Second Temple for coins with no image on them that they could use inside to make various offerings and purchase sacrifices, today’s believers also needed to make an exchange.
Those ancient believers were obeying the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt make no graven images,” Exodus 20:4–6). American Christians were, by contrast, partial to greenbacks with the words, “In God We Trust” on them.
Who would’ve guessed 50 years ago when the automatic teller machine was invented that this modern human financial interface would also play a part in the interface between human beings and their God?
Demonstrators march against corruption in South Africa. Reuters/Mike Hutchings
The prevailing economic crisis sweeping through South Africa is a direct result of economic mismanagement largely shaped by the looting of state owned enterprises.
Many are in deep trouble. Sheer incompetence and corruption has pushed entities like South African Airways and the South African Broadcasting Corporation closer to financial collapse. Serious questions are being asked about the legality of multi-billion rand procurements at Transnet and the state power utility Eskom.
The scale of the problem has been brought into sharp relief in recent weeks by two developments that show corruption in state owned enterprises has been unfolding for years. The first was the release of a report written by academics: Betrayal of the Promise. The second was the leaking of 200 000 emails which point to dubious links between the Gupta family, senior politicians and officials.
The country stands to slip deeper into crisis unless the lust for loot is stopped. The economy is already in deep trouble. It’s in recession, and worse is to come. The second quarter GDP figures will reflect that a third rating agency has downgraded the country’s credit rating.
There are some indications that the tide may be turning but the job of reforming the state owned enterprises will have to go beyond just replacing board members. It must also focus on ensuring greater accountability financial responsibility, and performance management.
Unfortunately the severely fractured African National Congress (ANC) is incapable of reversing the slide. Instead, it’s more concerned with outsmarting the growing opposition to President Jacob Zuma’s rule suppressing internal rebellion, and maintaining the crumbling patronage network.
Unaffordable
The increasing inefficiency in state owned enterprises continues to put pressure on the country’s fiscus. This is not something it can afford. Ratings agencies have made it clear that they’re monitoring continuous bailouts and government guarantees. This is because they pose a serious threat to government’s fiscal balances and policy priorities.
Government guarantees to state owned enterprises stood at R467 billion at the end of 2015/16. Standard & Poor’s forecasts they will swell to over R500 billion by 2020 – 10% of South Africa’s current GDP. This is more than twice the government contingents in year 2015/2016.
These bailouts have weighed on the fiscus, pushing government debt into dangerous territory. Even before the downgrades South Africa’s debt burden was higher than other emerging markets. Moody’s forecasts that total government debt will reach 55% of GDP by 2018 and will continue to rise after that.
The reason government continues to bail out state owned enterprises is purely due to the fact that they are being managed badly.
The financial markets are increasingly unwilling to tolerate such excuses. This can be seen by the recent subscription failure of Transnet’s bond auction. And some private asset managers have become extremely cautious about lending money to public entities.
The way forward
The new Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba has so far failed to inspire confidence. Allegations that he is deeply mired in the web of scandals are not helping the situation.
Gigaba recently declared that state owned enterprises are functioning well and doing “great work”. This is surprising given the rot being revealed on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, the patronage network that stands accused of milking state owned enterprises has started to crumble. This includes the axing of Hlaudi Motsoeneng from the South African Broadcasting Corporation and Molefe from Eskom. Ben Ngubane has resigned as chairperson of the Eskom board.
There are also signs that public and private pressure is forcing some government ministers to take responsibility for their departments. Examples include Minister of Public Enterprises Lynne Brown, Communications Minister Ayanda Dlodlo and the Minister of Police Fikile Mbalula.
Nevertheless, the key implication of the Gupta emails is that reversing the deep damage inflicted on the country must start with reforming state owned enterprises. Reversing the rot will take decades. It should begin by ensuring that measures agreed last year are implemented.
These include:
holding the corrupt public servants to account,
closing loopholes in public procurement to ensure that history isn’t repeated, and
appointing suitably qualified and experienced technocrats rather than unqualified politically connected individuals.
Finally, some state owned enterprises will need to be privatised. This is because they operate as monopolies in key sectors which is perpetuating gross inefficiencies. Only privatisation will end these distortions.
For many years, government has claimed that South Africa’s many challenges could be overcome by adopting policies of a “developmental state”. This would entail active state involvement in economic activity and using its resources to tackle poverty and expand economic opportunities.
But the ongoing revelations show that even before South Africa can consider becoming a developmental state, it will first have to root out the ingrained predatory state. Only then can investor confidence begin to be restored, recovery restarted and rating downgrades reversed.
Stable food prices are a central issue for South Africa’s Reserve Bank. But should it be doing more to protect the poor? Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Debates on monetary policy in South Africa over the last couple of decades seem to have come from a madhouse. First, in the 1990s the country had old discredited Washington Consensus policies rammed down its throat. This was done with little regard for alternative progressive ideas and little or no democratic debate or public participation.
And then recently the country’s Public Protector, Busisiwe Mkhwebane released a report that made sweeping populist recommendations about the South Africa Reserve Bank. The report favoured revising the country’s constitution and a binding recommendation for a monetary policy regime that excludes any reference to price stability. A mandate like this simply doesn’t exist in any comparable country with a well-developed private banking system.
