Steven Friedman
WORM’S EYE VIEW
Taking from those who have most does not necessarily mean giving to those who need most. Our government has chosen to respond to events in Zimbabwe by insisting that we need more urgent land redistribution.
To many, that conjures up images of land being shared among the poor. But that is not what the new land policy says.
Until recently, government policy used subsidies to offer the poor a chance of acquiring land. Now, people who want to buy bigger farms will receive larger subsidies. Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza has confirmed that the aim is to promote a black commercial farming class. Some believe the effect could be to condemn the rural poor to a future in the same sort of overcrowded, neglected, areas that apartheid produced.
One policy change need not add up to a trend. But the shift does show that, in our conditions, redressing the effects of apartheid need not mean serving the poor. The land issue may be only one illustration.
A recent study by an economic consultancy found that inequality within racial groups here is just about as high as it is in the entire society: and we are the second most unequal country on Earth.
The land issue, the study, and the recent revelation that only 1% of the national Department of Welfare’s poverty relief funds were actually spent, suggest that government attention is moving increasingly from tackling poverty to addressing racial inequality by encouraging gains for the professional and business classes disadvantaged by apartheid.
That is an important political goal. But the widening inequality within black South Africa, while it largely reflects the fact that some people hobbled by apartheid now have opportunities they were denied, rather than worsening conditions for the poor, shows that it is possible to attack racial inequality while leaving poverty untouched.
For some, the claim that the poor are being left behind by the new South Africa is not new. Part of the right insists that the African National Congress never cared much about the poor anyway; its leaders were interested only in their own power and wealth.
Part of the left believes that, when the growth, employment and redistribution strategy (Gear) was adopted, the government ditched the poor to curry favour with business.
Both views are caricatures. The post- 1994 government has implemented a range of programmes – from subsidised housing, to water and electricity connections, to building new clinics – designed to reduce poverty. Social spending is about three- fifths of the budget.
But the evidence mentioned here does suggest a shift in government priorities to looking after the better-off and more organised sections of the ruling alliance.
If that trend hardens, we will find that we are addressing an important political problem – racial inequality – while leaving most of our social woes intact. That will not only force us to live with all the consequences of poverty. It will hobble our attempts to achieve sustained economic growth: the East Asian societies that grew so remarkably over the past few decades all made serious efforts to tackle poverty since they knew that, if they did not, their growth would be stunted.
Will it harden? The answer depends less on how much compassion is in stock among our elite than on how our politics develops.
There are some societies – as the Asian cases may show – where those who hold power look after the poor without being asked. More usually, the poor need to ask. And, since they are usually too weak or too concerned with survival to do this on their own, they need strong friends – groups that are less poor but with an interest in seeing to it that poverty is addressed.
In theory, the ANC alliance is meant to be this sort of vehicle; one in which the poor can find allies to press for policies which tackle their conditions.
To some extent, the alliance does operate this way. It still includes groups who keep poverty on the agenda to some extent. This is why government policy has not been purely concerned with looking after the upwardly mobile – and why, despite the trends mentioned here, it probably will not ignore the poor entirely.
But, even before the land policy shift, the poor lacked an effective voice in our politics, despite the cushion offered by alliance politics.
The fact that social pensions, the most important source of income for the poor, have been largely ignored over the past few years shows that the government, however well-intentioned it may have been, is out of touch with the needs of the poor and does not respond automatically to them.
And, because the poor remain weak, events such as the failure to distribute poverty relief or the land policy shift – which has largely passed unnoticed except by some activists and academics – show that it is fairly easy to ignore the poor.
That is unlikely to change unless the poor find some strong allies in other parts of society.
The obvious champion is the trade union movement: in many countries over the past century, it was unions who led the charge for anti-poverty policies. But unions’ ability to do this has been weakened by a variety of factors, such as, in many “developing” countries, the fact that they do not represent the poorest sections of society. And our own unions have made little headway in building alliances with the poorest.
Whether the poor do find partners who believe it is in their interests to organise people to act against poverty will not depend on the elite.
But the chance of politics that enables the voice of the poor to be heard will depend on how seriously we take the strengthening of our democratic system, so that voices at the bottom of the economic ladder have, at least, a better chance of being heard. This is a crucial point if we consider the current state of our politics.
The message we seem to be hearing from many who set the society’s agenda is that strengthening democracy is a low priority next to urgent challenges, such as tackling the social and economic backlogs apartheid bequeathed.
But current events show that tackling poverty is too important to be left to smart politicians and managers who, without a strong democracy, are likely to hear only whatever the best organised groups among apartheid’s victims want them to hear.
Poverty will gain the attention it deserves only when our democracy is deep enough to hear the poor.
The more we place democracy on a back burner, the more the gulf between those who have and those who do not will grow – to the cost of us all.