The article last week on the War on Poverty programme in Bitou (around Plettenberg Bay) is a tired and hackneyed portrait of political stereo-types that have long since been overtaken by a new reality (‘The politics of Plettenberg Bay”, August 27). It is exactly the kind of journalism that a newspaper on the cutting edge should strive to avoid.
Let me start with the way the writer contrasts the Democratic Alliance’s and the ANC’s approaches to reducing poverty. She refers to the ‘do-it-yourself creed” of the DA versus the ‘ANC’s credo that it’s government’s responsibility to rid the people of the legacy of apartheid”.
Really? Anyone who even scratched the surface of each party’s respective policies and track record would come to a different conclusion.
The DA has said, time and again, that a key role of the state is to do those things for people that they cannot be expected to do for themselves. And we have an excellent track record of doing this, ranging from free basic services to sustainable land reform. We also support a social safety net (that is, social grants) to alleviate extreme poverty. Hardly a ‘do-it-yourself” ethos.
At the same time, we do not treat people as if they are permanently in bondage. We believe in the ‘do some things yourself” approach. No country has ever significantly reduced poverty without it.
The ANC’s ‘community profiling” approach to fighting poverty actually entrenches the legacy of apartheid by freezing people in a cycle of dependency from which they cannot escape. ‘Community profiling” sounds good in theory. It involves a survey of each household in a community so that the state can intervene in a targeted manner to help people move out of poverty and earn a living. But because it fails to record many of the key poverty traps in households (ranging from rampant substance abuse to absent fathers and teenage pregnancies), its proposed solutions usually miss the mark and will predictably make poor people poorer.
I am deeply aware of the province’s extreme substance-abuse problem. It is a form of self-imposed oppression every bit as dehumanising as apartheid was. It was manifest at every turn.
To give an example: a house we visited in KwaNokuthula, according to the profile supplied, was headed by an unemployed plasterer and builder. The family’s sole income was his wife’s disability grant. When we arrived at their house, in the middle of the morning, both were stone drunk. The profile listed the man’s skills as ‘brick-laying, painting, walls, welding, carpentry”. This was followed by a list of state interventions required to support him moving out of poverty. It noted: ‘needs assistance in fixing cracks in RDP house”.
Here was a man with all the skills required to fix his wall. But the state was instructing a local government department to send someone else to do it, for the ostensible purpose of enabling his family to escape poverty.
To be sure, he needed the assistance, not because he lacked the skills, but because he could not stand up. It is a tragic fact that dependency on the state often goes hand in hand with dependency on substances. Perhaps that explains the irony of the major corporate sponsor of the anti-poverty rally being none other than South African Breweries.
The DA’s approach is to get to the root causes of endemic poverty, not just to treat the symptoms. This is why we are implementing a substance abuse strategy in the Western Cape on a scale never seen anywhere in South Africa. And it is why our focus is on significantly improving education for all and creating an enabling environment for job-creating growth.
At the same time, we will retain social grants because they are the only income many people have. But they must be used in a policy context that aims to diminish absolute poverty, not increase it.
As experience in all successful emerging democracies has shown, a good education, a decent job and personal responsibility are the only sustainable way out of poverty.
But the best policies in the world mean nothing if corruption flourishes. People know that corrupt politicians make them poorer, which is why the ANC mayor of Bitou, Lulama Mvimbi, was booed at the War on Poverty rally. The mayor, of course, played the race card, arguing that the corruption allegations were a ‘racist plot”. This was strange considering that, as Mvimbi well knows, the charges were initiated by none other than the former ANC provincial minister for housing and local government, Richard Dyantyi.
As they say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. But, while we have come to expect base generalisations and lies from the ANC, we still have faith in the media to scratch below the surface. And we would expect the Mail & Guardian, of all newspapers, to go beyond entrenched stereotypes in its reporting.
Helen Zille is DA premier of the Western Cape