Have poor people fallen so far off the political agenda that politicans no longer need to pretend to care about them?
Statistics SA’s report on poverty trends was published last week: it seemed an ideal opening for politicians to do what they do best — use the poor to score political points. The report found that 55.5% of South Africans live below the poverty line. This is a two percentage point increase on 2011, although well below the 66.6% recorded in 2006.
Given the current state of factional politics, within the ANC and outside it, it seemed only a matter of time before both sides used the finding that most citizens live in poverty, and that the percentage of those who do is rising, to try to get one over on their opponents.
Patronage politicians would surely claim that "white monopoly capital", emboldened by its continued hold on government, is depriving the black poor of the little they have. Their opponents would latch onto the finding that poverty reduced markedly until 2011, but has risen since, to blame the president and his faction for alienating investors and hobbling the growth needed to dent poverty.
Neither side has bothered.
The poverty figures prompted some media comment and union federation Cosatu said it would discuss them. But they have not become an issue between the parties, who are more interested in how the Nelson Mandela Bay coalition is sorted out than the fact that most of the people they claim to represent are poor.
This surely confirms a reality usually hidden by all parties’ habit of claiming that everything they want is good for the poor: none really speaks for poor voters, and the debate between parties is about what is good for the economic insiders who are able to benefit from the market economy, not the outsiders who live in poverty.
The "state capture" debate is, for example, about whether we will continue arrangements that exclude people as they are now, or change them to ensure they advantage only those who are politically connected.
This means the majority of South Africans have no voice in the debate between politicians.
At first glance, this seems a strange claim. Politicians do, after all, argue about policy issues that seek to redress poverty — the great land debate or that over jobs or a minimum wage. But, if we look closer, these political battles show not how close the politicians are to the poor but how remote they are. The battles are always fought for and against grand, abstract slogans. These are products not of listening to the needs and views of the poor, but of the party or politician’s view of the world.
This worsens the voicelessness of the poor because not only are they not heard but words are placed in their mouths by parties or politicians hoping to justify their own goals.
If poor people really did enjoy a voice we would see a party debate that focused much more on the concrete, lived experience of most citizens. In this case, parties and politicians who spoke for the poor might not need a Stats SA report to highlight poverty — it would rise quickly to the top of their agenda because it would be the most important priority for the citizens they represent.
Another tangible example is an issue mentioned before in this column: the fate of people living in inner-city Joburg. The DA administration wants to create the best possible conditions for private developers — this fits well with party policy, but no-one seems to have asked poor voters in the area whether it works for them.
The EFF, whose votes propelled the DA into office, seems determined not to get involved, while the ANC is far more interested in claiming the city is bankrupt than in fighting the battle of inner-city residents.
The clear message to the flat dwellers is that they are on their own because none of the parties has any time for them. Which is not surprising: there does not seem to be any issue on which any of the parties is keen to take up the cause of the poor.
This probably explains better than any economic theory why poverty figures remain so high. Experience around the world shows there are two circumstances in which elites, who take decisions, care about poverty enough to try to fix it. Either they come to believe, for one reason or another, that fighting poverty is essential for their political goals, or poor people are organised enough to convince politicians they had better listen or face losing their seats.
Where politicians are convinced that they must do something to fight poverty, evidence also shows that this does make a positive difference to poor people’s lives.
In this country, the poor have no such advantage. The parties are absorbed in fighting over which insiders get what and the poor have not yet formed organisations to speak on their behalf. And so they are spoken about, not listened to — and poverty figures remain stubbornly high.
• Friedman is research professor in the University of Johannesburg’s humanities faculty.
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