JONNY STEINBERG: Welfare cannot just be for the frail as in the 1960s

As the debate about the future of social security grows ever more fractious, we need to go back to the beginning and ask the most basic question of all: what is welfare for?

From the advent of state welfare more than a century ago the answer has been that it is for those for whom the market cannot provide. Thus, collective responsibility was invoked to offer pensions to the elderly and disability grants to the infirm. The market, it was assumed, would see to everybody else. Some among the able-bodied might lose work for a time; for that, short-term unemployment insurance evolved. The assumption was that they would sooner or later find another job.

SA’s welfare state was built on this foundation, and for the first three-quarters of the 20th century it held true. SA’s economy was labour-scarce, unemployment levels low. This changed after the oil shocks of the early 1970s, and it is clear by now, about 45 years later, that the change is permanent. SA’s labour markets have been unable to provide work for the able-bodied for two generations now. There is no reason to believe they will provide work for all ever again.

To this day SA’s welfare system has never adjusted. Its basic assumption remains that the young can find work. In the gap between this illusion and reality deformities have evolved. In their quest to live human lives ordinary people have tried to twist an anachronistic system into a shape that serves their needs. A disturbing inversion has occurred. The young and able-bodied have gathered around the elderly and the disabled. The frail have become breadwinners among the poor; the young and the fit have become supplicants to the old.

We could go on pretending that we live in the 1960s, and that our welfare system really is for the frail. Or we could say the days of full employment are just around the corner. But that takes us into dubious ethical terrain. Like Vladimir and Estragon, we can keep waiting for Godot while generations of South Africans live and die. This waiting game erases the significance of their presence in the world; they are collateral damage in service of a fantasy.

We must acknowledge that the welfare system we have was made for a time that has passed. If social security is for those the market cannot service, this includes many from the ranks of the young and the able-bodied. We need to start from the world in which we actually live.

That leaves unanswered some serious questions. One is the ever-controversial matter of what SA can afford. As Carol Paton has argued in these pages, a cash transfer system is not worthwhile if basic social goods are sacrificed for it — education, health, transport, public safety (“Careful work being done on BIG but the risks remain treacherous”,  August 2). This argument is critical. But it cannot be enlisted in service of the status quo; debates about affordability are no cover for delusion; we cannot pretend welfare is for the old and the infirm.

A second question is: does welfare damage the soul and the spirit of the able-bodied and the young? There is an assumption abroad that the answer is yes. But it is an answer born from habit of thought, not evidence. Across the world there is now overwhelming evidence to show the opposite is the case. Places infused with new cash transfers do not die; they experience new life. They bring conviviality and stimulate entrepreneurship; they bring down rates of suicide; they provide some among the young with the wherewithal to join the labour market.

Less tangibly, but perhaps most critically, they take the edge off a brittle and traumatised world. Programmes touted as alternatives to cash transfers, such as public works and tailored education and training courses, while valuable in and of themselves, are hopelessly — indeed scandalously — inefficient in comparison.

The evidence for all of this will be the subject of my next column.

• Steinberg is a research associate at Oxford University’s African Studies Centre.