In the belly of a dysfunctional state that South Africa has become, my attention in the week past was drawn to four critical programmes in which I participated: an interview about my views on the medium-term budget policy statement, an address at the annual Government Employees Medical Scheme (GEMS) Symposium, remarks at the divine marriage of the Gordon Institute of Business (GIBS) and the Economic Modelling Academy (EMA), and an address to the ANC Youth League, where the focus was not the requested topic ,“the statistics required for planning”, but instead on systems thinking and systems design and the requisite evidential base and capacity for achieving such competence.
When reflecting, I refocused my fading lens of time as it was awakened by my observations driving the length and breadth of the country. Anecdote is no forage for statisticians though; their work life is about systematic collation of observations, scientific analysis of such and drawing defendable conclusions. Having been in this boiling pot as the statistician-general, I can state without fear of contradiction that South Africa is heading the wrong way and certainly immersed in failed delivery as the systematic assessment evidence. As though anecdote will play the role of antidote, the victory of the Boks cannot teach us anything because it takes a different ethos, commitment and value system to achieve what the Boks did. It takes honesty of effort, skill, determination to do good and singularity of purpose. Acknowledgment of ignorance is also a virtue, and accepting correction is divine. When you are ignorant there is hope for course correction. But when occupying a position of power and you are intentional about malice, there is no medicine for that as the powerful continuously use their power to manipulate and fight for personal survival. At the heart of our edifice is intentional malice. The Zondo commission made this clear and obvious finding. President Ramaphosa addressing the ANC said the ANC might not be alone in this malice, but it stands as accused number one.
With these engagements the theme on health that I addressed seems to have caused mental convergence. But it does so through a statistician’s cardinal sin: deploying anecdote to generalise. Mindful of the lurking sin, I would tread carefully in explicating my observation and what made it systematic.
In my travels along our roads until say 2017, I have hardly witnessed so many people with mental disorders walking up and down our highways.
In my travels along our roads until say 2017, I have hardly witnessed so many people with mental disorders walking up and down our highways. In the 1990s I worked in Bophuthatswana, and through Mabeskraal, Mogwase and surrounds all the way from Mmabatho, a common feature of mental disorder along the road was a lone male. His misfortune, legend has it, came from being a habitual cattle rustler. Victims of his trade came together and got a medicine man to cast a spell over him. Over those kilometres travelled from Mmabatho to Mabeskraal you would see this mentally ill person walking up and down along the Lediga-Mabeskraal road.
The other unwell person I often saw was in Botswana. He too is said to have had a spell cast on him after committing atrocious crimes. He was a feature at the Gaborone rail station. With a heavy coat on, come rain or shine, in cold weather or sweltering heat, he held on to the rails on the pathway to Gaborone Station from morning to sunset facing east. I am reminded of this in light of my more recent observations over the past half dozen years that our roads are increasingly populated by the mentally deranged. I have made it my business to count how many I see every day wherever I drive. I have observed that I have not seen a woman along the road but only males. On my way to the Drakensberg Summit last week over 350km, I saw seven. Two of these I saw along the Ben Schoeman Highway, a distance of just 50km.
Driving early along N14 on Saturday to the ANC Youth League strategy session, I saw two during that 45-minute drive. How many such people are there and the social determinants of their condition given our fast-deteriorating social and economic conditions that loomed large over all four engagements last week? A startling mortality statistic of adolescents is that 52% of male adolescents die of external or unnatural causes of death compared with 20% of their female counterparts. There is a social and existential dilemma for the nation’s survival. In a population the sex ratio at birth is about 102 males born for every 100 females. But male adolescents’ deaths due to unnatural causes is twice the mortality of female adolescents. The trauma among the young boys child has many ramifications. One of these observed in the HSRC study was the correspondence of prevalence of HIV infections among females 15-25 years and males over 40. Anecdotal evidence of blessers at play may not be farfetched. There is gender-based violence too that is reaching epidemic proportions.
The MTBPS is an austerity document driven by principles of accounting and not economics. Economics as a subject consists of politics, society, culture and place. Our type of economic policy is best defined in the book titled What Alan Greenspan Has Learned Since 2008 by Justin Fox Greenspan, who says in retrospect: “What I’m trying to get at is that the vast proportion of decisions that are being made by non-financial institutions are based upon objective reality and its probability structure. Finance, however, is almost wholly behavioural animal spirits. It’s a different type of paradigm.”
Not only is Greenspan reflecting deeply but Milton Friedman of the Chicago school later in life also sang his mea culpa. Jeremy Adelman in the Two Faces of Neoliberalism discusses Hayek and Friedman. “Milton Friedman was not given to self-doubt. His commitment to the virtues of unobstructed markets made him the guru of deregulation, privatisation and free trade. In his view, unfettered capitalism is the bedrock of civic and political freedom, whereas societies that inhibit the workings of supply and demand are condemned to lose it. These beliefs undergirded the hyper-globalisation that prevailed for half a century from the 1970s, and Friedman was their avatar.”
Yet late in life, Friedman did occasionally express doubts. Around the time China joined the World Trade Organiation in 2001, he worried that his table-thumping “privatise, privatise, privatise!” mantra was a mistake. “I was wrong. That wasn’t enough,” he told an audience of perplexed conservatives. After all, Hong Kong, and Singapore, once touted as mighty little engines of globalisation, had become examples of market-orientated models yielding less freedom: property was sacred, but elections were not.
Last week GIBS welcomed the Economic Modelling Academy (EMA), where I am a director. The word EMA, an acronym for the academy, in the Sesotho has two meanings. One is stop, the other is stand up. In short EMA invests in causing us to stop and think then rise. Perhaps when we have done so through foresight, capturing the laws of motion of the economy, we will stop to think and, like the Boks, rise to glory as a country. It is when we enmesh ourselves in the true subject of economics by using superior tools of systems design and design thinking that we can wean ourselves off incumbency, capture, arrogance and the me-first-you-later culture of impunity. A higher-order consciousness of common good is what the EMA courses have invested in by providing science-based economic modelling. Thereby EMA through modelling multidimensional poverty as a tool for planning can deliver this to enable social compacting through common purpose. By collocating at GIBS, EMA can stimulate economic thought across business, society, labour and government. Authority has often closed their eyes and ears to reason and labelled critique as a critic. The Boks have proven that a different philosophy of embracing critique and distinguishing it from a critic, while allowing room for the critic.
The youth league that I addressed seem to be on the path of the Boks. Indeed time will tell. As we wrestle with the man-made tragedy South Africa has become and contribute honestly Theodore Roosevelt’s oft-abused quotation guides us to harness our efforts and decipher deception from honesty in trying to remove from the roadside the many mentally ill by giving them care: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
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 Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.
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