In the midst of our middle-class economic boom it is easy to delude ourselves that other South Africans are thriving. The Reserve Bank’s quarterly bulletin, released this week, will no doubt fuel the optimistic view of a country poised for “unprecedented” growth and prosperity. The bulletin asserts, as other data sets have done, that the economy is beginning to create jobs and that the period of general employment decline is over.
If that is true, that is good news. But other developments on the employment front suggest there is no reason to celebrate yet. The decline in “sunset” industries like mining and clothing may mean that manufacturing jobs are being lost more quickly than the services, construction and tourism sectors can create them.
This week the Mail & Guardian reports on the likely closure of Rex Trueform’s 67-year-old factory in Cape Town. It is a working-class institution, the site of the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union’s birth, and now the latest victim of the crisis in the rag trade. In the past decade, 100 000 workers, mainly women, have lost their jobs. Some 12 000 of them clocked out permanently last year, and another 2 750 will turn off their sewing machines for the last time at the end of next month.
Gold miners, too, remain at the sharp end of the crisis. The trade union Solidarity says that 20 000 workers across industries it organises have been served with retrenchment notices effective at the end of April.
It is no surprise that the Congress of South African Trade Unions is considering a socio-economic strike — its blue-collar membership is seeing little or no benefit from the current consumer-driven boom. It is middle-class blacks and whites who are shopping up a storm, largely on credit.
There is little the government can do about the exchange rate, but a less conservative hand at the Reserve Bank would certainly help. So would a marginally higher inflation target, which, with lower interest rates, would serve to weaken the rand and stimulate South African exports.
Ten years after the advent of democracy, South Africa is increasingly showing healthy self-confidence in forging its own path, instead of slavishly following the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. This is evident from the decision to drop privatisation as a policy tool and to use state-owned enterprises to drive growth through infrastructure investment. It has also manifested itself in the creation of a social safety net and the Expanded Public Works Programme. The government now needs to follow up with a national plan to save jobs by bolstering the job-creation trend tentatively suggested by the latest statistics.
This will mean tackling the monetary policy hurdles that stand in the way of growth and employment creation, and making use of the policy tools available to us in terms of World Trade Organisation rules. These can be used to shield vulnerable industries — notably textiles and clothing — from a deluge of cheap Chinese imports.
But it may also demand concessions from labour. Trade unions may have to accept the linking of pay increases to productivity and measures designed to prolong the life of declining sectors.
Ultimately, what is required is a social pact between the government, business and labour to tackle what is effectively a national emergency of job destruction. Otherwise, the current pattern — of boom for a minority and bust for the masses — will consume us all.
In with the new
Who knows why, who knows how — but it has become conventional wisdom that the Zimbabwean opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) lacks the leadership resources to govern that country. Its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, does not have the required “charisma”, according to some of the whisperers. The MDC’s uncomfortable alliance between unionists, intellectuals and civil society can only fracture under the pressure of governance, say others.
In South Africa, the bad-mouthing campaign has reached absurd levels, with ruling party apparatchiks repeatedly claiming that the MDC leader is a spy in the pay of British intelligence.
As a liberation movement in power, the African National Congress tends to look at Zimbabwe as a mirror of what could happen here — the fracturing of its huge electoral majority by a sprightly Johnny-come-lately, perhaps born of the labour movement.
The ANC has quickly forgotten that similar conventional wisdom about its “inexperience” in government, and uncomfortable alliances, fuelled a mythology that it was not ready to take the reins of power. Such disinformation, it should be remembered, was the direct cause of its “Ready to govern” campaign. Yet on balance, the party has done a pretty good job.
Elsewhere on our continent, the peoples of different countries have dumped liberation movements and elected untried and untested governments — with mixed success. This is how democracy works. The people choose their rulers with their aspirations, not past glories, in mind. Sometimes a new ruling party succeeds, at other times it fails.
South Africans who buy the rumours about the MDC’s incapacity, without substantiating evidence, risk becoming unwitting disciples of a reactionary myth. Zimbabweans need and deserve a government, and a strategy for national renewal, that offers them some hope of ending their country’s downward spiral.