It’s always stupid to throw a lit cigarette stub into the brush. Usually nothing happens. In a drought, however, it can explode into a wildfire that threatens lives and houses. In that case, the police should certainly track down and charge the person who lit the flame. But unless communities work together to build fire resistance there will always be another spark to set off catastrophe.
Similarly, SA has to ask not only who instigated the recent insurrection, but why so many people were willing to participate in the looting and destruction that followed. The difference in the diagnosis is critical. If we blame security failures the answer is to improve intelligence and bulk up policing on the street. The logical conclusion is to call for the army to deploy on a mass scale, presumably to throw a ring of steel around the townships, or for the relatively well-off to form their own (sometimes murderous) militias.
Both responses are depressingly reminiscent of the 1980s. The measure of a successful democracy cannot be the ability to repress the poor, who are the vast majority of SA voters. Doubtless a smarter, more responsive and effective justice system is needed, but it famously cannot fix the roots of crime. Those lie in the deep inequalities long generated by SA’s economy, which have been sharpened by the quiet desperation of the Covid-19 depression.
Besides asking who instigated the looting, we also have to ask why so many joined in. After all, it’s hardly surprising that people plundered the township malls, which remain enclaves of opulence in working-class communities that survive from a threadbare combination of uncertain jobs and small businesses, social grants, family help and credit. Ultimately, if we want a more peaceful and cohesive society we must do far more to build a just and inclusive economy.
The pandemic depression has worsened SA’s notorious economic inequalities. Most visibly, surveys find that formal managers and professionals suffered no net job losses. In contrast, about one in 10 other workers was still out of their job as of March, despite the bounce-back in GDP from April as well as some improvement in overall employment. Job losses are highest among those with lower qualifications, incomes and assets, who can least afford them.
The restoration of special grants and the Temporary Employee/Employer Relief Scheme (Ters) on Sunday is welcome. But terminating them both earlier this year, long before either the economy or employment had recovered, surely fuelled the flames of unrest.
Relief programmes are critical in the short run. But they don’t do much about the factors that still reproduce inequality almost a generation after apartheid ended. Critical mechanisms are the profound inequalities in ownership of productive and financial assets, largely starting with inherited wealth; in education; in access to infrastructure; and in pay scales and workplace organisation. In SA, differences in income from work and assets adds even more to overall economic inequality than joblessness.
This is where the tired debate about growth and inequality comes in. Yes, more rapid growth would make it easier to address the root causes of economic inequality. Objectively speaking, however, deeply unequal economies everywhere grow more slowly. As recent events showed, you can’t sustain strategies that please big business when most citizens haven’t seen much benefit from them.
It’s easy to wring our hands over violence and theft. But fixing it requires effective solidarity, expressed not through temporary charity but through long-term, large-scale programmes to address the roots of inequality. The business and political elites who benefit from the status quo will need to accept significant short-run costs and risks to build sustainable prosperity in the longer run. As the recent events demonstrated, change is disruptive, but the cost of avoiding it is escalating.
• Makgetla is a senior researcher with Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies.
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