Graeme Bloch
crossfire
When a commentator and participant of John Saul’s authority expresses his critical views in the Mail & Guardian, June 23 to 29, it is important to sit up and take notice. When these hinge on a pessimistic appraisal of the outlook for the poor and working class in South Africa, the issues generate even more concern.
Saul should surely not need to call on his “struggle credentials” or risk being called an “ultraleftist”. Nor should he dismiss others by using the all-embracing catch-all of “neo-liberal”. The debate must go deeper.
Saul reflects a pessimism of many in the left that I fail to understand.
South Africa, patently, is a far better place than it used to be.
Police do not wake people at 4am asking their political and personal views. Black people are not hounded from their homes. Trade union laws entrench the rights of workers and a range of laws are labour- friendly, from industrial safety to skills development.
At the level of rhetoric, at least, the entire Cabinet has signed the Declaration on Poverty that identifies poverty as the core issue today. Internationally, President Thabo Mbeki promotes views that are progressive and developmental- friendly. Anti-nuclear weapons and landmines campaigns are led by South Africa. Mbeki meets with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder: for Saul to dismiss this is churlish and begs the question – why shouldn’t he, when there is every reason why he should?
A progressive environment of freedom, democracy and an entrenched multiparty Constitution are a profound starting point for the poor in changing their situation. As the United Nations Development Programme argues: “When human development and human rights advance together, they reinforce one another – expanding people’s capabilities and protecting their rights and fundamental freedoms.” (Human Development Report 2000.)
The controversy is more profoundly around the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) policy. Yet in all the opposition to Gear, no one has yet shown that it is Gear itself that causes South Africa’s economic problems. No one has credibly shown an alternative to adjusting to the new economic realities as South Africa re-entered a globalising world.
There is plenty of room to try to rework the rules, but no viable escape. What alternatives were there to a radical restructuring of industrial capacities, to enable competition in a cut-throat world market? Is foreign investment not to be attracted? Should we go it alone in the world, the African National Congress branch running our local bank accounts, and a committee of civil servants to manage the gold mines, drawn from the same government that Saul seems to distrust?
The same cliches are repeated in a hoary non-debate. In fact, South Africa is a middling economy, doing fairly well on the world stage, avoiding the economic states of emergency of Latin America, the authoritarian and muddled transitions of much of Eastern Europe and the dramatic turns of the Asian economies. This is the hard truth that makes the programmes of the current government resonate far more with voters than the old left slogans – a sign of the electorate’s maturity and not its ignorance.
Is the issue a state refusal to spend for growth? Debt reduction has released new funds for social expenditure. The problem is far more to do with efficiency and targeting. Ending the roll-over and poor design of projects and the R20- billion efficiency losses in public expenditure (as estimated by one parliamentary committee) would make an enormous difference. Capacity for delivery in South Africa has no instant lucky- packet solutions. Modern management experience is not embedded in our systems, not least the education backlogs.
South Africa’s spend on health care, for example, is insufficient. More: a World Health Organisation committee has found our health-care system to be worse than Mali’s – with the 57th spend, South Africa ranks only 182 on the efficient use of available resources. These kinds of questions, regearing and joining up government spend, are a different order of problem.
The missing of the core occurs again in Saul’s dismissal of black business. Everybody acknowledges the need for markets and then expects them to work by hidden hands. Why should capitalists stay white in a new South Africa? With new money will, of course, come greed, a scramble for advance and corruption. These consequences should be up for analysis, work for social scientists rather than dismissive sneering.
Gear, with its attempts to prioritise and streamline, should be good for the poor. I must agree with Saul, how- ever, that Gear by itself is not enough. It must be combined with an effective social programme, a dynamic transformative approach across society and a vigorous debate and planning for social development.
I would even agree with Saul that government’s wider anti-poverty programme is unclear and unsustained, too ad hoc to tackle the problems with the long-term rigour and vigour required. It’s a serious indictment, but it requires a different set of solutions and pressures from Saul’s despairing rejection and vague, unformed and vacillating aspirations for either the “Spirit of Seattle” or “centimetre by centimetre concrete advances”.
What I miss in Saul’s argument is the old Saul, the Saul of engagement and flexible identification of “contradiction”. Because the South Africa of today is surely fluid and not fixed.
In politics and in the state, throughout society, there exist progressive and exciting potentialities. All over, there are people genuinely looking for solutions. The poor are not shut out, and indeed have space and the room to organise and propose. This is the space that Saul and others on the left should continue to occupy – building effective coalitions for engagement with social policy, working out solutions and the ability to implement them, and finding efficient ways to monitor and co-ordinate.
There is a hard slog for concrete programmes around jobs, health care and homes, within a context of all our national and international limitations. This is not a cause for despair, but a sign of the profound changes through which South Africa has already gone, and the many that can still be made.
Graeme Bloch is the former head of social development in the Department of Welfare