PALI LEHOHLA | Gwede, the youth don’t like it

The village of Pella in Moses Kotane municipality in North West is close to my heart.

Pella ea Matlhako, 50km from Rustenburg, is a place of firsts.

In 1985 during the Census of the Population, Mr Mosome, a schoolteacher in Pella, lost an eye from a scuffle at a shebeen. I was drawn into the case because it occurred while he was a census taker.

Enumerators do a house-to-house count that includes shebeens. As an organisation we were friends of the court (amicus curiae). For six months, we had to pick up Mosome and drive to Madikwe magistrate’s court where the hearing was in session.

Mosome lost the case against the perpetrator, but sadly the accused also lost his job in the Rustenburg mines as an awaiting-trial prisoner whose bail was denied until the hearing, and the verdict was acquittal but into joblessness ― the subject of this column.

I had to start the journey of compensating Mosome’s lost eye on duty. BopStats issued a cheque of R6,000 as compensation, almost a year and a half of my salary. This is how I was initiated into Pella. But the fire was yet to come. I triggered it.

In 1993 I was so excited about the breakthrough ideas we had achieved in the Bophuthatswana Census of 1991 ― the second census of the homeland. I had paid special attention to Pella ea Matlhako perhaps because of the intimate texture I had with it ― Moses Kotane’s home where the ANC 114th anniversary celebrations are held this weekend.

At Garona Building in Mmabatho, where BopStats was housed, we had taken advantage of the nascent graphic interface the Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) had developed.

On the basis of that, we pinpointed the population distribution and its attributes by place name. Pella had several names: Kgosing, Monneng, Tshwaedi, Lediga, Ramasoko, Rasetlang, Motlhabeng, Ramolokwane, Ramomene, Maphusumaneng, Lengeneng, Lekubung and Bashabaerata. The name that landed me in trouble was Bashabaerata.

When you google Bashabaerata you will come across the following: “Basha ba e rata [the youth like it] was a section name in the village, though its official recognition caused some local contention among elders.” The local contention was stirred by me through subplace mapping of population attributes that confirmed that actually Bashabaerata was predominantly youthful.

The presentation of the census results to the community and the place name opened a sore case of hidden conflict in the village where elders saw Bashabaerata as a rebellious part of the village.

One question that killed my presentation: “Young man, what is that place? Who named it and how come the government recognises this name?” That was the end of what I had prepared to reveal the beauty of youthfulness and data and the engagement at a village level for planning. Yet there was no offence in talking about Monneng ― “where a man is”.

It is not always the absence or presence of data that creates reality. Having learnt this lesson, employment statistics created problems for me as the statistician-general. The numbers lost rhythm, yet everything in nature stayed the same. The seasonality disappeared. Guess who opened my eyes on the matter — Gwede Mantashe. I took advantage of sitting next to Uncle Gweezy and picked up on the subject. I gave a statistical method lecture on sampling and seasonality. And I asked him, why has seasonality in agricultural employment disappeared in the Eastern Cape when rain and other factors have remained the same? He said, “Oh SG, people are not fools. They cannot grow more maize while the harvest is at the summit of the rondavel. Where will they store the harvest?”

In the same vein ― call him King Coal ― he makes sense in calling out the Trojan Horse riders who without any plan for the Emalahleni belt closed Komati. But in equal measure minister Mantashe just lost the plot in the buildup to the January 8 statement in displaying a lack of, at the least, intuitive understanding of labour markets in South Africa. I was very disappointed.

If these three ministers have no clue about the core evidence of their performance, why are we surprised?

Three ministers in South Africa presiding on core policy areas of the economy missed out on a measurement tutorial on employment. These ministers had sat for an exam paper on the anatomy of an elephant but spent a good part of the rush hour in the morning reading about the worm. So having failed to spot the lecturer, the only similarity between the worm and the elephant was the trunk of the elephant which is elongated like a worm.

With a 30% mark they were promoted by the education ministry. At 31 years of democracy and 114 years of life of the ANC, you are reminded by the policy report that carried weighty interventions that asked, “How are we going to honour those who paid by limb and life for the freedom we enjoy today?” The 7,000-member delegation was more worried about the outcome of the elective conference than the policy report and the march forward. That question remains relevant today as it was then in Polokwane.

But the showing of ministers Parks Tau of DTIC, Nomakhosazana Meth of labour and recently Mantashe of minerals and energy left me cold when they talked about employment. While their reading of the labour market statistics was way below a glorious national pass rate of 30%, Samson came way below the other two. He decided rather to pull the pillars of the temple than to explain how we are going to honour those who paid with life and limb for the freedom we enjoy today.

If these three ministers have no clue about the core evidence of their performance, why are we surprised?

Tau and Meth believed Fourie’s abracadabra, calling to question the numbers of the statistician-general. But as for Uncle Gweezy, he was not going to be any white man’s boy; he cooked his own pot of numbers based on his Teba (The Employment Bureau of Africa) cattle-rearing and back to the Teba experience. So he Mantashed the definition of discouraged work-seekers by saying, work will not come to you.

Three important points are that the Quarterly Labour Force Survey is a detailed instrument that asks what did people do to look for work? And 32% of them did what Mantashe did five decades ago and work refused to accept them. Twelve percentage points out of the 44 percentage points are the discouraged work-seekers. They did exactly what the uncle said and went out into the street because work will not come to you.

What they told Risenga Maluleke, the statistician-general, was, we have no money for transport, the soles of our shoes are worn out, we have no water to wash ourselves to appear decent before the work we seek to undertake.

The effort-reward stakes are so loaded against them that it is a devil’s casino where crime wins 90% of the time. Decency is the loser. The question by then-president Thabo Mbeki in Polokwane in December 2007 stands: how are we going to honour them those who lost life and limb for us to enjoy this freedom? Dololo, except a below-30% pass mark.

Moses Kotane in his grave is asking how the children of Bashabaerata are going to honour him for the unfree freedom they experience in Pella Ea Matlhako where the 114th-year anniversary celebrations are held?