Writing in the Financial Times this week, Sarah O’Connor confessed: “I hate big numbers. Or rather I hate it when big numbers are used to impress or bamboozle rather than to make sense of the world.”
This struck a chord when I recalled a senior maven at our National Treasury advising: “Cyril [Ramaphosa] loves big numbers.” As indeed recently evidenced at his fifth investment conference in Sandton a few weeks back.
Spraying numbers from a rhetorical confetti gun he advised: “We have now hit R1.5-trillion on commitments, meaning we have overshot our initial R1.2-trillion target by 26%.” Raining on his verbal “puffery and backslapping”, Claire Bisseker of the Financial Mail stripped the claims down to their essence. Her conclusion? It was an exercise in alternative reality, a sort of high-minded fake news edition of presidential exuberance.
The claims deflated on closer inspection: only 40% of the capital promised five years back has actually been invested so far; the fixed investment ration has declined dramatically over a decade (from 22% of GDP in 2008 to just 14% of GDP now, less than half of the target set by the National Development Plan). And one of the biggest investment curbs for the desperate need for repairing our creaking, collapsing infrastructure is “the critical shortage of professionals with built-environment skills and experience across all spheres of government”.
One number, perhaps the scariest of the data dumping which disfigures our public discourse, went unmentioned during the “celebrations” here on Monday marking Workers’ Day. That is close to 12-million people falling within the broad definition of “unemployed”, or 32% of the working age population formally unable to find work, and far more ( about 42%) who have given up the search for work.
Those numbers, to underline an obvious point, are huge: at the height of the Great Depression in the US in 1933, the percentage unemployed was 24.9%, which translated to, with a population five times larger than ours, 12-million people. In Weimar Germany, at the same time, the percentage of unemployed registered at 24%. The long-established democratic tradition in America saw Democrat Franklin Roosevelt elected in a landslide to solve the unemployment crisis, which he duly did. The far more unstable, fragile German democracy of that era ushered in Adolf Hitler to do the same thing, which he duly did with unimaginable consequences for Europe and the world.
Ramaphosa alas is no Roosevelt and thankfully not Hitler either. But the nub of the issue here, which should be relentlessly examined and re-examined (and of which there was zero sign in the rhetoric from the government and its allies on Workers’ Day), is: “If government policies are working, how come 12-million South Africans aren’t?”
Back in the golden days of early democracy here, 1994-1999, in the small Democratic Party which I led in parliament, we had so few MPs that each of our seven legislators had to take on additional portfolios. Since I was one of two lawyers in our tiny team the lot of labour spokesperson fell on me.
So I had a ringside seat in witnessing and opposing, for the most part, a rush of labour legislation which in its headlines promised worthy and even noble goals. The Labour Relations Bill, the Employment Equity Bill, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Skills Development Act and so on.
Little time was spent looking at the granular detail of each high-sounding item, simply the fact that both big business and Cosatu had agreed to each (though conspicuously not small business entrepreneurs and certainly not the unemployed) was sufficient for parliament to nod each of them through. And pillory any opponent who pointed out the pesky detail in each which undermined the intention of the legislation, as unpatriotic or against the consensus of the day or worse.
About a decade later, with unemployment here still stubbornly high, The Economist magazine pointed out that if the title of each piece of labour legislation here had survived even basic contact with the harsh realities of the real world, South Africa would be a place where unemployment had disappeared, skills had ramped up and a workers’ paradise had been nested on the southern tip of Africa.
Stringent labour legislation, however out of whack with the new world of artificial intelligence (set to replace most rote jobs within a few years) and decentralised global supply chains and the like, is one thing. But if you have a highly-skilled, agile and adaptive work force, the supply side is taken care of even if the demand side is ultra-regulated. But here at home, with barely 20% of matriculants achieving university pass rates in mathematics and science, such legislation amounts to a cruel fantasy.
On cue was the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Future of Jobs report published this week. It found that the jobs now most at risk were “secretaries, telemarketers, accountants and auditors”. The most in-demand new jobs will, according to the report, be for “business development professionals, data analysts and scientists and digital transformation specialists”. In other words, highly skilled specialised workers, precisely the opposite of the outcomes achieved by our dysfunctional education system.
It is a cruel parody that a government in office now for nearly three decades, covering more than two generations of school leavers, has produced such dismal outcomes. If the most anti-black advancement party — determined to rob the South African majority of life — chances and employable skills — had taken office in 1994 instead of a party and government which set its face to achieve the opposite, it could hardly have done better. Or worse.
Undaunted by the real outcomes of ruinous legislation and systems failures, president and government have not reversed or even moderated course. Instead, they have doubled down. Ramaphosa recently signed into law an amendment to the Employment Equity Act. Now according to analysts, it removes the “targets” of the principal act and replaces them with effective and ministerially determined quotas and applies these, at ministerial discretion, across the entirety of the private sector (for firms of more than 50 employees) and not just for state departments. Compulsion via bureaucratic fiat is the new gloss for an already job-crushing law.
Again, go back to the central question: if the slew of legislation already on the law books worked, why are so many without work? More of the same, in more extreme form, from the legislation grinder, might make the current 12-million out-of-work South Africans seem, in a few years hence, a happy number.