To fix South Africa's dysfunctional state, ditch its colonial heritage

South Africa’s Union Buildings in Pretoria.
Paul Saad/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently made an astonishing statement: that the country’s governance is collapsing. It takes extraordinary courage for a head of state and of the national executive to be so candid.

Ramaphosa’s statement followed the release of damning data about the state of governance in the country. For example, the most recent report from the Auditor General Kimi Makwetu showed that only 7% of the country’s municipalities are discharging their constitutional mandate. And only 8% were given a clean audit in the last financial year.

Hot on the heels of this report were parliamentary briefings which painted a gloomy picture of the state of public service. Added to this is the fact that a number of state owned enterprises have gained notoriety as conduits for patronage.

Does this suggest that South Africa is at the tipping point? I’m asking the question because an important determinant of a functioning state is its administration. As the British political scientist Andrew Heywood argues:

Political systems can operate without constitutions, assemblies, judiciaries, and even parties, but cannot survive without an executive branch to formulate government policy and ensure that it is implemented.

The administration of the state is key. A political system can be optimised or vitiated by the way in which public affairs are managed. Politics decides a system of government while the administration of the state institutionalises how these objectives are realised. In a democracy this is about enhancing the quality of citizens’ life.

To understand what’s behind the appalling state of governance in South Africa it’s more useful to look at causes, rather than just the problems. I argue the main driver is that South Africa’s democracy has been sacrificed at the altar of neo-liberalism - a system of organising society in which the markets are left unbridled and their principles thrust into various aspects of human life.

The rise of neoliberalism

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980s gave the neo-liberalism arsenal an unfettered edge. It was peddled as the panacea by international financial institutions and liberal scholars. Audaciously, an American political scientist and economist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in his book The End of History and the Last Man that the market economy and a democratic political system were the only means to achieve sustained growth and development.

The post-apartheid state was created just as these views were becoming more prevalent. This meant that the new state didn’t deconstruct the colonial architecture of its administration.

The African National Congress (ANC) also took over running the state with zero experience behind it.

In other words, the ANC ran into government in 1994 completely unprepared. As a result, it often embraced the colonial apartheid governance model.

The intersection of a neo-liberal approach and a colonial edifice eroded the state’s capacity to fulfil the mission of the liberation struggle. This was about “uplifting the quality of life of all South Africans, especially the poor, the majority of whom are African and female.”

In a neo-liberal framework, the people’s sovereignty is replaced by the market. The public good is commodified. State and the citizens assume a transactional relationship in which citizens are characterised as customers.

New public management

During the 1980s a template began to emerge for state reform along neo-liberal lines. It was called new public management. It remoulded the administration of the state according to private sector principles and practices, which saw the state becoming more service ensurer than service provider.

The approach dominated the 1980s but waned in the 1990s. South Africa embraced it anyway, and used it to frame the post-apartheid model for state administration.

The new public management approach became a staple diet in the education of students of government. They were taught that the performance of the state was the function of the economic value of efficiency, largely derived from privatisation cuts in public expenditure. The key is to maximise output with minimum input costs. It’s not about the “social effectiveness” of the state’s action - enhancing the wellbeing of the citizens.

This approach spawned inequality. Society is stratified along socio-economic lines. The hardest hit are the poor while the business, political and bureaucratic elites rich live lavishly.

As I have argued elsewhere, “democracy in conditions characterised by inequities in socio-economic gains is not sustainable, particularly in South Africa with the history of many decades systematic marginalisation” of other races.

Can governance be fixed?

South Africa’s governance challenge can’t simply be fixed by reorganising the structure of government, such as by reducing the size of the public service. It requires rethinking the ideological edifice that frames it, and daring to decolonise the administration of the state.

To get there, the idea that government should be run like a business has to be jettisoned and the idea that it should be like a democracy embraced. This should be linked to the concept of the public good, where democracy should be given a human face.

