Browsing through Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness I realised how desperately SA needs a comprehensive study that objectively captures the state of progress since 1994.
The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s (Mistra’s) recently released Macro-Social Report comes close to that. Spoiler alert: it makes for grim reading about the current context while capturing pithily the advances made during our three decades of democracy.
Rosling, a Swedish statistician with the Karolinska Institute, and his co-authors explain why as humans we tend to think everything is worse than it actually is. They put it down to 10 stubborn, data-distorting human instincts that they call the gap, fear, negativity, generalisation, urgency, straight line, size, destiny, blame and single-perspective instincts.
The last two are particularly apt for SA:
- The “single perspective” instinct is the impulse towards simple explanations for complex problems and one-size-fits-all solutions; and
- The “blame instinct”, is when we look for a single source of blame for a given problem.
In SA’s case these two instincts merge. There were many of us who want to blame former president Jacob Zuma, state capture and the Guptas for all the country’s woes. The DA displays such a tendency when it conjures up images of a black-led doomsday scenario of chaos and anarchy, while proposing its “moon shot pact” as the solution.
We tend to blame President Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership for everything from poor service delivery to the increased crime rate, with some suggesting that a Zuma could do better if s/he occupied the leadership position.
What we require in the public discourse is avoiding what Mistra executive director Joel Netshitenzhe has been labelling “acontextual presentism”, a term closely associated with US historian David Hackett Fischer, to explain when the current is not located in its historical context.
Among this year’s Macro Social Report’s highlights is that the years since 1994 saw one of the longest periods of economic growth. Until 2003 average GDP growth was 3%, and from 2004 to 2007 that increased to 5%. From 1994 to 2007 we reduced our debt to GDP from 43% to 27%, with a budget surplus registered in 2007 and 2008. Households with access to government housing grants increased from 5.6% in 2002 to 18.7% in 2019. The percentage of formal housing had risen to 84% by 2020.
Perhaps the most important foundation laid since 1994 has been the extent of the social security system, especially leveraging off the macroeconomic gains of the early period of democracy. By the end of 2019 about 18-million social grants were being paid out, and in response to the Covid-19 pandemic another 6-million were receiving the social relief of distress grant by December 2020, a number that reached 10-million by January 2022.
As parts of the government’s food security strategy the National School Nutrition Programme provides daily meals to 9-million children in about 20,000 state schools across the country.
The “buts” to this narrative are well known:
- Business Day readers would probably choke on their morning croissants when the virtues of the welfare state are extolled on these pages. But we should remember that the UK allocates about a fifth of the total budget to social spending, and that places it in the middle of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development league in terms of social expenditure;
- The GDP to debt ratio has grown to 61% by 2020, while GDP growth of late has been tepid. For the period 2009 to 2012 the SA economy grew 3.1% per annum, while comparator middle-income countries’ growth averaged 4.3%. We experienced a technical recession in 2018 and tepid growth in 2020 (1.5%) and 2021 (1.2%), and we may be back in recession territory today;
- While absolute hunger decreased from 52% in 1999 to 26% in 2013/14, only 46% of households can be considered fully food secure; and
- We have an employment crisis, with no signs of improvement, and about half our economically active population does not work.
Electoral rhetoric tends to revel in fancy slogans and quick sound bites. Policy alternatives need to be far, far more evidence-based.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute.
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