What has freedom brought? It is almost 10 years since apartheid ended and the government has published its draft review of its first decade in power to hold up a mirror to its own performance.
Its reflection of the freedom years reveals a chequered pattern — good in parts, patchy in others.
There are more poor households than in 1994 when the African National Congress was voted in. Then, 28% of all households lived in poverty, that figure had now grown to more than one in three households.
But this does not necessarily mean people are poorer, said the government.
The latest census revealed that 20% of the population in the provinces with the largest metropolitan centres are new internal migrants, a factor that has led to a plethora of new, smaller households, which has increased the rate of total household poverty.
But the picture of poverty is not likely to be far off the mark despite the jump in households and this is because unemployment has increased dramatically.
In general, the labour market was expanded by 1,6-million new jobs between 1995 and 2002, but here was the rub: ”During the same period, the number of unemployed people grew from 1.9-million to 4.2-million, an increase of 2.3-million.” Joblessness is the state’s biggest challenge for the next decade, said the review.
In drawing up its report card, the government instituted a system of ”composite indices” similar to the United Nations Development Programme’s human development indicators to measure infrastructure (such as housing, water and sanitation), quality of life (like basic services including health, literacy programmes and environmental quality) and both political and social inclusion.
The index was measured between variables of 0 and 1, with 1 being complete service delivery. Each of these indices reveal improvements with the highest being 0,6 for infrastructure.
But the safety and security as well as the economic participation indices have slipped because crime and joblessness had been large challenges.
”These indexes suggest that the legitimacy of the polity and the social fabric are improving, especially in formal institutions,” said the review.
Economic growth has averaged 2,8% — too low to achieve the job creation necessary to stave off endemic unemployment, but the government has undertaken a massive extension of services.
Water has been extended to 85% of households from 60% in 1996, electrification has doubled in the same period.
But housing faced a conundrum: with the number of households jumping by two million in the past 10 years, the waiting list was getting longer and longer.
Speaking in his personal capacity, a senior policy adviser at the United Nations Development Programme in Pretoria, Asgar Adelzadeh, described the transformation of South Africa over the past 10 years as ”incomplete”.
He pointed out that in some areas the government has done really well, especially in the establishment of democratic institutions, like an independent, non-racial legal system.
However, Adelzadeh was critical of some of the government’s economic policies.
While South Africa has won much local and international praise from business and investors, among others, for its relatively orthodox economic policies, the result has been that the country has failed to create jobs on the necessary scale and it has been relatively conservative in its social development spending.
”They knew that they had to make trade-offs with economic policy but they did not necessarily chose the best ones,” he observed.
He was also concerned that the country’s land reform programme, which could be used to create wealth and security by the rural poor, was moving very slowly.
For its part the government admitted it is still struggling to turn the state departments it inherited into an effective civil service and a tool of social and economic development.
”Government’s successes occur more often in areas where it has significant control and its lack of immediate success occurs more often in those areas where it may only have indirect influence.”
The report points out that its areas of least influence are the behaviour of the civil service and its interaction with civil society, which have been much slower to show improvement.
One reason for its lack of influence is that state bureaucracy remains short of the management and other technical skills it needs to be an effective civil service and tool of government policy.
This is despite repeated government attempts to overhaul, retrain and retrench state employees during the past years.
Resistance by the public worker unions to government plans and policies are one of the major reasons for these failures.
Another reason is the inability of some parts of the state bureaucracy, especially local and provincial government structures, to deliver essential services to communities because of inherent weaknesses.
According to the review, this has prompted the national government to begin considering intervening more directly in the running of those provincial and local government structures. — Sapa-IPS