Iain McLean, a British professor of politics at Oxford University, offers this conception of the public good:

any good that, if supplied to anybody, is necessarily supplied to everybody, and from whose benefits it is impossible or impracticable to exclude anybody.

So how can this begin to happen in South Africa? As a crucial first step, governance requires new narratives. These must transcend neo-liberal prescriptions and colonial-apartheid entrapment, replacing them with the notion of the public good.

Mashupye Herbert Maserumule, Professor of Public Affairs, Tshwane University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The way history is taught in South Africa is ahistorical -- and that's a problem

History textbooks suggest that in 1994 when formal apartheid and racial exclusion ended, so did prejudice and racism.
United Nations Photo/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

History may soon be a compulsory school subject until Grade 12 in South Africa. A task team established by the country’s minister of basic education made this bold recommendation in a report released in early June.

The task team credits history education with three grand tasks. The first is developing critical thinking skills, particularly those relating to “evidence” and the unique concepts necessary to becoming an academic historian. The second is to develop identity, with a focus on pan-Africanism and nation building. The third is about social cohesion: the ability to transcend racial, class and ethnic barriers by recognising the problem of prejudice and the issues facing a multi-cultural society.

If history is taught correctly, the report argues, school-leavers should become capable of dealing with educational, social and political problems.

The task team isn’t unique in its position. It draws on decades of post-conflict literature which has argued that history education is important for memory and identity formation. Since history education equals social cohesion, the logic follows that more history education will equal more social cohesion.

The problem is that history education as it’s currently delivered may not achieve the desired outcomes. My ongoing fieldwork involves observing four racially diverse Grade 9 history classes in Cape Town, with learners who represent a range of social and economic statuses. The observations are taking place over the course of the academic year, interspersed by longitudinal interviews with the teachers and learners.

The findings suggest that even when students are knowledgeable about historical events, they struggle to explain how these events shape contemporary society.

History education needs a more explicit focus on historical consciousness if students are to become capable of dealing with South Africa’s social problems. This focus would help students to construct a relationship between past events and present-day reality so they can understand why we are the way we are.

Textbook tales

Developing historical consciousness would require a shift from what’s currently happening. Take for instance the contents of the Platinum Social Science Learner’s Book, which is prescribed for Grade 9 history pupils in South Africa.

The history discussed in this textbook touches upon a number of important subjects including human rights, racism and legal discrimination. It explores some of the turning points in the history of apartheid: the Sharpeville massacre, the Langa march, the Soweto uprising, and the release of Nelson Mandela.

The chapters emphasise the causes and consequences of historical moments. Students are taught to understand not only the apartheid regime’s human rights abuses, but also the nature of the resistance to that regime – which after a long struggle led to democracy in South Africa. However, the textbook’s lessons on apartheid end with the “historic” election of 1994.

That election is undoubtedly an achievement worth celebrating. But the implication in the textbook is that when apartheid ended in 1994, so did the poverty, racism, discrimination and violence that were aspects of the apartheid regime. There is absolutely no discussion of the lasting impacts of apartheid, or any link between South Africa’s current problems and its recent past.

This means is that it is often left up to individual teachers to make those links between the past and the present. Unsurprisingly, the teachers that I observe construct an historical consciousness in very diverse ways even though they are all teaching the same set of historically accurate events.

For example, one teacher explained to his racially homogeneous class that their lack of diversity was a direct result of apartheid. Another compared the fascist approaches of Nazi Germany to that of the apartheid state and placed them both firmly in the past.

This is not a judgement on the historical consciousness these teachers present. But it’s worth interrogating the diverse contemporary meanings that are being created around historical events when historical consciousness is absent from the curriculum.

Students’ views

Even more interesting were the responses of the pupils, who are all around 14 years old, as they explained how they saw the relationship between past and present.

A number of students had a good understanding of apartheid events. But the only way they could explain the country’s continued racialised wealth discrepancy was to state that black South Africans were lazy. Many did not draw upon structural or historical explanations when interpreting their own social reality.

