It is easy to miss the systemically important stories in the deluge of effluent discharged into the public square daily in SA, but as far as stench goes, the extent to which the public education sector has been left to rot is enough to prick even the most desensitised nose.
The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study released last week found that 81% of SA’s grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in any language, up from 78% in 2016, the last assessment before Covid-19.
It is hard to overstate just how serious this problem is. And while things such as load-shedding and our cosying up to Russia grab the headlines, this is a crisis more serious and insidious.
The news sloshed into the public domain in the same week that our already world-leading unemployment rate started to creep up again and politicians were getting their red knickers in a knot over a certain book speaking truth to power while stage 8 was announced, with as much certainty as winter follows autumn.
And after a heated JSE results meeting in which Howard Lowenthal, son of former JSE chair Norman, pleaded with management on bended knee to improve the JSE share and to make it more attractive to list or remain listed. Lowenthal’s impassioned plea was still echoing hollow inside the halls of Gwen Lane when AngloGold’s CEO announced his decision to move the company’s primary listing to the Big Apple from the rotten apple.
Throw in the tortuously unconstitutional draft Employment Equity Amendment Act regulations, which will literally ban Indian and coloured South Africans from working at all in the agriculture sector in Limpopo and Mpumalanga, for example, and you have a week in which the competition for the wooden spoon was fierce.
Overwhelming stench
Of course, all of these things are connected. And until we have the maturity and courage — this really shouldn’t require any courage whatsoever given there is not much else left to lose — to connect the dots that reveal the picture at the heart of our problems, the stench will overwhelm everything.
Education is being held ransom by ideology. An ideology that places the interests of labour above those of our children. Six years since its publication, why are we still waiting to implement the recommendations of the report on jobs for pals. The SA Democratic Teachers Union is just allowed to run roughshod over our children’s future.
It is the same ideology that allows corruption and mediocrity to thrive in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under the ruse of a developmental state.
It is an ideology being wielded by trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel and his fellow travellers, who believe you can wave the legislative pen at sectors and make them bend to your localisation fantasies.
It is the same ideology that reaches into our nationalist past in the belief that you can sculpt the demographics of the workplace to your representative whim. Who cares that the majority are being failed by these very ideologies to read for meaning and to stand any chance of acquiring the skills that would make them competitive in the labour force — let us just make it happen through legislative edict.
It is the same ideology that has seen us lose our investment-grade credit rating, seen us removed from the world government bond index, seen us greylisted and increasingly isolated among former allies and friends on the global stage to repay old favours with ideological bedfellows.
Tactical acumen
On Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war, our stated foreign policy is apparently “non-aligned”, but there have been many examples of quite the opposite. We simply have too much to lose alienating a large, wealthy, powerful group of progressive nations (most of the Group of 20). Our banks (and their customers) require access to international markets (dollar, euro, pound and yen currencies and clearing systems such as SWIFT). This access is not a right, it’s a privilege. It can be revoked. Life is already hard in our country, and we don’t need anything to make it harder. Whom a political party chooses as its friend is not the issue. The problem arises if that party imposes its friendship on the country and its citizens.
I’m reading Michael Cardo’s illuminating biography of Harry Oppenheimer, which lies somewhere in the middle of hamartography and hagiography. Business leaders would do well to brush up on the Randlord’s tactical acumen in straddling the intersection of business and politics. Through the lens of Homo economicus, he outwitted the Nats and played a critical role in achieving the 1994 miracle.
A group of business leaders met deputy president Paul Mashatile on Friday, hopefully to bury the ideological debates and start talking about the cold hard Homo economicus facts.
Foreign investors have sold a net $10.5bn of SA government bonds this year, taking the percentage held by foreigners down from 43% to 26% since President Cyril Ramaphosa came to power. Government borrowing costs have surged, with the 10-year yield reaching a three-year high of 12.18% on Friday. The rand has lost 39% of its value since Rampahoria, the worst performance among major emerging-market currencies, and is poisoning the few fiscal green shoots.
As interest rates rise, so too are our borrowing costs, crowding out much-needed spending on things such as books to help the next generation acquire the foundation skills for employment. As usual, this government will point the finger at business and harp on about inequality and exclusion but, ultimately, the costs of this discredited ideology will be disproportionately borne by the poor who can’t afford solar power and private education as well as medical and security services.
If ever business needed to summon the spirit of Oppenheimer, now is it.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at badger@businesslive.co.za.
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