In February 2001 during the State of the Nation address President
Thabo Mbeki announced a “sustained campaign against poverty and
underdevelopment”. This took the form of
urban renewal projects (URP) and integrated sustainable rural development
programmes (ISRDP).
Run by 21 municipalities selected on need, including Cape
Town, they were a mix of soft infrastructure, economic and community
development and job creation projects.
A 2006 completion report
found poverty had declined in those municipal nodes. However, other assessments that supplemented
and fed into it contradicted its universal, rosy findings and indicated
shortcomings with individual programmes, and that expectations of inter alia
poverty reduction and economic development had not been met. (The report’s flaw was it conflated and
attributed social transfers – free services, etc – and bulk infrastructure
projects to the URPs/ISRDPs that were never part of the latter.)
This included the Central
Karoo/Beaufort West programme, which official reports said met objectives
“fairly well” when, in fact, little value was obtained for the R132 million
spent on it during 2003 and 2006, including on so-called poverty alleviation
and job creation projects.
Expanded public work programmes (EPWP) are another iteration
of the alphabet soup that started with the Reconstruction and Development Programme in 1995, and similarly, suffers
the same fate of exaggerated outcomes.
So it’s to be expected that politicians like Cape Town mayor
Patricia de Lille, who are incapable of reporting
failure, will fudge the number of sustainable jobs, benefits and opportunities
that were created, or enabled, from the 160 000 “job opportunities” and
R555 million spent (Cape Argus, ‘City council seeks to create jobs’, January 19).
The core function of local
government is to provide services and infrastructure and regulate the orderly
development of the urban space. Economic
development is a consequence of this function.
It’s not local government’s role to be an employment agency, except to
meet the staffing requirements for its core duties.
While I understand the necessity for occasionally employing
people for specific short-term projects, the scale of jobs entertained with EPWPs
are beyond the scope of those core duties.
And, as I said before, it’s duplication of service, an inefficient use
of resources and, as proven with the numerous A-to-Z programmes over the past 20
years, yields little lasting macro-economic benefits for either the beneficiaries
or country in terms of overall poverty reduction, job creation and skills development
against the billions spent, which could have been better invested.
Poverty is multidimensional.
But while grants, free housing and basic services have reduced absolute
deprivation in places, income poverty, or lack of jobs, is the still the most significant problem in South Africa.
I appreciate EPWPs’ attempt to provide a little income for a
short period. But the short duration of
the earnings window, typically a few weeks, means the person has access only to
subsistence income, but no meaningful time to accumulate assets and
opportunities to alter entrenched inequality/deprivation that only a sustained and permanent employment over a
long period allows. Social grants
and transfers like free basic services have the same limitations.
We have tendency to throw money at problems believing it’s
the solution, only to see problems persist, and we wonder why. In the meantime, we pretend to be unaware of and
fail to deal with the entrenched structural issues.
De Lille says they have evidence a few weeks make a permanent
difference for the majority of beneficiaries.
However, our poverty and unemployment levels would be a lot lower if
it’s as she asserts. Nevertheless, I
would like to see her long-range research and be proved wrong.
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