It’s a sickening statistic that the growth of one in six children in the Western Cape is stunted as a result of malnutrition. Incredibly, this is almost certainly better than the national average.
The latest figures come from a study into childhood nutrition conducted in the Western Cape in 2022 and released by the DG Murray Trust last week. But the SA Demographic & Health Survey carried out in 2016 found then that more than a quarter (27%) of SA children under the age of five were stunted.
I will leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions whether things might have improved in the rest of the country since 2016. This must surely mean incidences of childhood malnutrition in poor townships, informal settlements and rural communities in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape are rampant.
Aside from the devastating consequences at an individual and community level, it is sensible to ask whether hunger has become a political issue. I think it already has, as illustrated by another event that made headlines last week.
A strange report and bizarre statement were released by the Competition Commission. In its press release it accused food retailers of inflating the price of basic goods, saying that “shelf price increases may not be justified by costs” and claiming “opportunistic behaviour throughout the value chain [...] raises questions about the use of export parity pricing throughout the maize value chain”.
Now that, as they say, are “shots fired”. But what’s interesting is that several of the commissioners who sit on the Competition Commission had to read about this broadside first in Business Day. It’s also clear, as anyone who reads this newspaper will know by now, that the commission’s accusations seem to be without established basis in fact.
I will not go into the details because I can do no better than the economists who wrote about it in Business Day last week and concluded that the research work behind the accusations was, at best, slapdash (“Competition watchdog must do proper research and stop blaming industry players”, March 31).
If we can accept that the accusations levelled at the retailers by the commission are questionable, it raises the more pertinent question — why attack the retailers while armed, intellectually speaking, with little more than a limp stick of celery?
Sources tell me the commission is not a particularly unified or happy place at present, and that some ideologically driven people sit in its research division and behave more like activists than researchers. It is this division of the commission that was apparently responsible for last week’s report and press release.
Over the past decade the big grocers have been under the spotlight almost continuously, with no smoking gun found yet.
In these contested situations it is often best to try to work out who benefits from what has happened. And it’s clear that if you’re in government, your majority is under threat and poor families are unable to feed their children, there’s a benefit for you if you can find a scapegoat. Food retailers are an obvious target.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. The Competition Commission is mindful of the food retailers to the point of obsessiveness. Over the past decade the big grocers have been under the spotlight almost continuously, with no smoking gun found yet. That’s fine. That’s the commission’s job. But it must at least show sign that it has the first idea of the environment it is investigating before it gets into yet another expensive and time-consuming witch hunt.
It is entirely reasonable to join these dots. Food prices are a perfect target for misinformation and distortion because they paint a complicated picture. There are external factors, such as the war in Ukraine, and the effect they have had on global prices.
But it’s the self-inflicted factors that it may want to distract attention from. It was this government that ransacked Eskom to the point where it has been unable to meet electricity demand for months. It was this government that allowed corruption to run rampant at Transnet, eroding cost-effective national logistics chains and forcing businesses to privatise their logistics, as well as creating a giant hole in the heart of the fiscus.
It is this government that has allowed unchecked criminality to add a layer of cost to everything that happens in the economy and has seen us being hammered by ratings agencies, and even greylisted by the global financial watchdog. All of this has battered our currency, making everything more expensive.
State capture and corruption
The bitter truth I would also want to keep away from the public discourse is that the prices of bread, mealie meal and cooking oil today have been directly affected by state capture and corruption, as presided over by some of those still in government. The retailers are absorbing huge costs associated with load-shedding, and were inexplicably excluded from the diesel rebate scheme announced in the budget in March. This isn’t spin — look at what’s happened to their share prices. These businesses are under enormous pressure.
The problem, aside from the apparent disregard for hungry children, is that nothing gets better. The Competition Commission has a critical job to do. It does not exist to provide a fig leaf for embarrassing political problems. That there are ruthless scoundrels in the private sector is common cause, and by bringing into question the commission’s own good faith those who put out the report have empowered such scoundrels to dismiss it as an institutional gangster.
More broadly, this is another example of the favourite SA sport of top-down engineering. Blaming Shoprite for the cost of a loaf of bread when you are responsible for load-shedding, water shortages, currency weakness and crime is like blaming the universities for not producing enough black female doctorates when you won’t even fit schools with safe sanitation, let alone teach kids properly.
At some point you must do the hard work of treating the cause instead of shouting at the symptoms in press releases. The Competition Commission has made a fool of itself. That’s bad for all of us.
• Parker is Business Day editor in chief.
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