There is no doubt that modern day South Africa has inherited
a hugely flawed economic system (#Proudly Brought to you by the Apartheid
Government), but it would be hard to argue that we have made significant
strides in changing this system since the adoption of democracy nearly twenty
years ago. The simple fact of the matter is that we have missed the boat on the
one opportunity to truly change our economic system (# Proudly Borught to you
by the ANC) and if one considers the meteoric rise of organisations like the
Economic Freedom Fighters, the only logical conclusion is that a peaceful and
systematic transformation of the economic system, will be beyond our reach in
the very near future.
If, however, we want any hope of changing this system, we
must first understand its origins and the fact that our economy looks the way
that it still does today is no accident. The systemic problem in our economy that
everyone keeps referring to is the fact that it operates and relies on a system
of a small number of economic elite making large profits off the work done by
an unskilled or semi-skilled majority of working poor. Consider the vast
difference in the income of a few mine bosses and their companies in relation
to the workers who actually go down into the mine and haul the ore to the
surface and while this is not necessarily a bad thing, what we have to realise
is that the level on which this occurs in our economy is simply not
sustainable. The real unpalatable truth, however, is that the origins of this
system can be traced back to a single moment in time.
"There is no place for [the Bantu] in the
European community above the level of certain forms of labour ... What is the
use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in
practice?"
That, ladies and
gentlemen, is the exact moment in history that our economic system and its
associated modern problems were born, with the promulgation of the Bantu
Education Act way back in 1953. Now logic would certainly suggest that the easy
solution to the problem would be to simply address the educational disparity
between black and white children, but the sad truth of the matter is that we
have failed miserably and that only a fool would suggest that there is even a
hint of parity between the no-fee public schools and former Model-C or private
schools. There simply isn’t and, heartbreaking a commentary as it is, we have no
option but to come to the very inconvenient conclusion that “Bantu Education”
is actually alive and well, but the colour that matters now is the colour of your
money and not your skin. The logical deduction from this statement is that the system will remain as it currently is. The obvious question arising from this conclusion is
why this has not been the singular focus of the majority Government since
taking power in 1994.
Call me what you
will for this, but this is no accident either.
The major problem
with politics is a lot like the agency problem faced by large businesses where
the people who manage the company are not necessarily the people who own it and
this often creates a difference of opinion on where the company should be
heading because the two groups have different interests. When you apply the
same principle to politics, the people who set the economic and social
framework are not necessarily the people who have to rely on them; I cannot
imagine, for example, that any Government Minister or even a Member of
Parliament is reliant on things like RDP housing or the public healthcare
system and this is exactly why education was not priority number one from day
number one. A politician will do and promise the people nearly anything in
order to cease political power, but once they attain that power, all they are
interested in is staying there and the sad truth of the matter is that a
singular focus on education does nothing to improve the lives of the voting
public, because frankly, school children do not vote. Knowing this all too
well, the Government decided to embark on a populist path where they side with
the people (the working poor) against the capital (the economic elite) and that
is why we are seeing policies like Affirmative Action, Employment Equity, Black
Economic Empowerment, the Reconstruction and Development Program and the list
goes on.
These “redress”
or “transformation” measures as we’ve come to know them are not a bad thing.
They are very good, in fact, and are even supported by my neo-liberal economic
theory, but what we have not come to terms with is that none of these programs
have the power to eliminate our poverty and income (education) disparity problems.
They only have the power to temporarily relieve them, but given the vast
percentage of the public purse and the effect on inflation they entail, they
tend to be economic monsters that grow as time passes by until they reach a
point where they can no longer be sustained by the economy and the whole house
of cards comes down. If we now consider the increasingly strict nature of
something like the new BBBEE codes, the declared opposition to fronting, the
ever growing inflexibility of the labour market and the staggering rise in the
amount of people dependent on social security, we have no choice but to
acknowledge the fact that we are fast approaching this point and that the
opportunity to truly change our fortunes through the equal education of all our
children will be lost forever once we go past it.
The worst part
about it is that we, the people who have access to all the information and can
sit down to read or write pieces like this one, allowed it to happen.
We allowed all of
this to happen because we allowed ourselves to get caught up in the populist
and often racist politics that goes on around us, because we are blinded by our
own short-sighted, narrow and frankly selfish interests. We get into petty squabbles
surrounding things like white privilege, black victimhood, the DA being a white
only party that wants to bring back apartheid and most importantly, who gets to
represent the poor on these forums or we write opinion pieces on corruption,
the educational achievements of Jacob Zuma or, my personal pet peeve, what
society should do to address the rape situation in the country and then we have
the proverbial balls to get up in arms about organizations like Red October
that actually got off their asses and did something. This is precisely the
reason why we are seeing such an increase in amount of public money that is
lost to corruption each year; it is because we can vilify the DA for doing
everything in its power to obtain the Nkandla report, while it should be us who
are beating down the doors of Government and demanding answers or demanding
that heads roll. We have allowed ourselves to be duped into giving up our
interest in our own country and its future in order for an unscrupulous politician
to obtain a vote he/she thinks they are entitled to because they “fought in the
Struggle,” want an equal country for all or some other form of worthless
political ideology…
I’ve spent enough
time on my soap box for one day, but I know that when I put my six month old
son to bed tonight, I will once again start to wonder. I will wonder if the
architects of Apartheid would have gone through with it if they had known that
their grandchildren would have to go through a situation like this. I would
wonder whether those who had died in the ensuing Struggle would experience a sense
of shame at our inability to see this through and I would feel my own sense of
shame because the way things are going now, there is simply no way in which I
will be able to spare him having to go through this as well, even if his father
had always been destined for it.
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