How to heal SA’s inequality disease after the virus

As the national lockdown’s scheduled end-date draws near, experts say the time to address South Africa’s soaring levels of inequality is now.

“We have to be careful not to slave away to get back to a dispensation that was already dysfunctional,” the director of Stellenbosch University’s Institute for Futures Research, Dr Morne Mostert, said yesterday.

Mostert was responding to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s latest weekly newsletter, in which he said the lockdown had shone a light on “a very sad fault line in our society that reveals how grinding poverty, inequality and unemployment is tearing the fabric of our communities apart”.

“Yes, these are the residual effects of a fractured and unequal past. But they are also a symptom of a fundamental failing in our post-apartheid society. The nationwide lockdown has gravely exacerbated a long-standing problem,” said Ramaphosa.

Inequality was part of the reason the poorest of the poor had been hardest hit by the lockdown, Mostert said yesterday.

“So, we can’t, once this is all over, revert to a system that creates and maintains inequality,” he added.

The president pointed to “distressing images of desperate people clamouring for food parcels at distribution centres and of community protests against food shortages”.

He admitted “the provision of support to our country’s most vulnerable citizens has been slower than required”.

“However, the payment of social grants has proceeded relatively smoothly and, after a number of technical challenges, the food distribution system is being streamlined,” Ramaphosa said.

He said Cabinet was finalising measures to respond to the impact of the lockdown on South Africans’ livelihoods and that welfare provision would be scaled up.

He also said government would this week provide more interventions “to shield our most vulnerable citizens from starvation”.

Political economist Daniel Silke said yesterday this was an opportunity for the president to lobby for meaningful policy reform.

“It shouldn’t take a crisis like this for us to figure out that there’s something wrong with our society,” Silke said.

“A lack of policy over the last decade or so, together with continued graft and corruption, has exacerbated the inequality in the country. And the issues that were there before, remain and are even more important now as we move into the post-virus era”.

He said the current pandemic-driven food crisis was a reflection of “the dependency of the South African populace on the largesse of the state” and that government needed to work to uplift poor South Africans.

Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt said yesterday the emphasis must be on trying to create an environment where there were fewer poor people.

“And to do that, we have to grow the economy,” he said.

Roodt said with the recent economic downgrade, that the ship was sinking – and fast.

“I’m afraid there is no easy fix any more. We will have to put in place measures that will make things worse in the short term,” he said. “The single most important thing we must do is get the state to spend less money.”

– bernadettew@citizen.co.za

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