There were many striking figures in this year’s budget.
“Over the next three years, we are budgeting to spend almost R2-trillion … that’s a two, followed by 12 zeros,” Finance Minister Trevor Manuel told Parliament this week. It is a gobsmacking figure and no wonder Manuel needed to tally the zeros for us. Here’s another striking figure: we will have notched up a surplus of R5-billion (that’s a five and nine zeros) by the end of the financial year.
At the opposite end of the good news spectrum is a human challenge expressed in the following numerical detail: according to the official definition of unemployment, there are 4,4-million people who are unemployed. That’s a 4,4 and five zeros. If you use the unofficial definition, which includes people who have given up looking for work, then it is Âprobably just less than seven million South Africans.
We are set to begin to define a poverty datum line, but various analyses suggest that half our people can be classified as poor. That’s roughly 23 and six zeros.
So, if there is so much money, why is there so much poverty? The stock budget narrative of the past four years has been that we do not have the “capacity” to “rollout” the spending that will begin to reduce the numbers at the poverty end of the spectrum.
Lack of capacity is becoming a euphemism for dysfunction in the state.
The people’s budget campaigners are right to complain about the surplus (which is equal to the amount civil servants failed to spend in the past year) in a country where poverty gnaws at so many.
During the years of economic contraction, government departments developed an odd affliction: they learned not to spend. This trend is reflected in crumbling infrastructure, notably of our hospitals, water and sanitation systems and of many rural schools. The problem is being tackled, but R5-billion is still way too high a price tag for the challenges we face.
Society should have no patience with capacity and underspending problems. In the early days, patience was a requisite as the new democracy had to retool a civil service used to catering for only 10% of the population. Thirteen years later, with a largely black civil service now in place, we should raise the bar.
Inefficiency in the state militates against equality and dignity. The budget’s theme, reflected in the phrase “Impilo zabantu zinesisindo Ângokufanayo [People’s lives hold equal value]” is undermined these days not so much by lack of money but by the lack of will and drive. Dig down into the challenges, and red tape also emerges as a huge impediment. There is too much bureaucracy in the three-tiered system of government to move at the pace that our fat national wallet suggests we could. ÂGovernment has realised this and is reconsidering the provincial system.
But any big decisions will come only after the elections in 2009.
A fallen angel
It was the media that hailed Mama Jackey Maarohanye for the 100% pass rate for matriculants at her school, Ithuteng Trust. Oprah Winfrey called her “a living angel on Earth”. For years she appeared on newspaper front pages and television screens, fêted by the likes of Nelson Mandela, President Thabo Mbeki and American broadcasting networks.
Now the Gauteng education department has questioned the results claimed by Maarohanye, while some of her pupils have told M-Net’s Carte Blanche they did not pass matric at all, and that she encouraged them in fabrications so that the school could secure donor funding.
The account Maarohanye gave the world for many years is so bitterly disputed that it is difficult to tell right from wrong. She herself stands by her claims of being a philanthropist betrayed by ungrateful children who benefited from her.
But there should be little doubt about, or tolerance for, the events of last weekend when a Sowetan reporter was kidnapped and assaulted for hours in Mama Jackey’s presence. That she allowed it to happen and was heard to say the reporter would “shit himself” (otla nyella) as soon as she saw him, means, at the very least, that she aligned herself with the anti-media sentiment fomented in the school hall. She even allegedly threatened to beat up the reporter herself because of questions he had prepared in his notebook to put to her.
That she has been under severe pressure following the Carte Blanche documentary is no excuse for assaulting a journalist who was merely doing his job. She could have viewed the interview request as an opportunity to set the record straight — if, indeed, it needs to be straightened. The media, as she can surely testify, have been generous in covering her work over the years.
There is a lesson in this sorry saga for other fallen heroes who cannot handle negative publicity. They should remember that there are various institutions they can use to challenge unfair and flawed media reports. These include the courts, the press ombudsman and the media themselves, who, almost without exception, do not condone irresponsible and inaccurate reporting.