One Xhosa-speaking black student who lives in a shack argued that apartheid had no lasting effects – because the white family whose home his mother cleans often speak to him kindly. Most of the students that I interviewed believed that the colonisation of South Africa was ultimately a positive thing because now we have “clothes, food and technology”. None of the students of any race believed that white people had any historic responsibility to address past wrongs.

These students were neither stupid nor ill-informed. So how should we make sense of their responses? Perhaps this is what social cohesion looks like in 2018. For the most part they were not angry about the past, because they don’t see the past as having a particular impact on their present lives. The past is a lesson to learn from, not something which stands in their way.

The question, though, is whether they are capable of dealing with educational, social and political problems if they view these problems as ahistorical. And if we discover that they can’t, then maybe we need to include some historical consciousness in the South African history curriculum before we make more of it compulsory.

Natasha Robinson, PhD Candidate and research consultant, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

What to look for when assessing South Africa's president, Ramaphosa

South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, has a tough job of fixing the damage caused during Jacob Zuma’s era.
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Now that Cyril Ramaphosa has served as South Africa’s president for more than three months, many pundits and ordinary citizens are assessing his performance. Some have argued that he’s doing a great job others are less impressed.

Whatever one’s view, perhaps the most important element to take into consideration when assessing Ramaphosa’s work so far is that he took the country’s reins under circumstances that were far from ideal. He stepped into the role vacated by President Jacob Zuma when he had to be recalled by his own party in order to allow Ramaphosa a greater latitude as a leader.

Since Ramaphosa was elected to the position by parliament rather than in a national poll, he will be hoping to secure his own full-term, and with good margins for his party, after the 2019 general elections. So far he has taken an inclusive approach to keep the ship steady towards the 2019 general elections.

He is treading a delicate balance between expressing his own distinct leadership and cultivating cohesion within his party. This is not without difficulty, as fissures deepen in the ANC’s KwaZulu-Natal province despite Ramaphosa’s quest to achieve unity. He has also failed to assert his will in the North West province, where his party is also riven by tensions.

And yet, Ramaphosa needs to be firm if he’s to reverse Zuma’s legacy that left behind a deeply damaged economy and state institutions.

He will not succeed if he becomes a teddy bear within his party, especially given its chaotic state. This is even important given the fact that the pro-Zuma faction is not giving up and will possibly mobilise against Ramaphosa at the 2022 elective conference of the African National Congress.

Ramaphosa should bear in mind that he does not have much time at the helm of government, since there is no South African president under democracy who has completed two terms in office.

Need for better focus

In his hastily delivered state of the nation address a day after he replaced Zuma, Ramaphosa presented a 10-point plan that emphasised the economy, renewal, and unity as the centrepieces of his presidency.

He’s come up with many ad-hoc initiatives and ideas. These include the jobs summit, the investment conference and the special investment envoy. He’s also been talking about reviving manufacturing, supporting black industrialists, boosting youth employment, growing the tourism sector, and a digital industrial revolution commission, among others.

These are all sensible and promising programmes. What they need to succeed is better rationalisation, clearer focus, and technocratic finesse. They will also need sound indicators to measure success. Otherwise they run the risk of gathering dust in filing cabinets.

Some good moves

There are some commendable practical steps Ramaphosa has taken so far, which will need a strong push to bear results. On the political front, Ramaphosa has managed to exercise influence over the core of the economic cluster in government. Agencies such as Treasury, Trade and Industry, Economic Development, and Mineral Resources are now steered by figures that enjoy credibility with the public and the private sector.

At the institutional level, he has taken little time to get on the work of overhauling leadership in struggling state owned enterprises. Boards at Eskom, Denel, Transnet and SAA Express were replaced with fresh blood and individuals that have experience and integrity. New leadership appointments have been made in the security cluster.

The head of the South African Revenue Services Tom Moyane, a known Zuma ally, has been suspended and is likely to be dispatched to the wilderness before his contract comes to an end.

