Marikana could be catalyst for change

EVENTS last week at Marikana, where protesting mineworkers were mown down by police, will dominate headlines for days to come.

The horror and tragedy that unfolded near that dusty koppie outside Rustenburg will be revisited during the judicial inquiry announced by President Jacob Zuma and relived in the nightmares of survivors, their families and friends.

A bloody stain on SA’s post-apartheid record, the Marikana massacre – as it will surely come to be known – comes at a huge cost, and not only for families of the men who were killed or injured. The cost comes to the country – to every one of us who calls SA home.

If a country had a psychological profile, ours would probably be diagnosed as bi-polar, with its tremendous swings from hope, enthusiasm and hilarity to despondency and despair.

It doesn’t take much to make us deliriously happy. Last week, we were ecstatic as our Olympians flew back home toting their stash of gold medals.

We should also have been able to spend time absorbing the details of the National Development Plan presented by Planning Minister Trevor Manuel.

The plan is the country’s first long-term blueprint for mapping our way out of the fix we are in.

It’s the result of more than two years of work and aims to take the country to a future where none of us suffers from, or is threatened by, inequality, poverty and unemployment.

Manuel – the head of the National Planning Commission’s 25-member team of experts – would have been hoping to get a national conversation going about the plan, which include targets and milestones.

Critics have dismissed it as a wish list. Opposition parties have embraced it, but questioned whether it can be implemented. Manuel has made it clear that the plan is not the property of any one political party. It is the president and his cabinet who will have to drive its implementation, at least until their term of office ends.

Briefing journalists last week, Manuel said the commission did not speak on behalf of state departments and had been careful not to set itself up as a shadow cabinet. It saw its role as far more cross-cutting, he said.

In Parliament last Wednesday, when Manuel handed the plan to President Jacob Zuma, opposition members wanted to know the extent of support for it in the ANC. They wanted to know whether the divisions racking the ruling party as it heads towards leadership elections in Mangaung in December would not keep the plan locked in the starting blocks.

Thursday’s calamitous events in Rustenburg stopped any conversation about the plan before it had even begun, as headlines and images riveted attention on the grievances of some 3 000 rock drill operators working at one of the world’s largest platinum mines.

This is where the striking rock drill operators take home nearly R4 000 a month, while the mine owner’s chief executive officer nets more than R1m a month, and a national office bearer of the National Union of Mineworkers – its general secretary Frans Baleni – earns R1.4m a year.

It is this sort of gap between wages that helps make SA one of the most unequal societies in the world. Under apartheid, race created the big divide. Today, the split is more along class lines.

The measure for poverty used by the planning commission was a breathtakingly low monthly income of R432 – which it said was earned by 39 percent of the population.

Among the aims of the plan is to reduce the proportion of people earning this little to 0 percent by 2030, reducing SA’s Gini co-efficient – which measures the level of income inequality – from a high 0.69 to 0.60.

To achieve this, though, SA would have to grow its GDP by nearly 5.5 percent a year – and create 11 million jobs over the next 18 years.

Most of those jobs, according to the plan, will come from small to medium-sized businesses and much of the impetus for their creation is predicated on increased exports.

For this to be possible, a range of other things must happen – almost all of them at the same time, and over a long period.

The education system needs to start producing people able to do the kind of jobs needed to make SA a global player. For that, we not only need capable and dedicated teachers, finely tuned curricula and well-provisioned and staffed tertiary institutions, but proper nutrition and early childhood education.

Raising living standards, according to the plan, goes way beyond merely improving people’s incomes.

Focusing on 13 areas, the plan sets out targets and recommendations for dealing with the issues that hobble development, including the lack of efficient and affordable public transport.

One of the legacies of apartheid planning is that the poor live furthest from places of work. Most low-income households are far from centres of economic activity, the report notes.

“The costs of searching for and getting to work are high, and information about work is often unavailable… low-cost and efficient public transport is essential…”

In addressing the myriad challenges confronting the country, the plan recognises the need for “collaboration between all sectors of society and effective leadership of government”.

“In a society with deep social and economic divisions, neither social nor economic transformation is possible without a capable and developmental state,” it says.

A capable state, it explains, is one with the capacity to devise and implement policies that serve the national interest; a developmental state drives growth to build capacity to address the causes of poverty and inequality.

While noting the gains made since 1994 – consolidating fragmented apartheid governance structures, for example, and increasing access to education, sanitation, housing, water and electricity to millions of people – the report does not shy away from articulating deep-seated problems in government.

“The foundations have been laid, but weaknesses in how these structures function constrain the state’s ability to pursue developmental objectives.

“The main challenge has been unevenness in capacity that leads to uneven performance in local, provincial and national government.

“This is caused by a complex set of factors, including tensions in the political-administrative interface, instability of the administrative leadership, skills deficits, the erosion of accountability and authority, poor organisational design and low staff morale.

“The weaknesses in capacity and performance are most serious in historically disadvantaged areas, where state intervention is most needed to improve people’s quality of life.

“There have been many individual initiatives, but there is a tendency to jump from one quick fix or policy fad to the next. These frequent changes have created instability in organisational structures and policy approaches that further strain limited capacity,” says the report.

It talks about the deficit in skills and professionalism in the public service, and how reporting and recruitment structures at senior levels allow for “too much political interference” in selecting and managing high-level employees.

“The result has been unnecessary turbulence in senior posts, which has undermined the morale of public servants and citizens’ confidence in the state.”

Interestingly, the report notes that efforts to shore up the state may be doing more harm than good, especially in trying to achieve constructive relations between spheres of government.

“A lack of clarity about the division of responsibilities together with a reluctance to manage the system has created tension and instability across the three spheres of government,” the report says.

“There is no consensus on how this is going to be resolved and there is a lack of leadership in finding solutions.”

However, while these “co-ordination problems” are not unique to SA, “the issue is how they are dealt with”.

“New initiatives have often been ad hoc, with responses to individual problems being implemented without adequate consideration of the cumulative effect. This has resulted in public servants becoming increasingly overburdened with paperwork.

“Initiatives targeted at preventing misconduct often focus on restricting the scope for discretion, but this has the unintended consequence of limiting the scope for innovation.

“Reforms are needed that will enable people to do their jobs by strengthening skills, enhancing morale, clarifying lines of accountability and building an ethos of public service.”

To deal with poverty and inequality, the state must play a developmental and transformative role, says the report, but the Catch 22 is that this requires well-run institutions with skilled staff.

“By 2030, the South African economy should generate sufficient opportunity that enables those who want to work the access and possibility to do so,” the report says.

The cost of the breakdown in relations between people, and the failure of leadership that led to the kind of bloodletting that seeped into Rustenburg’s dust last week, goes much further than dampening the national mood.

It will depress the economy, as investors weigh up whether or not the country is teetering close to the precipice.

The multiplicity of factors that combined in the explosive cocktail that ignited at Marikana will cost us in real terms.

Marikana can plunge us into doom and gloom, or we can use it as the catalyst to put the country on the path to healing. But for that we need leadership.