Change challenges vested interests and path dependencies of people who fear unknown risks more than they ignore current dangers. In a democracy as crazily unequal and volatile as South Africa, what influences change, and in particular, change of distribution towards sustainability?
A participant in many campaigns for change, I have to admit that behind every silk screening of a T-shirt (1980’s), every design of a pamphlet and every drafting of a parliamentary submission lay the idealistic belief that each person is driven by a primal desire to do good, to embrace change that would make everybody’s lives better: even out of self-interest. It always seemed so obvious that greater numbers of less destitute people would lead to more general happiness, less unhappiness and anger, less guilt, greater safety and thus a greater ability to enjoy living in South Africa for all. Utilitarian thinking. People just needed to get the right message and they would do the right thing.
I have supported the call for a basic income grant since 2002. It just makes sense. Recent global demands for universal cash grants have been picked up in many circles here for this simple, corruption- proof reform. The reform that would direct money from the insanely better off to the unthinkably poor in South Africa. The decision that is probably best able to get us out of the (pre-Covid) recession just by creating massive consumption demand. The commitment that would make sense of abiding by the rule of law for the majority of South Africans. The policy that would put food on the tables of a quarter of our population who are literally starving ,and a policy that will recognise that for more than half of South Africans life is a lifelong sentence of to be lived below the poverty line.
But no more of this idealism. That is clearly not how we roll in this country. That is not how we are wired.
This epiphany came when I realised that the only reforms of redistribution in our post – liberation economy have in fact been a redistribution to the rich and well off. Not from the well off to the poor, but the other way around.
Surplus (profit) is made through exploitation of human labour and/ or natural resources. Historically, apartheid slave wages and the grabbing of land and the mineral wealth below the surface provided the best inputs for primary accumulation in South Africa. Instead of using these surpluses to begin to address the devastation of racial capitalism, we have continued to hand back more and more of corporate profits to the shareholders, year on year, continuing a trend that the apartheid state began in the last days of their reign. Since 1990, the effective tax rate for companies fell from 50% in 1990/01 to 28% in 2020. In contrast, the levels of VAT have increased from 10% in 1991 to 15% in 2018[1]. VAT builds inequality, taxing the poor exactly the same as the rich. Returns to wealth for those who own wealth have increased exponentially, while at the same time increasing numbers of people have been falling into poverty and below the food poverty line.
Taking stock of a pre-Covid South Africa; the economy was in a confirmed recession. Unemployment had rocketed to 39,7%. Poverty hit one in two people and starvation 1 in 4. 17 million children and old age pensioners were poor enough to qualify for means tested grants. South Africa’s wealth and income inequality had made us the outlier, the pariah, globally.
The staggering failure of government to make good on Ramaphosa’s Covid-promise of financial relief to individuals makes a mockery of any claim South Africa clings on to, of being a capable state. The failure to prioritise getting food into the households of the people that we saw snaking towards food parcel relief centres, shatters any claim to be a caring nation. Throw – away statements by the minister of social development about poverty and Covid showed an appalling lack of interest in her basic constituency and political mandate.
So, in trying to understand the political economics of change in South Africa, one and one does not equal two. Power tends to attract power. Where financial inequality is high, elite pacts are frequently struck between economic and political elites. A parliamentary system of equal votes should suggest that the ruling party is in power because its policies improve the lives of the majority of voters. The tripartite ruling alliance in South Arica is between the ruling party, the communist party and the largest trade union federation. This in itself should suggest based on simple arithmetic that economic policy of the third alliance party would favour redistribution from the rich to the poor.
How does inequality continue to grow in our democratic state? To what craven image have rulers sacrificed our future?
The fudging of any political ideological commitment by the ruling party has enabled it to win votes and never alienate voters. It even continues to hold close many of the people associated with state looting and capture.
Crises expose fault lines, they do not create them. It is not clear that anything other than relentless national massive demonstrations of the silent majority on the streets demanding a fair share, disrupting the false narrative of egalitarian rule of law, will shift what we have become towards what we need to be.
Poor person, you are on your own. Progressive campaigns and parliamentary submissions have clearly not won any victories. People are not motivated by common good, but by naked self-interest. Building militant mass action to demand pro-poor redistribution seems the only chance to correcting the flow of resources from the wealthy to the poor. Waiting for government to act will only benefit the rich.
[1] Despite a limited items of essential foodstuffs being zero rated, VAT increases costs at each stage in which value is added to a product. Many basics remain outside of the zero rated basket, impacting disproportionately on the poor.
Comentários