To be black in SA is to be hemmed in by poor, or a lack of, education and demands by employers for skills you lack. It isn’t about to change soon, largely due to the failure of the state, which will continue well into the future.
In recent years the government has been cutting budgets in a manner that hits those most dependent on state-funded education the hardest, a point Michael Sachs and his colleagues at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at Wits University have been hammering home for some time.
Various pieces of research over the years have shown the importance of education in getting a job in SA. Research has also shown that most young people remain trapped in dysfunctional schools where their chances of learning are limited, forcing many to drop out.
Of those who make it to the end of high school, most cannot afford university. Alternatives to university education are limited too — few of the country’s technical colleges are worth attending because no employer would even look at what they produce.
As economists Haroon Bhorat and Safia Khan spelt out in their 2018 paper, a defining feature of postapartheid SA has been that job creation “has been heavily skills biased”. That is because the services section of the economy has expanded most rapidly, primarily driven by the financial sector and community, social and public services.
That is one end of the squeeze the poor face. The other is education. The latest research that sets out SA’s education problem is produced by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. Yes, it is funded by that family that made its money in mining, an industry that condemned black people to servitude. But the trust’s message remains valid.
Bleak picture
The report reviews three pillars: early childhood development, basic education (schooling), and higher education. The consensus among education experts is that early childhood development is key as it lays the major building blocks of one’s educational development.
The trust’s report paints a bleak picture, concluding that about 20% of South Africans can give their children access to good early childhood development and basic education, “setting them up for better learning and higher earning possibilities as part of the highly skilled portion of the labour force”.
The majority have limited or no access to quality early childhood development opportunities. This means they enter the schooling system with “learning backlogs”, which are made worse as they progress through primary and high school. Many give up along the way and join the millions of unemployed.
Those who make it to the end of high school do so “without the requisite skills” they need to access functional institutions in postschool training. Nor do they earn a wage that enables them to migrate to a socioeconomic status higher than that of their parents, which in effect condemns their offspring to the same life, if not worse.
Universities are squeezed too. To fund student fees via the National Student Financial Aid Scheme the government has cut subsidies to universities, which means they have more students but a reduced monetary cake. Watching this, employers will soon not hire anyone with a basic degree, if it isn’t happening already.
Alternatively, they will hire based on which school one went to, because that foundational phase makes all the difference. What the government has done is sentence young people from poor homes to a life with a degree but without job prospects.
Money’s tight
The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust recommends increased expenditure and access to quality early childhood and basic education, which is necessary “to break the cycles of poverty, unemployment, and inequality that have become so deeply entrenched”.
That is unlikely to happen, though. Now, the government is singing British soul and pop band Simply Red’s tune Money’s Too Tight (To Mention). This means more expenditure cuts, and the way budget cuts have been done over the past decade is that all budgets are trimmed equally.
It’s an approach favoured by spineless politicians. The best way of cutting budgets is one in which certain expenditure lines are ring-fenced because they are critical to socioeconomic progress, especially for the most vulnerable in society. But that approach requires a strong political backbone, of the kind that saw the three Ms — Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Trevor Manuel — tell union federation Cosatu and the SACP to take a hike over the mid-1990s Growth Employment & Redistribution (Gear) macroeconomic strategy.
You might not agree with what they cut, but Gear remains one of the few economic policies implemented largely by postapartheid governments.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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