We have 16 months to renew our political vows. We are at our lowest. The self-inflicted energy crisis and wanton destruction of infrastructure, including cable theft, has landed us with a self-manufactured economic crisis. Countries which have been at the bottom of the food chain for decades, where citizens lost hard-earned savings and pensions, are bouncing back. I studied in one in the Eighties. We used to say Ghana ihard, coconut make soft. Bread was hard to come by, and when it did arrive, people would break out in song — brodo brodo brodo, piled sky high, twice the height of women carrying it on table-size wooden structures. But like the air in a balloon, it would be gone before you finished the cup of “hot”. The name “hot” came about because you were never sure whether what you were drinking was tea, cocoa or coffee. You were sure of one thing — it was hot, even when you prepared it yourself.
Ghana played a major role in the African continent's liberation as the first country in the sub-Saharan region to gain independence from colonial rule. The infrastructure prime minister Kwame Nkrumah laid, such as the Tema Motorway, schools and the Akosombo Dam on River Volta that supplied Ghana with electricity, stands out to this day, years after he was toppled by a military junta. That set in motion instability in Ghana and a chain of coups d'état in Africa. It was during Hilla Limann's time, after flight lieutenant Jerry Rawlings' first coming and handover to civilian rule, that I arrived at the UN Regional Institute for Population Studies (UNRIPS) at the University of Ghana for postgraduate undertakings.
The heat and humidity were uncomfortable, the food unfamiliar. We could have been very comfortable as UN-sponsored fellows on $390 a month, but Professor Chukuka Okonjo, an ex-Biafra secession sergeant in Nigeria, would have none of it, as this would have placed us way above the salaries of Ghanaian lecturers from whom we received the golden fleece, as Chinua Achebe referred to education in his book, No Longer at Ease. So unlike other foreign-sponsored students who received money in foreign currencies, Okonjo, the director of the institute, handed over ours in local currency. A dollar on the black market fetched 40 cedis. At banks you got only six. However, to ease our lives the institute used part of the stipend to fetch us essenco from neighbouring Lome. Essenco was short for essential commodities, including corned beef, tinned fish, powdered milk, soap, toothpaste, sugar, tea and coffee. We would trade half the essenco, representing a quarter of the stipend in dollar terms, at Makola Market and get at least more than half of it in cedis on the black market. Economics was at play. Bubra — draft beer — would then flow.
The beginning of the year would be dominated, as it is here, by the state of the nation address (Sona) and budget speech. Everything would disappear from the market awaiting the latter. And as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, post-budget-speech prices would be up and old stock would be sold at the new prices. Cocoa and cigarettes produced in Ghana disappeared and were exported through kalebule (fraudulent profiteering) to neighbouring Togo, from whence they would be imported for domestic consumption at inflated prices. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural reforms were full blast.
As South Africa enters this period of Sona and the budget speech post the ANC policy conference and January 8 statement, the statistician-general reminded me of the deafening tragedy regarding his report on births. A tragedy that triggers all the ills that define our society. An ill that hardly gets discussed fully in conferences, Sona or the budget speech.
In the past 30 years South African women of reproductive age have given birth to 1.2-million children a year. Of these, 770,000 have no father recorded on their birth certificates. This percentage resembles one I came across in a study I undertook in 1986 in Bophuthatswana on the registration of vital events. The birth registration was low because if the father’s name was not available, the birth was not registered. Armed with this knowledge, in 1998 Stats SA and the department of health made aggressive recommendations to the department of home affairs to remove these archaic restrictions and have all births registered and noted at the health department, under whose watch more than 90% of births occurred. This effort made children visible to the system. Yet sadly, the system is tone deaf and Jericho blind to these children. Policy conferences remain tone deaf to them. Of those born, 900,000 will not get a decent matric because only 600,000 will write the exam. The rest will fall by the wayside before acquiring the constitutional and legal right to basic education.
In the past 30 years South African women of reproductive age have given birth to 1.2-million children a year. Of these, 770,000 have no father recorded on their birth certificates
The statistician-general also reminds us that 51% of women are unemployed. These are the people who single-handedly carry the burden of 60% of new life. Arguably, that South African children fail dramatically on the promise of a better life is a matter of design. That women suffer gender-based violence (GBV) is a brutal policy design that neglects children at birth. That we see a declining progression ratio at higher education from a one is to 1.3 in the Eighties between blacks and whites to the current one is to six is a deliberate design of placing financial barriers to entry to university for all students who passed, rich or poor. Even in the face of a fees must fall call by students, the minimalist approach to financing higher education, became oblivious of the statistic that in 60% of births the father's name does not appear. More importantly, 62% of fathers say they are married compared with 38% of mothers. These statistics are telling and a policy conference that ignores them cannot begin to design solutions to deal with GBV, let alone resolve our broken society and energy system.
That we have no desire to pick on best examples in education to scale up to, such as Mbilwi Secondary School in Venda, leaves me cold. Mbilwi charges R 3,000 a year compared with St Michael's College and schools like it which cost R100,000 a year. Yet both achieve similar results and thus, on a weighted scale, Mbilwi achieves 35 times better results than schools like St Michael's. South African children, year in year out, are deliberately failed by an uncaring political system at worst, at best a system tone-deaf to facts and designs preoccupied by minimalist policies that are non-transformative.
South Africa seems to have advised itself to take on an insatiable appetite to experience and take pride in its failures instead of learning from the 50-odd African countries that experienced failures before it. With 16 months to an election and a tonne of self-inflicted problems, one wonders whether the policies discussed by political parties and ourselves as society take a view on the abundant evidence from the nation's fact-finder, the statistician-general, or prefer to stuff our ears with sticks, dig our thumbs in our retinas, toss a die and hope for the best.
Beset with no solution in sight for Eskom and attacks on resigning CEO André de Ruyter — a listening device was installed in his car, so former chief of police commissioner George Fivaz advises, he wore a bulletproof vest to mitigate assassination attempts and was allegedly recently poisoned with cyanide — South Africa is not short of evil.
While on record regarding my displeasure at De Ruyter’s unsuitability to be Eskom chief, I condemn attempts on his life. In March, Eskom will be a century old, begging the questions: Are there plans to commemorate this? Would it not be a major nation-building exercise? Or are we so covered in shame and denial that on this monumental occasion the dying or almost dead giant will sing itself a happy or sad birthday. A nation that does not value its institutions has no honour. The stalwarts must be turning in their graves.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand and a distinguished alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.