President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address (Sona) made the kind of headlines he probably wanted on the Eskom mess. There’s a state of disaster. There will be a minister of electricity to add to the many bosses the CEO of Eskom will have to prepare slides for. Something is being done.
I think we need to be really clear that none of this is going to work fast. We are stuck with load-shedding for years, and the crisis of this is not only in the cold chains, which can be propped up with generators, or the shuttering of businesses. The crisis is for our young people, and this will only be felt in the decades to come.
Ramaphosa’s ostensibly laser-like focus on addressing our immediate electricity crisis means it is easier for us to be distracted from the elephants in the room. Indeed, there are many elephants in the president’s room, but none so big as the burgeoning crisis in early childhood development. This has the potential to be a bigger crisis than energy, and is also 30 years in the making.
In consumer theory, Giffen goods defy the law of demand. They are cheap, staple goods that experience an increase in consumption as their prices rise. Examples are rice, mielie meal and bread. Households under severe economic pressure will buy more mielie pap as it gets more expensive. They’ll just drop the chicken. Or, more alarmingly, they’ll drop the trip to school.
Marion Wagner, director of Breadline Africa, an NGO focused on early childhood education, says spiralling poverty is manifesting in parents being forced to opt out of early childhood education centres. “We’re definitely seeing fewer children coming to our ECD [early childhood development] centres over the past few months,” she said. “We recognise the financial struggle of parents and are really worried about declining numbers.”
Wagner says some parents are now unable to afford the fees of about R150 a month. Transport costs and fear of crime in dark streets contribute too. Even more alarming is the fact that for some children the two meals a day they receive at the ECD centres are the only meals they get on that day.
Compounding the issue, ECD centre principals are confronted with an overgrown bougainvillea of red tape to access the R17 per school day subsidy the department of basic education is willing to pay. This puts the principals under financial strain.
The consequences of this are severe. In 2021 a study showed that just 20% of 10-year-olds in SA could read for meaning in any language. Now that figure has fallen to 18%. The cycle of poverty and inadequate intervention means 52% of grade 1s drop out before matric.
This is what the department of basic education’s R279bn annual budget buys us, of which ECD centre subsidies come in at about R3.3bn. That the department is willing to spend R500 a year on a child up to age five, and R22,000 a year for a child aged five to 17, seems like a misallocation — and an ongoing failure to understand the importance of the first six years of life.
With all of this in plain sight, the president’s speech seems almost offensive.
Those of us old enough to remember will recall where we were when we heard then deputy president Thabo Mbeki deliver his “I am an African” speech. That speech marked the adoption of the SA constitution and the beginning of something we all believed in. By contrast, few of us will remember Ramaphosa’s Thursday address.
His role was to present the state of the nation, and I think he really did. It was a rambling oratory that resorted to rhetorical flourish to distract listeners from the dearth of vigour that the country needs. To say so little so beautifully is a trick as old as the hills. What he did was present the true state of government: distracted, entitled and disconnected from reality.
Ramaphosa’s assertion that this is not a country defined by language, song, landscape, work or mineral wealth was telling, because it is so wrong. Of course we are defined by our cultures and climate, our land, song and industry. How strange that he would say otherwise.
Instead, he says we are defined by hope and resilience, which at least has the benefit of being an admission of failure. If we are defined by hope, then we are defined by a yearning for justice. If we are defined by resilience, it is because we have been hoping for too long.
In this trick, he suggests that South Africans’ reactions to the failures of government is an immutable character trait. It is not. I’m sure we’d all like to stop having to hope and stop needing to be so resilient.
In education, the trees that were not planted decades ago give us no shade today. The lesson should be to plant more trees, and to get more children into early education centres. These children don’t need hope and resilience. They need a decent meal and early childhood interventions.
There is no well-funded lobby for two-year-olds. For them, though, time is of the essence.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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