Seven virtues, six deadly sins

South Africa may have a special role to play in the global search for what one might call the ”decent economy” — one that embodies humanity’s capacity, undreamed of in previous centuries, to ensure that everybody has enough to eat, that there is a water-tight roof over their heads, that all children are well-educated to their fullest potential, that the astonishing resources of both preventive and curative medicine are available to all and that the whole world can enjoy each other’s music, dancing and sporting prowess.

But if we are to achieve this — stage two if you like of the revolution of which so many have dreamed in the long march to freedom — it is necessary to examine unflinchingly what we have and have not achieved since 1994.

We might call it a ”seven by seven” society: seven major achievements and six significant failures. First the achievements:

• The negotiated transfer of power from a racist oligarchy to a non-racial democracy.
• The defusing of not one but two potential civil wars through sheer hard work, a little luck and some brilliant politics. Knowing what economic destruction civil war has caused in a number of African countries, not least nearby Angola during the past 25 years, we need to give thanks every day that South Africa has been spared that catastrophe.
• Macroeconomic management has been more professional, more people-oriented and generally better than at any other time in the country’s history. This is not to say it has been perfect, but to have controlled what many feared would become runaway inflation to single digits, to have guided the economy from persistently negative to consistently positive growth, and to have engaged in a process of significant restructuring of the Budget to increase the scope of the social security net under the poor is a singular achievement.
• The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, limited and full of flaws, nevertheless marked a giant moral step forward not only for South Africa but for the entire world.
• The abolition of capital punishment. The horrific rise in executions under the apartheid government has long been documented. In the years from Sharpeville in 1960 until 1989 when then president FW de Klerk suspended executions, the number of people hanged by the apartheid regime was somewhat more than 3 000. To its eternal credit the African National Congress government, led forcefully by president Nelson Mandela, moved immediately to abolish the death penalty. Despite being engulfed by a tidal wave of crime including murder, armed robbery and rape during the first 10 years of its stewardship, despite strong political pressures from the grassroots, and despite shameful pandering by the official opposition, which urged the re-introduction of the death penalty, the ANC government has stood firm in its belief that such a step would move the country backwards.
• The drafting and entrenching of a Constitution based on a Bill of Rights, which places the ”inherent dignity” of every person and ”the right to have their dignity respected and protected” at the heart of the country’s legal system. The establishment of a Constitutional Court with supreme authority to interpret and enforce it. And with all this, the abolition of the colour bar in both the state and the economy.
• Finally, the active process of generating the inclusive, non-judgemental ethos of a genuinely non-racial society. This includes a whole rainbow of activities ranging from Mandela’s tea party for the widows of political leaders, including Tienie Vorster and Ntsiki Biko, to the inclusion of Die Stem in the national anthem and the extraordinary radio talk shows hosted day after day by Tim Modise, John Perlman and others.

These are all very great achievements. But as with all societies, there is a shadow side that needs to be faced. Side by side with these seven virtues, there are also six deadly sins.

• Unemployment. In the years between 1993 and 2002 the average rate of unemployment, whether using the broader (more accurate) or the narrower definition, has risen to levels that are not only intolerable for those who want work and cannot find it, but also unsustainable for any society in the long term. Moreover, breaking down the average figure, using the 1993 data for example, the rate of unemployment varies from 2% for older whites to 65% for black women and men under the age of 25. People in the same country are living in different universes as far as economic security is concerned.
• Poverty. At least 50% of the population has monthly incomes whose level is too low to sustain a decent life. Nor is it only a matter of income. Millions of people, especially in the urban areas, live in shacks that are woefully inadequate, while in the rural areas, millions more live miles from clean drinking water. The government has done much in the past 10 years to remedy the lack of basic needs, but the situation remains chronic.
• Widening inequality and a spirit of greed. A story reported in the press last year from Vanderbijlpark said it all. While employees were laid off by the thousand as the result of globalisation and the loss of tariff protection for steel, Iscor directors were reported to be walking away with sums of R6-million or more. In terms of measured statistics, using the Gini Coefficient, South Africa remains one of the top two or three most unequal countries for which data is available. And if the gap continues to widen while poverty remains endemic, the political economy will become inherently unstable.
• Weak local government, collapsing hospitals and large numbers of dysfunctional schools plus significant levels of public corruption in some areas. The problems are well known. But how to solve them? First, by acknowledging that corruption is not a new phenomenon in a country that endured half a century of singularly corrupt apartheid government, and second, by not using this as an excuse but setting our own new high standards and then monitoring, regularly, the extent to that we live up to them.
• HIV/Aids. The pandemic continues to ravage the region and the roll-out of the anti-retrovirals — which have been shown to make a real difference to peoples’ lives — remains painfully, even criminally, slow.
• Crime and personal safety. Abuse of children, rape, murder and armed robbery are at levels that, while falling for some categories, are completely unacceptable for any society aspiring to be filled with the spirit of ubuntu. There is more to be probed in the search for a decent economy. Is the process of generating wealth simultaneously generating poverty — as South Africa did for 100 years after the mineral discoveries? What about conditions in the prisons in which thousands of men and women are incarcerated for years, without hope? All these

  questions and many more remain to be asked and discussed so that strategies for effective action may be developed.

One major lesson that the first 10 years of democracy has taught us, is that good though the government may be in so many areas, it can never do everything. The achievement of a decent economy will also require harnessing of the focused energies of civil society. And therein lies work for us all.

Francis Wilson recently retired as University of Cape Town economics professor after nearly 40 years, much of it spent directing the Southern Africa labour and development research unit