Advocates for change: How to Overcome Africa’s challenges
Moeletsi Mbeki (ed.)
Picador Africa
The exceptional value of this book is its focus on hands-on solutions to the problems facing Africa south of the Sahara and troubling South Africa in particular.
It identifies the challenges before offering solutions and its analysis of what is going wrong is incisive.
Moeletsi Mbeki, an outspoken critic of the current leadership of the ANC government, has emerged as a leading commentator on the state of the nation. In this book he has brought together a selection of essays by leading specialists. In his introduction Mbeki says Africa’s peoples are the poorest in the world because the continent was plundered over the centuries by the slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism, the cold war and feeble post-independence leadership.
He points out that South Africa had leaders who feared the rise of knowledge among the citizens and introduced Bantu Education aimed at keeping the “natives” in their place.
Yet the causes of the current situation must be clear to most Africans, says Mbeki, ranging from corruption in high and low places, to inept public officials, a demotivated private sector and parastatal managers – and foreigners helping themselves to our natural resources in return for crumbs for Africans governments.
In the post-apartheid era voters support the ANC primarily because of their material dependence on the ANC-controlled state. Mbeki quotes the results of a Markinor poll which show that 67 per cent of the people who voted for the ANC in 2009 do not work. And 69 per cent either have no education at all or have not completed high school.
So the ANC’s primary constituency is made up of poor black South Africans, who are kept on side by a system of welfare grants distributed to an estimated 15 or 16 million people.
Mbeki’s team of experts argue that Africa’s problems are far from intractable and would yield to practical solutions. But Mbeki says South Africa is the one country in sub-Saharan Africa that is most likely to experience what happened in the insurrection that swept across North Africa. This has already begun to happen, as the widespread social protests against incompetence and corruption in the public sector would suggest.
So what are the practical solutions which South Africa needs so urgently to head off chronic instability and insurrection?
Seeraj Mohammed, Director of Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development Research Programme at Wits University, says that South African economic policies, including macroeconomic and finance policies, should focus on supporting industrial development and employment creation. The post-apartheid government’s policy choices have driven the economy towards the wrong kind of economic growth.
Industrial policy, he argues, should be geared to making the economy less dependent on the mines, shifting the economic growth path away from debt-driven consumption and speculation towards increasing the competitiveness of industry and employment creation. Financial institutions need to be made more responsive to the needs of industry to ensure that capital is allocated towards economic and industrial policy goals. Economic policies should ensure that economic rents should be managed by the state to support their economic and industrial policy goals.
David Everatt, executive director of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, a partnership between universities and the Gauteng provincial government, considers the role and influence of the African middle class in South Africa. He concludes that what it looks like, how big it is and its political predilections are unknown or are at best the results of guesswork. The African middle class in South Africa remains “blurry” and poorly understood. Yet he believes that the ANC’s grip is weakening on the young black professional class, and particularly among those who have made it in the new South Africa.
Professor Jonathan Jansen, Rector of the University of the Free State, notes that the public school system serving Africans is in crisis because of bureaucratic and administrative ineptitude at both the national and provincial level. Then the “highly esoteric and unworkable” policy of Outcomes Based Education collapsed primary education.
He says the large under-performing public school system requires the restoration to government of political authority and accountability over the schools. This would require a government and a presidency prepared to take political risks with especially the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, requiring that schools start on time, with predictable timetables and uninterrupted teaching schedules.
It would need exceptionally courageous political leaders, including the president, says Jansen, to place the interests of 13 million children above the personal and political interests of those currently in power. He concludes that until governmental authority is re-established over schools, all other kinds of well-intentioned reforms will avail nothing.
Mike Herrington of the UCT Graduate School of Business offers suggestions on how to overcome obstacles and promote entrepreneurship among the country’s youth.
This accessible collection of essays gives us encouraging insights into what can be done to get South Africa back on track.
Let us hope these practical solutions are forthcoming in time to head off an explosion.
l Shaw is an author and former assistant editor at the Cape Times.
The Cape Times is hosting a lunch with Mbeki on Wednesday. See the advert on page 6 for details. Bookings close today. - Cape Times