A welcome breathing space opened up this week, as those with their hands on the levers of power let policy take precedence over politics. Measures outlined in President Thabo Mbeki’s State of the Nation address, which will be fleshed out in the budget, provide hope for a more meaningful attack on poverty.
Mbeki’s announcement of a dramatic overhaul of the social security system may turn out to be one his most important policy interventions. Our welfare state has grown in the past three years as budgets have become more expansionary and grant funding has risen to include a range of measures forming a social security net of significant strength.
But the system is incomplete. The announcement of a new approach to retirement funding, combining mandatory contributions and a social security tax, could plug a crucial gap between the most basic state provision and private pensions schemes.
As we enter a national debate about this system, South Africans of good will and long vision should support it.
Much will depend on how it is implemented. The tax treatment of retirement savings will probably be particularly contentious, but it is crucial to ensure mandatory contributions do not drive up the cost of employing people.
The related proposal of a wage subsidy also has merit — although perhaps not, as Mbeki suggested, “for first-time entrants into the job market, especially young people”. The idea is that the subsidy would help low-income earners meet the cost of social security contributions, without making them costlier to hire.
And it was clear this week that a government that admits its capacity constraints, skills shortages and other limitations is being tempted down a path of micro-economic reform which centres on state economic intervention. It makes perfect sense to spend taxpayer cash on a dramatic revamp of public transport, a crucial bit of economic infrastructure; but other proposals look less encouraging.
Details have yet to emerge of a long-promised industrial strategy, but it now seems certain to include financial incentives for strategic sectors. Picking winners is hard to get right in countries with large and highly skilled bureaucracies. In the hands of our overstretched department of trade and industry, it could prove a disaster.
An industrial policy is of a piece with the department of public enterprises’s renewed insistence that state-owned companies are the most effective instrument for changing market dynamics. We report this week on how Infraco, a majority-owned government enterprise, is at the centre of plans to bring down broadband costs. Government has been pledging to tackle anti-competitive telecoms costs for four years now, and we are not convinced a greater state hand is the answer. The jury is also out on government mega-projects like Coega and state agencies geared to help small businesses.
A thorough focus on the other half of the government’s growth strategy — competition and competitiveness — is more likely to deliver results. Of course, it takes political will to overhaul labour markets and tackle cartels, but that is what 70% electoral majorities are for.
Equal before the law
Afrikaners have every reason to be proud of General Koos De la Rey, celeÂbrated in the Bok van Blerk song that has triggered a wave of Afrikaner nationalist nostalgia. As one of the four great military leaders of the Boer struggle against British imperialism during the South African War — with Jan Smuts, Louis Botha and Christiaan de Wet — he can credibly be placed in the pantheon of 20th-century liberation icons. What Afrikaners cannot and should not do, however, is equate the plight of the volk at the turn of the 19th century with their place in the South Africa of 2007.
By any reasonable standard, they are not an oppressed national minority. They may complain about affirmative action, the renaming of cities and the place of Afrikaans in universities and schools. They have justified fears about the future of the taal in a world dominated by English, which match the concerns of speakers of South Africa’s nine other official languages. But such issues are a far cry from the burning of farms and internment of starving women and children in disease-ridden concentration camps. To a large extent, Afrikaans political commentator Tino Venter is right to see a “power-loss syndrome” in much Afrikaner-issue activism. But we also agree with Tim du Plessis, the editor of Rapport, who says that while Afrikaners lost privilege, they did not lose rights under a democracy.
All citizens of this democracy have more rights than we have ever had; none of us requires a special dispensation. To demand so is to return to apartheid.
And Afrikaners should be realistic about place names: it is both just and inevitable that South Africa reflect its indigenous African identity.
But South Africa is not out of the woods in forging a national identity, and the authorities must continue to deal with national sub-groups and their cultures with sensitivity and caution. Symbolism is all-important: in its renaming programme, for example, Afrikaners complain that Afrikaans toponyms have been targeted in preference to the by-products of British colonialism.
As Tshwane and Jozi roll off the tongue with greater ease than Pretoria and Johannesburg, so, too, would eThekwini and Mandela City for Durban and Port Elizabeth.