It is easy to be blasé about the Budget and label it ”boring” — but we shouldn’t. Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel has once again announced major increases in spending, symbolically important tax cuts and a reduced budget deficit — the headline measure of sound fiscal management.
Per capita annual income has improved by 15% in the past decade, Manuel told Parliament, and it will increase by another 30% over the next 10 years if current growth levels of more than 4% are sustained. The black middle class is growing and this has an effect on the retail and other sectors. A ”virtuous cycle” seems imminent. And for those not yet part of the cycle, the social welfare net is reducing the effect of grinding poverty on the poorest citizens.
The revenue, expenditure and forecast figures that underpin the economy are impressive, even if they pale beside the achievements of some Asian countries or post-war Germany, where Manuel and his Cabinet colleagues find inspiration.
But as the 2005 Budget Review points out, job creation is the key to reducing poverty and inequality — with their attendant social ills — in the long term. Manuel has gone some way to addressing this, with measures to improve the earning potential of the poor by improving the education system and by boosting growth. He has refused, however, to address the question of jobs head-on.
He quibbles over statistics, irritated by commentators who use the broad measure of unemployment that puts it at 40%, rather than the 28% that excludes those so discouraged they have given up looking for work. In his Budget speech, he celebrated the creation of 280 000 formal sector jobs a year since 2000 — without acknowledging that this is a drop in the ocean.
Asked at last year’s pre-Budget press conference how he planned to halve unemployment by 2014 in line with the government’s pledge, Manuel replied ”change the way we measure it”. That’s not quite as bad as Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s refusal to offer HIV/Aids statistics, but the stress on better measurement of the informal economy sounded like jobs denialism to many.
For a government so confident about its ability to intervene in the economy with infrastructure investments, beneficiation rules and industrial policy, the refusal to present a tough, coherent jobs strategy is inexplicable. Governments don’t create employment — we agree with Manuel that that isn’t his job — but we’d like him to apply the political courage it took to stabilise the economy to our biggest challenge.
A fighter, not a ruler
The final days in public office of Raymond Mhlaba, the veteran African National Congress leader who died this week, were not covered in glory. The only constant seam in the fabric of his life was that he remained a communist to his dying day, having joined the then Communist Party of South Africa — before taking up ANC membership — while working at a dry cleaning factory in Port Elizabeth in 1942.
Mhlaba belonged to a generation that lived by the mantra ”freedom in our lifetime” and he made huge personal sacrifices for his ideals. After the ANC was banned in 1960, he was one of the first to undergo military training in China. He was a founding member of Umkhonto weSizwe, and briefly served as its commander after the arrest of Nelson Mandela.
Along with Mandela and six other Rivonia trialists, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, and spent 25 years in jail. In 1991 he was elected to the ANC’s national executive committee, and in 1994 he became premier of the Eastern Cape. Mhlaba received the ANC’s medal of Isithwalandwe, and served in 1997 as South African high commissioner to Uganda.
The posting to Kampala was read by political commentators as an admission by the ANC and the government that heroic as he might have been in his youth, Mhlaba was unimpressive as a premier of one of the poorest and most chaotic provinces. Of course, the Eastern Cape’s woes cannot be laid entirely at his doorstep, and have continued under his successors. But there can be no disputing the fact that Mhlaba’s finest hours were as a resistance fighter, rather than in the corridors of power.
(Raymond Mhlaba, born February 12 1920, died February 21 2005)
Our apologies
The energy, investigation, thought and argument that go into making a great newspaper can count for very little if you’re unable to get it to your readers in time. In the past fortnight, we’ve failed to get the Mail & Guardian to subscribers and many buyers on Friday and for that we apologise profusely. In the first week, there were production problems. In the second week, the now common Johannesburg electricity cuts disempowered us on deadline.
The relationship between readers and newspaper is an intimate one, especially on a read like the M&G where we know that many of you have been with us for a long time. Levels of frustration in Gauteng (the only affected province) were acute because the newspaper is, for many, a Friday-morning coffee warmer.
As the title heads towards its 20th birthday in June, it is in sturdier financial shape than it has ever been. This year we are working on improving our production and printing systems to ensure that we match our financial stability with an efficiency drive. Ultimately, the newspaper’s success and longevity as a key institution of a free media will lie in its economic success. Getting the newspaper to you on time is a vital part of that future.