To put the report in context we want to focus on basic monetary policy principles that have been debated for centuries by serious thinkers and scholars. We also explore how South Africa can move the debate forward constructively and responsibly.
Broadly, thinkers on monetary policy can be considered on a scale with “sound money” advocates on the one side, and those concerned that money and banking must serve the productive economy – let’s call them “serve-society” advocates – on the other.
We locate ourselves unambiguously on the “serve-society” side of the debate. We agree with William Lowndes who served in the British Treasury in 1695, who said that money supply must serve society. Thomas Attwood in the 19th Century, John Maynard Keynes, the trade union leader Ernest Bevin and Hyman P Minsky in 20th Century, concurred.
Unlike Mkhwebane’s report, these economists, particularly Keynes and Minsky, understood that currency and money markets under capitalism have a nasty tendency to be unstable. That’s why the regulatory and lender of last resort function of the Reserve Bank is so vital. (When the operations of the inter-banking lending market cease to operate, the lender of last resort is the entity – usually a Central Bank – that has sufficient liquidity to lend to banks short of funds.)
The South African Reserve Bank has performed these roles moderately well for almost a century. The country hasn’t had a systemic banking crises since the formation of the Reserve Bank in 1921. Experts in the field Calomiris and Haber, 2004, find that South Africa is among the most stable top 13 banking systems in the world. The Reserve Bank should take credit for much of that.
That doesn’t mean that it’s beyond criticism which is why a serious debate is needed. The debate doesn’t need to rely on the ideas of fringe adventurers and crackpots. The country has a wealth of intellectual talent on monetary and central banking policy inside and outside its universities that straddle the ideological spectrum. The country’s public intellectuals in the unions and in civil society organisations have excellent ideas on central banking and monetary policy. Ordinary citizens should be drawn in too.
One thing is clear: things cannot remain as they are because so much is changing in the world of central banking and in economic life.
The two camps
Sound money thinkers tend to view banking as just another business, best left to the free market. Historically sound money economists have preferred deregulation of the banking system. But since the spectacular collapse of thousands of banks in many parts of the world in the 1930s, and the banking and financial crises after 2008 , very few now propose abolishing the lender of last resort function of central banks.
Sound money economists now want central bankers bound by rules, rather than allowing for discretion. But they still focus on the virtues of trade and private finance.
For their part, “serve-society” advocates worry about production, employment and growth.
Keynes – by no measure a crank or a crackpot – was very much in favour of adjusting monetary and fiscal policy where necessary. He was a passionate advocate of sound banking and financial regulation because he understood the inherent instability of capitalism. He warned that getting it wrong could massively increase poverty and unemployment.
In 1933 he proposed three safeguards when shifting economic policy priorities: Firstly, don’t be doctrinaire. Secondly, he maintained that “the economic transition of a society is a thing to be accomplished slowly”. And thirdly, don’t allow “intolerance and the stifling of instructed criticism”. For those not in public office he offered this final piece of advice:
Words ought to be a little wild – for they are the assault of thought on the unthinking.
A changing world
Conventional notions of what central banks are, and of what they should do, face a number of challenges. For example, the processes of technological innovation, including the growth of crypto currencies like Bitcoin, are rapidly reshaping some of the core functions of central banks.
And over the last three decades a number of economic factors have forced central banks to review their roles. They’ve had to do so to align their functions with other states in the wake of greater economic regionalisation, the creation of monetary unions and the establishment of regional central banks.
The events of 2008 also shook confidence in the ability of central banks to use their reputedly vast capacity and skills to predict and head off the crisis. This has been particularly true as far as their regulatory responsibilities to promote financial stability are concerned.
As pointed out by Princeton Professor and former deputy-Governor of the Banque du France, Jean Pierre Landau, a return to the status quo ante in respect of central bank policy is neither desirable nor indeed feasible.
Despite this warning the status quo ante is being defended all over the world as if nothing has changed, and as if all is well in our economies.
Let the debate begin
After the release of the Public Protector’s report the Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, Lesetja Kganyago, offered the potential space to begin a serious debate about South African monetary policy aimed at creating a more inclusive and prosperous society and economy.
But, he warned, such a discussion would have to be based on “evidence and sound analysis”.
In our view ideas must come from across the ideological spectrum. And they must be debated in legitimate and properly structured forums. One place to begin the discussion would be Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Finance.
Other structures – such as the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Forums (as proposed by the governor) and forums led by business, labour and civil society organisations as well as universities – need to keep up the momentum.
There must be no place for defensive postures, arrogance or condescension. The debate must be guided by one overriding objective: to improve the quality of life of the many South Africans for whom the end of apartheid has brought no real material change? It must consider the impact of change on employment, investment and growth.
Who would’ve guessed 50 years ago when the automatic teller machine was invented that this modern human financial interface would also play a part in the interface between human beings and their God?
But the ongoing revelations show that even before South Africa can consider becoming a developmental state, it will first have to root out the ingrained predatory state. Only then can investor confidence begin to be restored, recovery restarted and rating downgrades reversed.
There must be no place for defensive postures, arrogance or condescension. The debate must be guided by one overriding objective: to improve the quality of life of the many South Africans for whom the end of apartheid has brought no real material change? It must consider the impact of change on employment, investment and growth.
