The SA socioeconomic dilemma is usually expressed from the prism of the triple challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality. This trinity, and the quest to challenge it, has formed the basis of many commitments from politicians across the spectrum.
In SA’s version of the national economic blueprint — the National Development Plan (NDP) — this trinity looms large as the fundamental premise for the many ideas and proposals espoused in the NDP. From the moment the diagnostic report was produced 10 years ago, in June 2011, and the subsequent release of the NDP, the need to implement multiple interventions collectively and simultaneously has been understood as the best way for SA to tackle its trinity of challenges.
In addition to the nine primary challenges identified in the diagnostic report, the four thematic areas included the key elements of rural economy and social protection. The position from 10 years ago was that if SA did not deal decisively with the themes identified its prospects of ever conquering its fundamental challenges would remain remote.
This week the results of what ought to have been a decade of building for the next century were reflected in the release of the Quarterly Labour Force Survey. The survey — regarded as the authority and barometer for the country’s ability to create and sustain jobs — reflects a simple and sobering reality.
With a record 34,4% unemployment rate and an even more dire 44% expanded definition, coupled with bleak prospects for the 75% of young people who are unemployed, the survey serves as an indictment of SA’s leadership. Whatever has been done in the past decade has done little to deal with at least one of the three horsemen of the national crisis.
The employment question, perhaps more than the poverty and inequality dimensions, is the one that has greater prospects of creating a domino effect on the other two. With greater employment comes a lower reliance on social assistance programmes and greater capacity to migrate beyond the poverty line.
Under conditions of increased employment, where many more citizens would be earning a wage of sorts, the current measurement of income inequality — where the few citizens fortunate enough to participate meaningfully in the economic bandwagon are contrasted against millions of citizens that exist on the periphery of the economy — would still exist but perhaps not be as glaringly wide as it is now.
The observation from the past decade is that perhaps the litany of challenges identified in the NDP, and the range of solutions proposed, were simply too overwhelming for the politicians of our time. Consequently, while each department and state agency may somehow be able to cite some semblance of activity towards the steps recommended in the NDP, the collective efforts have yielded little in the way of substantive changes.
For every regulation that sought to liberalise a critical sector, a bureaucratic hurdle naturally emerged to stunt any semblance of progress. For every state institution that had the capacity to execute on its socio-developmental mandate, a redoubtable deployment committee stood ready to unleash a litany of ill-suited bureaucrats and less-than-capable political principals to oversee it all — with disastrous consequences.
The effect of it all is that the nation stands at a crossroads where the question of what needs to be done can no longer be left to the whims of those who have been at the heart of the descent into crisis. Regrettably, rather than resetting the clock and simplifying the quest for difficult solutions, the nation is steadily gravitating towards more ill-timed interventions — like the Green Paper on social security reform — that do little to grow the economic pie but seek to dice it in ways that decimate what little exists of the national taxpayer base.
The problem with the government is that despite its political convictions the data in front of us indicate that we are fast running out of the tax base needed to sustain any of its proposals — including the more lucid ones.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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