Law enforcement agencies were quickly on the heels of those implicated in acts of corruption. Among those feeling the heat are the Gupta family which had been untouchable due to its closeness to Zuma and their allies like the former minister of mineral resources Mosebenzi Zwane. Even the ANC general secretary Ace Magashule is feeling the pressure.

Ramaphosa’s short tenure has, no doubt, brought a sense of urgency in cleaning up government and other state institutions. This is something to be encouraged. However, the road ahead requires much more.

Beyond slogans

Beyond a set of programmes and short-term plans, Ramaphosa needs to develop strong signature themes that define his leadership, and not just piecemeal programmes. He needs to express a clearly discernible mission beyond the feel-good slogan, “Thuma Mina”, a campaign to galvanise citizen activism in addressing the country’s challenges.

Whatever people think of former South African leaders such as Nelson Mandelaand Thabo Mbeki, their leadership had strong imprints that were felt early on. Whether it was reconciliation and nation-building, in the case of Mandela, or African renaissance, in the case of Mbeki, what their presidency stood for was clear. Ramaphosa is yet to show his leadership identity.

However Ramaphosa’s record is assessed, people should not lose focus on the responsibility of citizens to keep leaders accountable. They should not allow themselves to be reduced to applauding spectators. Leaders are here today and gone tomorrow.

Positive efforts should by all means be supported but citizens must avoid complacency at all costs. They can play a critical part in contributing meaningfully to consolidate the country’s democracy and promoting social change by getting involved in initiatives that seek to address social ills.

Matlala Setlhalogile coauthored this article. He lectures politics at the University of Johannesburg.

Mzukisi Qobo, Deputy Chair: SA Research Chair on African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, University of Johannesburg

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

There's a new way of measuring poverty in South Africa: Here's how it works

A poverty index is revealing new insights about deprivation in South Africa.
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There’s more to understanding a country’s poverty levels than merely calculating how much or how little individuals earn. That’s why a method called the multidimensional poverty index was introduced globally in 2011.

The multidimensional poverty index reflects aggregate levels derived from a number of socioeconomic indicators. These include education, health, standard of living and labour market activity. It unveiled new insights about the nature of poverty around the world.

South Africa had been watching with interest. In 2014, Statistics South Africa adopted the multidimensional poverty index into understanding the nature of the country’s poverty. The move produced the South African multidimensional poverty index (SAMPI).

Before this, the picture of the country’s poverty was mainly informed by the money-metric approach, which examines the proportion of the population with income below the minimum level required for survival (poverty line).

The SAMPI is still a relatively new and thus developing method. With that in mind, our recently published study zoomed into Statistics South Africa’s new multidimensional approach, pointed out and addressed numerous shortcomings in the method. We were then able to develop a more granular version of SAMPI. Our version focused on smaller geographical units in South Africa, namely district municipalities, from 2001 to 2011. The aim was to identify, more clearly, the location and characteristics of the poorest individuals.

The most important finding of our study is in refinement of the SAMPI by indicator. It shows that unemployment contributed the most to SAMPI, followed by years of schooling and disability. The results indicate that the government needs to move with urgency in its efforts of boosting job creation and improving quality and access to education and healthcare.

Some good news

Our version of SAMPI found a generally downward trend in the proportion of deprived population for all indicators, except the disability indicator, between 2001 and 2011, as reflected in the figure below.

Proportion of population deprived in each indicator (%)
From the authors

But we also found some alarming indications. In 2011 just under half of the population still did not have access to a flush toilet and refuse removal at least once a week. These two proportions were 53% and 50% for Africans but only 1% and 9% for the white population.

We found that poverty was most severe amongst female Africans living in rural areas in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo provinces. In 2011, the top five least deprived district municipalities were West Coast, Cape Winelands, Overberg, City of Johannesburg and City of Cape Town.

In contrast, Alfred Nzo a district municipality in the Eastern Cape was the most deprived district. It was followed by OR Tambo also in the Eastern Cape, uMzinyathi (KwaZulu-Natal), Harry Gwala (KwaZulu-Natal) and Chris Hani (Eastern Cape).

