South Africa deserves growth and opportunity, not fake transformation
Key topics:
Fake transformation policies deepen unemployment, poverty and poor services
Race-based empowerment fails, IRR calls for non-racial alternatives
Real growth needs jobs, infrastructure, property rights and investment
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.
Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.
If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.
By Chris Patterson*
South Africa is a place not of grievance, but of opportunity.
I’ve been reading Tony Leon’s Hope & Fear: Reflections of a Democrat and though I wasn’t yet even a thought in my parents’ mind when the book appeared in the late 1990s, I can “feel” the vision, the hope, the potential and freedom that the new South Africa embodied in that period.
But as time has gone by, as dreams have been sandblasted by reality, the future promised by politicians has gone pear-shaped for many. The hopes of millions now lie dashed.
South Africans are sick and tired of fake transformation. The economy is scraping by, and millions are unemployed. Those lucky enough to have a job are living from pay-check to pay-check. Millions are reliant on the government for a social grant falling in value with each passing year. This is no way to live.
Victims of fake transformation
Fake transformation, however, is not victimless. It impacts mothers and their newborn children, unable to access the vital resources they need in hospitals, left to sleep on concrete floors due to a lack of beds. Also toddlers, whose parents are unable to secure access to quality Early Childhood Development Centres, let down by educators who are simply incapable of imparting knowledge. The child then goes to a substandard public school without working lights, no books to write in, no stationery to use. Their parents can’t afford these basics, because they’re two of the nearly 12 million South Africans either unemployed or discouraged work-seekers. The government has wasted the money meant for no-fee schools on a useless court case for a conflict in the Middle East, to name but one example.
By the time the child reaches grade 4 – due to the lack of teachers’ pedagogical skills – they will be one of the 81% of Grade 4’s who cannot read for meaning. The teachers at their schools also can’t do basic arithmetic, because their education was also substandard. If the child makes it to matric – nearly half a million South African children have not in the last year – they will be very lucky to have the opportunity to access tertiary education.
Here, the child will be a bystander in the battle universities are having between merit- or race-based education.
Do universities appoint their lecturers or professors on merit, or the colour of their skin?
This is a question the IRR has asked of all 26 public universities, which either did not respond to our detailed questions, or claimed that they were simply obliged to follow the laws and regulations of the Republic.
Remember, the basis of racial classification in South Africa is the immoral Population Registration Act of 1950, reincarnated in the form of the supposedly “democratic” Employment Equity Act of 1998.
IRR polling has routinely shown over the years that South Africans prefer non-racial empowerment in the form of tax-funded healthcare, schooling and housing vouchers over race-based empowerment schemes like Black Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity. These have done nothing to reduce unemployment, inequality or poverty – the South African Government’s so-called three most pressing crises.
