The leadership of the “disability movement” is naive and spineless — no pun intended — if it believes that “the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities … will strengthen the [office on the status of disabled persons] OSDP” (“Rights on paper, not in practice”, March 23). At the heart of the troubles of South Africa’s disabled people is the unquestioning belief among the “disability movement” leadership that the country’s laws and policies will find a way of implementing themselves to the benefit of the country’s six million people with disabilities. Having failed to carry out the Integrated National Disability Strategy White Paper of 1997, how far do they hope the convention will take us?
The 10 OSDPs in the office of the presidency and the respective provincial premiers’ offices find themselves struggling to breathe life into this document. The MPs who are “disability representatives” are nothing more than empty symbols without a political voice worth listening to. In disability politics, the elites account to themselves rather than to ordinary disabled South Africans.
Disability politics reflects starkly the shortcomings of representative democracy. The movement’s leadership continues to hang in mid-air. As reported in the story on the OSDP, Disabled People of South Africa’s secretary general Mzolosi Ka Toni did not even respond to questions sent to him by the Mail & Guardian. At the same time the director of the OSDP could not “answer questions about the operations and budget of the office without permission by Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad”. Similarly, the various organisations operating as “of” or “for” one kind of disability or another are either organisationally weak, with one individual as a cult leader or they run as businesses.
Meanwhile, a 2004 report by Idasa indicates that children with disabilities still do not have access to services “that will allow them to function in the way they want to, as contributing members of South African society”. For an ordinary disabled youth in the poverty-stricken Winterveld, North West province, the series of indabas and makgotlas that the leadership frequently attend are nothing more than ceremonial posturing. Both civil society and government are “embedded”, in the new meaning of the term.
The Commission on Employment Equity constantly reports the unchanging — if not steadily falling — statistics of employed people with disabilities: the majority of whom occupy clerical and lower level posts. When interpreting the country’s broad based BEE strategy, “black people with disabilities” are worth only 2% to 3% of the whole economy’s value. This is despite the fact that we comprise 12% of the country’s population. Our ownership of and involvement in the economy will remain thin.
In real terms, this means that business ventures headed by people with disabilities are not likely to exercise meaningful control over the country’s economy. This is a sad indictment of how the “disability movement” leadership were unable to apply foresight in the processes that led to the adoption of the strategy. Rather than challenging the current political system through the mobilisation of ordinary disabled people who are deeply frustrated and disenchanted, the leadership resorts to appeasement. It is a disgrace indeed that in our 13th year of democracy the majority of local governments around South Africa have not devised “universally accessible” means of service delivery for disabled members of their respective communities.
MI “Papi” Nkoli is a PhD candidate at Wits University and a member of Disabled People of South Africa and the National Council for Persons with Physical Disabilities