One encouraging finding was that the most deprived districts in 2011 were also the ones enjoying the most rapid absolute decline in the multidimensional poverty index between 2001 and 2011. This result is not surprising given the government’s effort to improve the provision of free basic services since the democratic transition.

The key drivers

It should be no surprise that unemployment contributed the most to multidimensional poverty index. South Africa’s unemployment rate has remained stubbornly high and is currently seating at 26.7%. This rate is shockingly high for the youth aged 15-29 years at 44.3%. Nearly half of the unemployed youth struggle to find the first job.

The couple of initiatives directed at addressing youth unemployment have not made a difference. These include the Employment Tax Incentives Bill or the Youth Wage Subsidy. Only time will tell if the newly introduced Youth Employment Service initiative would change the situation.

It’s been clear for a while that the South African economy changed into one that has greater demand for more educated and high skilled workers. This dynamic is not being addressed adequately. In 2017 only 53% of African job seekers aged 21-25 years completed Matric. This proportion was 83% for the white counterparts.

South Africa was ranked second from the bottom in Grade 8 Mathematics and last in Grade 8 Science mean test score in the 2015 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. South Africa was also ranked last in Grade 4 Reading mean test of the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. The disappointing performance of South African learners in these tests strongly suggests the presence of poor quality education at most schools, which subsequently becomes a crucial factor that sustains and deepens poverty.

The under performance of learners has to do with a wide range of factors. These include family socio-economic status, access to basic learning resources such as textbooks and school facilities, teacher quality, remuneration and absenteeism, and even quality of preschool education. All these areas should receive urgent policy attention.

Data from the 2016 General Household Survey indicated that when feeling ill, only 55% of Coloureds and 60% of Africans consulted healthcare workers (compared to 80% in the case of Indians and whites). Also, about 20% of African-headed households living in poorer provinces, such as Limpopo, needed more than half an hour to visit the nearest health facility.

And the proportion of households claiming they were very satisfied with the quality of healthcare services received was relatively low for certain demographic groups. It was 58% for African-headed households but 86% for white-headed households. It was 55% in KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Northern Cape but nearly 70% in Western Cape.

A better understanding of public healthcare issues in terms of access and quality is needed, especially given imminent major health reforms via the proposed National Health Insurance.

Room for improving the SAMPI further

The SAMPI has revealed new and useful insights into the nature of South African poverty. These can be used by policy makers to come up with more informed interventions. And our version has produced an even more refined understanding. But there is still room to improve the SAMPI further by considering other non-money-metric poverty indicators like transport assets, financial assets, physical and social isolation and vulnerability and helplessness.

This is an extract from the journal article titled “Multidimensional poverty in South Africa, 2001-2011”, which the writer co-authored with Tina Fransman, an Economics Masters graduate at the University of the Western Cape.

Derek Yu, Associate Professor, Economics, University of the Western Cape

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Patience with Ramaphosa's presidency is waning among South Africans

Patience might be running out for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
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South Africa’s new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has just crossed 100 days in office with increasing signs that his honeymoon period is already over. The economic realities are hitting home. And the accompanying impatience which seemed suspended since he took over in February is reemerging.

Ramaphosa’s tenure came with renewed hopes about the future of the country’s economy. His state of the nation address, followed by the national budget, raised optimism that the economy would soon rebound. This followed President Jacob Zuma’s rule which wrecked the economy through a series of corruption scandals and destructive economic decisions.

Given the depths to which Zuma had taken the country, it was easy for the Ramaphosa euphoria to emerge. A couple of speeches promising a “new dawn” did the trick. The people ululated and the markets cheered.

But it would seem that the honeymoon is over. Patience is waning and giving way to protests against long standing grievances. The failure by the ANC government to deliver basic services and endemic corruption is driving people to the streets.

Many celebrated the decision by one of the top three credit rating agencies to leave South Africa’s rating unchanged. What they missed was it’s long list of warnings.

