Many articles I read like this one on The Conversation and elsewhere about
poverty, inequality, development and related topics, and particularly those written from a sociological
perspective, omit, ignore or avoid the elephant in the room of why South Africa
is not meeting developmental goals or achieving minimum standards: poor to
mediocre economic growth rates that’s been on a downward trend from a 5.6% high
in 2006, the highest since 1980 (6.6%) to a low of 0.28% in 2016 (-1.5% in
2009).
While peer and less developed countries – Rwanda, Ethiopia
and Kenya to name three – is achieving 6% and above, SA has lolled about in
mediocrity without leadership and direction due to political and economic
mismanagement and incompetence, officially sanctioned industrial protectionism
and big business greed.
One cannot begin to analyse why SA is not meeting
development goals without understanding these factors. You don’t do so here and
your analysis is the weaker for it because the reader perceives development
goals in isolation from the political economy which it’s not.
In 2015 SA’s HDI was 0.66. It didn’t improve much since
1995 (0.65). The country spends 20% of
its budget on education – more than some developed countries and in gross terms
arguably the most in Africa – with poor results, and 15% on social grants for
17 million people, just under a third of the population.
It cannot reasonably be asked to do more yet activists,
politicians and academics like you expect yet more expenditure without saying
how this improves already failing outcomes and how the about 5 million taxpayers
is expected to pay for it. (The largest reallocation is the unbudgeted R57bn
for fee-free higher education over three years, despite the existing R50bn
budget hole.)
Winnie Sambu and Lucy Jamieson of UCT's Children Institute write: “Various challenges and constraints [] include lack
of financial and human resources to implement SDGs, as well as the capacity to
monitor and evaluate the programmes that are put in place. South Africa is not
alone in this: many developing countries face the same dilemma”
I’d argue the problem to SA’s manifold problems is less
financial, as they claim, and more political management and vision. Comparatively
poor African countries are performing better than SA in international benchmark
education tests. If what you say is true, then they should score far worse than
SA but SA has the distinction of coming at the bottom of the rankings time and
again. Last year, I think the Department of Education said its second last
placing was an “improvement” (sic).
So except for human resources, I disagree with the entirety of
that statement. Their and similar' analyses of where SA is failing in key performance
indicators is correct but your assessment of why that’s happening is being too
softy-softy diplomatic which helps no one understand the intrinsic severity of
the problem and how we must solve it (hint: solutions are known).
Comments
Post a Comment