Is the ANC’s glass half empty, or half full, asks Reg Rumney
When it comes to the African National Congress’s record in government purely in terms of its own goals, is the glass half full or half empty? That question is more than a matter of natural pessimism or optimism.
Assessing the government’s record of ”delivery” is perplexed by perception, by political claim and counter-claim, and by what viewpoint you hold.
A team at BusinessMap, which at the very least has the advantage of being independent of any major interest group, has just compiled the BusinessMap June 2001 Risk Rating report. The half-yearly report rates South Africa in terms of investor risk by looking in detail at a range of economic and political developments as well as government performance.
Our report for the first half of this year gives South Africa a fairly good risk rating of almost 75%. It is based on a number of weighted criteria, including the political, economic and key indicators investors are likely to look at, such as privatisation.
By contrast with government delivery, assessing the economy is easy.
Politics is always open to interpretation. We looked at government delivery on a broad front, from housing to health.
Dr Rob Adam, the Director General of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, pointed to part of the problem. At the local launch of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) human development report at Auckland Park recently he observed that the science of indicators has developed its own dynamics in terms of the international marketing of countries.
Though the World Competitiveness Report and Yearbook plays this role strongly, about half of the indices in these reports are based on perceptions, he said, rather than on measurable quantities. Adams further noted that an internal study by his department found that South Africa did much better when perception-based indicators were excluded. It has even been suggested to me that public relations people exist who will, for large amounts of cash, no doubt, help massage perception indices for countries.
Perhaps it is human nature to focus on the empty half of the glass, but the clich illustrates the problem of objectivity in assessing government delivery. Even where measurables exist, such as in those areas of delivery for which the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry is responsible, you can interpret them in very different ways.
In February this year the department’s Director General, Mike Muller, took to task those outside of government who not only draw attention to the empty part of the glass but continually claim that it is cracked and leaking as well, destructive, ritual criticism that ”begins to generate a dangerous and destructive cynicism and distrust that we can ill afford as a nation”.
Muller added: ”I am concerned about the combination of negativity and lack of investigative diligence that I experience with some honourable exceptions from the local press as well as the development and public policy community.”
Water affairs has indeed delivered, and while question marks hang over the sustainability of its initiatives in supplying water, these remain queries.
Muller has said that contrary to negative reporting, the Department of Water Affairs has delivered basic water supply infrastructure to approximately seven million people since 1994 and that 82% of the schemes were successful.
The other side of water management is sanitation. Crucially, while sanitation provision has progressed markedly from the days of apartheid, the recent cholera outbreak shows how far it has yet to go.
Another contentious debate in government circles is how to fund ”free basic water” promised by the ANC last year in its local government election campaign.
These and other complexities of delivery are discussed at length in the report. But the issue of housing delivery illustrates another dimension of the problem, and one that political commentator Steven Friedman has eloquently written about.
The ANC, under pressure from a business community that believes politics merely interferes with getting on with the job, made delivery the focus of its government style. Democracy demands more, and tapping into the creative energies of ordinary people would seem to be the only way to solve, for instance, a severe accommodation shortage that led to the Bredell land invasions and to the mistaken notion that such invasions have anything to do with land reform.
So what about the actual, non-perception indicators? They do not paint a pretty picture. The Gini index, contained in the UNDP report, measures inequality of income, where 0 is complete equality and 100 is complete inequality, South Africa’s index is 59,3, which makes it almost twice as unequal as Canada and more unequal than most countries in Africa. Only Zimbabwe comes close, with a Gini index of 56,8. Egypt’s index, for example, is 28,9.
Statistics SA has put out a new, refined measure of unemployment that has drastically and, some would say, suspiciously reduced the unemployment rate to 22,5% of the economically active population. Even using this definition, about 3,5-million people, most of them black, are out of work.
The old, or ”expanded”, definition gives a figure of 36%, which in developed countries would probably lead to rioting in the street or some other form of social disturbance. Here the glass is definitely in need of topping up.
What should give government food for thought is its own measure of progress, released recently by Statistics SA as a special review of its October household survey figures. These show that most people are not overjoyed with what has happened since the first democratic elections. Less than one-fifth of all South Africans, according to the survey, feel that life has actually got better. One-third believes life has got worse.
For some people this could be because they have lost their unfair advantage though for Africans the figures are little different than for all race groups, so it is not just the usual category of ”whingeing white people” who are unhappy. It could be because of great expectations unmet. It could be because while some things have improved, the crime situation demonstrably has not improved for all citizens, particularly the poor at least according to present statistics and jobs for the poor have demonstrably not poured forth in great number.
But it could equally be because people want something more than a status as passive recipients of government delivery, and that is what should exercise politicians’ minds. Perhaps it’s not a question of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty; the problem may be that people want a cup instead of a glass.
Reg Rumney is information services director of investment strategy group BusinessMap