I believe that this all adds up to the need to be extremely cautious about the country’s immediate future. The real test for Ramaphosa’s presidency is how he will respond to the immediate pressing needs. The people, markets and rating agencies will stand waiting to judge. The latest economic growth figures, showing a 2.2% dip in gross domestic product (GDP) during the first quarter of this year, is not a good sign.

A closer reading of S&Ps decision

S&P downgraded South Africa’s sovereign rating to sub-investment grade towards the end of last year, warning that further downgrades were possible. The country’s economy was in a perilous state and faced the possibility of slipping deeper into sub-investment grade.

Against this backdrop, S&P’s most recent decision, not to downgrade South Africa further, was greeted with delight. But its decision can be interpreted from two perspectives.

On the one hand, the decision was a sign that the rating agency was impressed that the country’s position has not deteriorated further since its last downgrade in November 2017.

The other view is that S&P acknowledged that the country has not done much to improve its fiscal position which remains significantly weak. By keeping the country’s outlook stable, the rating agency is anticipating the economy could improve modestly in the near future if certain reforms are undertaken. But it’s also a warning that should there be deterioration it will be forced to do another downgrade.

What’s been done, and not done

Ramaphosa’s government has largely focused on saving key institutions ravaged by the patronage of the Zuma era. This include the police and prosecuting agencies and state-owned enterprises.

There have been big changes in the management of key state-owned enterprises such as the power utility Eskom, regional airline SA Express, defence company Denel and transport and logistics enterprise Transnet.

This shows that Ramaphosa’s government is committed to rooting out corruption and improving service of these enterprises.

But a number of issues remain problematic. First, the country’s economic growth figures remain subdued and are likely to stay that way for a while. That’s because government is still not showing any firm commitment to undertake structural reforms that are required to jump-start growth.

Secondly, unemployment remains significantly high with no practical solution in sight besides a proposed job summit. South Africa’s unemployment stands at 26.7%. The rate is much higher, around 36%- if disgruntled work seekers are included. Youth unemployment stands at more than 52%. Something drastic is required to tackle this problem. Nothing from the prevailing talk fits the bill.

Thirdly, government’s debt burden continues to rise. This is on the back of low growth and a rising social service bill. The bloated civil service and cabinet are not helping the situation. Ramaphosa had a chance to review the cabinet size when he reshuffled it in February but he let it slip presumably for fear of unsettling political support. The continued power balance within the ruling party means that he will shy away from taking hard decisions like rationalising the civil service.

There is also the lingering financial burden posed by state owned enterprises. Besides improvements in their governance, many are run on fundamentally unviable funding models, making it impossible for them to be weaned from government support.

And finally there are the disturbing uncertainties around the ANC’s move to undertake expropriation of land without compensation. This is undermining the pledge to restore policy certainty and improve economic growth.

Possible solutions

Ramaphosa has inherited a ruling party and government faced with a tricky overriding challenge. The ANC is getting increasingly pressured by its voter base to deal with poverty and inequality. And the noise coming from populist groups like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is piling up the pressure. Arguably, it is this dynamic which led to the adoption of the land expropriation without compensation resolution at the ANC conference in December last year.

And so the government finds itself trying to strike a balance between addressing poverty and inequality while maintaining property rights and ensuring food security.

The main priority of the government should be centred on growing the economy to create jobs and reduce poverty. This could be achieved with structural economic reforms. These could include liberalising the labour market by making changes to the employment laws to lower the costs of hiring and firing workers in order to improve the ability of companies to respond to market shocks.

Economic reforms should include the removal of bottlenecks in the product and service markets to allow establishment and sustenance of small businesses. In addition, the reforms must aim at improving the country’s delicate taxation system through broadening the tax base with targets to reduce social spending in the medium to long-term.

Misheck Mutize, Lecturer of Finance and Doctor of Philosophy Candidate, Graduate School of Business (GSB), University of Cape Town

This article was originally published on The Conversation.