CAIPHUS KGOSANA | Carry on opposing grants and July riots will look like child’s play

This is my first column of the year. I wish I were a “new year new beginnings” type of fella, but my gym membership expired four years ago.

I tend to switch off current affairs when I’m on leave. SA is a depressing country. If money is not being stolen somewhere, then someone is getting senselessly murdered, raped or harmed. Our news cycle is so depressingly heavy that I often find myself endlessly scrolling different sites in search of good news.

But we are also a weird country. In a place with 46.6% unemployment (expanded definition, according to Stats SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey), we are engaging in endless ideological debates about whether we can afford to offer financial support to our fellow countrymen and women, who grapple daily with where their next plate of food is going to come from.

I don’t know about you, but I was born and raised in a crowded township and each time I go back to check on family, my heart just breaks into a million little pieces. On every corner, in every street, men and women (young and older) loiter aimlessly or hustle hard for pocket change. It is painful to come across a contemporary from the same neighbourhood begging for you for R5, offering to wash your car, poverty having robbed them of any shred of dignity.

They are what the experts called Neets (not in employment, education or training); poorly educated, unskilled and with very little prospect of finding formal employment. The Neets might be statistics to you, but I know them by name — they are relatives, they are neighbours, they are people I went to school with who, unluckily, did not get access to higher education, training and formal employment. They are in every township and village, waiting patiently and endlessly for their democracy dividend.

It is painful to come across a contemporary from the same neighbourhood begging for you for R5, offering to wash your car – poverty having robbed them of any shred of dignity.

Last week, a briefing note emerged out of the presidential economic advisory council — a group of academics, economists and experts tasked with advising the president on economic policy. He had asked them for advice on the feasibility of introducing a basic income grant. The note they compiled argued quite aggressively against introducing one, or a permanent grant for those outside the welfare net, on the basis of affordability. It turns out there was another briefing note, drafted late last year, which holds the opposite view. So the 18-member advisory council is split on this issue and both documents are sitting on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s desk.

Economists opposed to state-funded welfare packages for the poor even argue in their briefing note against making the R350 social relief distress grant permanent. It is reasoning that defies logic. How do you argue for the state to take away the only money between a desperate person and hunger on the basis that structural reforms to the economy will provide them future jobs? People do not eat economic reforms, for heaven’s sake!

Also, as the opposing briefing note so eloquently points out, no one knows how long we will have to wait for these reforms or if they are a magic wand to job creation. When the economy was growing at 5% it didn’t create jobs at massive scale. Even if these labour-intensive jobs eventually materialise, the unskilled and poorly educated might not qualify for them.

Social justice organisations and developmental economists have made a strong case for a basic income grant starting at the lower end of the food basket of R624; they have done the costing and have calculated the economic benefits to the country, since this money will recirculate where beneficiaries live. But this is not just an economic debate; it’s a moral debate we shouldn’t be having. Were those who oppose it fast asleep when malls were looted in July last year?

I laugh when conservative economists passionately argue from their ivory towers that this country cannot afford to implement a basic income grant. What this country cannot afford is an uprising of the hungry and the desperate poor. If that were to happen, you would not be safe in that coffee shop in Bryanston, in your posh office or in that air-conditioned vehicle. No electric fence will be high enough to protect you and your family. It would make July 2021 look like a picnic.