Shouldn’t we be quite alarmed at Treasury director-general Dondo Mogajane warning us that SA is heading towards becoming a failed state? Not that many years ago, but how long ago it seems, the bearer of such pernicious heresy would have been disinvited from every cocktail party north of the concrete highway. Now? We take it in our stride, it seems, not unduly unhappy that we’ve reached our comfort zone, and normal service has been restored. Take a bow SA, we’re a failure, a flop, useless.
But perhaps not so fast. Note that Mogajane said we’re heading for a failing state, so one takes it we’re not quite there yet. We’ve made impressive progress, though. Hardly a forgotten corner of our public space has emerged unscathed and not demoralised from a brush with the ANC. To add insult, we have a public service wage bill that could keep a small country going for a few fiscal years, and a civil service that is too often neither civil nor of much service either. Our public service is the human equivalent of Eskom: very expensive and not that enlightening.
Between load-shedding and fretting about the terrible prospect of nuclear war breaking out in Europe, I did a bit of research about the state and failed states in particular. Predictably perhaps, the term “failed state’’ was doomed from the outset as the realisation set in that all states are to some degree or other failed states, so it was a headline written before the story had been. Besides, no state with a working email address likes to be called failed so they objected, and now we have the much less descriptive, but arguably less offensive, term “fragile’’. Some busybody organisation in the US compiles a league of these fragile states, about 200 or so of us, and I’m happy to be able to report that in the most recent league table we came in halfway. That’s not as bad as it might have been had the compilers of the table ever come here and stood in a home affairs queue for a week or two. Or tried to book a driver’s licence test.
We were slightly more fragile than Ukraine, but obviously the Ukrainian state has been rendered “most fragile’’ by dozens of Russian missiles, so we moved down one spot on this hit parade of losers. Relatively less fragile than two weeks ago.
To add insult, we have a public service wage bill that could keep a small country going for a few fiscal years, and a civil service that is too often neither civil nor of much service either.
Mogajane seemed to be trying the “tough love’’ approach with our politicians and senior public servants, which has been proven not to have any effect whatsoever. He said they needed “to get off your high horse and do what we have to do to ensure we create access and a conducive environment for people’s lives to change. If that’s not going to be a motivating factor, we can start calling SA a failed state because the things that define a failing state are beginning to show, where we don’t care about the poor and improving their lives.” Start calling ... so there is still hope even if it derives exclusively from Mogajane’s prudent use of the present continuous tense.
What makes his comments about improving the lives of the poor telling is that the Treasury is usually cast as the villain among the dramatis personae that populate the largesse-dispensing pantomime cast that makes up our assembled state. It’s always the Treasury bringing its icy little heel down on the enrichment (sorry, upliftment) projects ANC ministers come up with. So it’s super ironic the mean-fisted Treasury should be upsetting the KFC family bucket in such rude style.
Of course, he was talking about senior public servants, who constitute an Armani elite and whose job consists in the main in squeezing the last drop of enthusiasm from already-overworked minions who populate the crevices of crumbling buildings in Tshwane and beyond. To further demotivate them, and even though relatively speaking they are among the best-paid public service workers in the world, their pay is being squeezed and the government has reneged on its three-year wage deal.
True believers and optimists must be disappointed that the democratic state has turned out to be little different from the apartheid and colonial state. In fact, according to political economist and commentator Moeletsi Mbeki, the ANC has broken its trust with the people by simply grafting itself on to the apartheid state and grabbing the benefits of liberation for a small elite. The economic model has remained essentially the same. And who could disagree with that?
For the middle classes, the state is a grudge expense because they have to provide their own schools and security and hospitals at additional expense. Or that’s what they insist on, but imagine for a moment how our state might change if that money and talent were given space to flourish within a refashioned state that wasn’t primarily parasitic in instinct and intent.
For the middle classes, the state is a grudge expense because they have to provide their own schools and security and hospitals at additional expense.
One thing inherited from the apartheid state is an unmerited faith in the social utility of monitoring and filling in forms to attest to such monitoring having taken place. The apartheid bureaucrats set themselves the task of dividing humanity into race groups, the criteria for which were set out in laws like the Population Registration Act. Nowadays, and in much the same spirit, a battalion of bureaucrats monitors BEE compliance, sorting the previously privileged from the soon-to-be privileged. Box tickers are trained to look for fronting, except if it’s someone well-connected, in which case tick the box for empowered, not fronting.
Those not fortunate enough to savour the job satisfaction that comes with box-ticking and document-stamping are doomed to do the real work of public service: teach, police or provide healthcare. It’s tough work, and important that one stays in line and answers diligently to the relevant authority. That’s not your line manager. Instead it’s the union boss because all three sectors are heavily unionised, especially to police against any unwelcome initiative being shown. The eager principal at a village school may be surprised to learn he or she has to take orders from a shop steward in a distant office. The school governing body can be happily ignored.
In researching the state, I learned that the uber-guru of all this was a German sociologist, Max Weber, who pondered long and hard on the true meaning of the state and concluded that the state is unique in that it “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’’, which our state can hardly be accused of. Last year during the riots, the police happily relinquished their “monopoly on violence’’ and the Dudula anti-immigrant mob terrorising foreign shop owners is just another example of a state that’s not hell-bent on hogging all the hooligan action. Ask the EFF about this.
Marxists, who are partial to histrionics and the grand flourish, seized upon the work of Weber, even as other social scientists concluded it was less than useful in analysing society. The state became a religious fixture for Marxists, but for the rest of us it’s just something that consumes much money for little in return. Some social scientists even argued the state didn’t exist as a discrete social entity. Maybe, but then they’ve never been stuck in a traffic jam of shiny Mercs and BMWs in central Pretoria at rush hour as our state heads for the suburbs to water their high horses at home. At about three in the afternoon.
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