I was in Sandton on Friday night to meet a colleague who was returning from China. A portion around his hotel in Beijing had load-shedding. He said it was news flashing all over in Beijing. For how long was the load-shedding? I asked. He said 30 minutes, and the Chinese were cursing. Last night was third-place competition of Afcon. I checked the only schedule in town that never disappoints. On Friday my train schedule was expected to disappear into cyberspace at 6pm and re-emerge at 10pm. I was in my yellow Bafana Bafana regalia driving back home. When I arrived the cyberspace train disappearance had been rescheduled to disappear by 10pm. In the hope that it was a mistaken schedule, I sat for another two hours hoping the train would reappear at 10pm so that I could relish the game of Bafana Bafana life on television. Alas it was not to be 10pm. Stuck and sitting in the dark and I could only imagine. Perhaps a PM 10 battery and a Panasonic radio would have done the trick, had I kept those items as trash in the storeroom. I was a disappointed Tintswalo, denied a legitimate right to see the re-emergence of Bafana Bafana walking the stage tall and proud.
Six years ago, we engaged Quinton Fortune, the maestro midfielder of Bafana Bafana, who had just returned to the UK after a three-year sojourn of coaching in Mexico. The subject was why football was poorly performing in SA and rugby on the rise. He was preparing his proposal for his master’s thesis on this subject, whose broad strokes observed that rugby was indeed a Tintswalo and soccer could not be one. The Tintswalo metaphor in the state of the nation address (Sona) last week resonates and yet does not resonate. It suffers what social science calls an ecological fallacy. Tintswalo fits a different racial group in a different point in time.
The Tintswalo metaphor can be confronted by similar lived experiences observed by Jim Yardley on June 11 2011 in an article in the New York Times, on the significant changes taking place in Gurgaon, a booming Delhi suburb: “Surveying Gurgaon, one quickly apprehends how virtually all of India’s modern growth miracle has occurred due to the dynamism of the private sector, with the vast majority of the government serving only as a corrupt impediment to progress. In fact, as Yardley correctly notes, a key driver in Gurgaon’s early development was that there was no local government at all to interfere with it.” The question of some of the sparks of brilliance, such as Musa Motha’s Golden Buzzer, the consecutive Rugby Cup victory last year, the better than expected performance of Bafana Bafana at Afcon 2024, Tyla’s Grammy Award, are too telling. Yardley’s India of “the vast majority of the government serving only as a corrupt impediment to progress” fits SA very well. So this begs the question, whether our Tintswalo is in spite of government and not because of government.
Successive censuses show how the Indians/Asians, who were clustered at the same performance level as coloureds and black Africans, diverged dramatically after Verwoerd in September 1953 said in parliament: ‘What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?’
In fact, if one wants to understand Tintswalo, we need to see this not in the context of Yardley’s India, but history, including one of white SA, is replete with Tintswalos.
Before we let the private sector on the loose with Yardley’s appetising observation, we are reminded by Marianna Mazzucato about an entrepreneurial state that unleashes state power to successfully address mission challenges. We need not look far. The architecture of the apartheid state is a typical example of an entrepreneurial state. Shortly after 1910, with the formation of the Union and in 1913 with the onset of World War 1, then prime minister Jan Smuts rose to the platform, to prevail over the country with foresight and deployed his chief scientist, Hendrik van Bijl, as the architect and executor of his grand plan. Franklin D Roosevelt, towards the end of World War 2, came with a grand Marshall Plan, having attentively listened to John Maynard Keynes, the British economist. Park Chung-hee of Korea, having been rejected by the World Bank, went on to pursue his road infrastructure that connected Seoul and Busan. Deng Xiaoping is remembered for sending Milton Friedman packing from China, where he tried to sell China the IMF/World Bank shock therapy, which he had successfully sold to Gorbachev with devastating results and the emergence of the oligarchy in the former Soviet Union.
The Smutsan Tintswalo was born after the worrisome subject of the poor white. It was subjected to a 1993 Carnegie study. Its findings were startling. There was no rounding off of numbers to ensure no-one was left behind. The ultra poor were 39,021 and the poor were 67,497. In terms of percentages these represented 3.06% and 5.29% respectively. This can compare with the current Stats SA percentage figures of the food poverty line and the upper bound poverty line, which are more than six times at 25.2% for the ultra-poor and 11 times the poor at 55.5%. Smuts took action to eliminate poverty of the 106,518 poor whites and eliminated it. China, by 2020, was tackling poverty and eliminating it for the six-million Chinese who remained in multidimensional poverty down from 800-million, the Tintswalo they had to tackle over 40 years. China counts in threes like us. Their triple challenge was defined as three tough battles, namely — poverty, environmental pollution and elimination of risks.
According to China Daily, “In 2012, about 100-million people in China were still living in absolute poverty. Taking note of that, President Xi Jinping later stressed that elimination of poverty was one of the three “tough battles” China was fighting, which it would win by the end of 2020. The other two were to reduce environmental pollution and prevent risks. Indeed by 2020 the last six million were taken out of poverty, and in our Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network (MPPN) we saw how specific problems of Tintswalo’s triple challenge, with poverty as the first, were tackled with precision.
Who is our modern-day Tintswalo and what is her history? Our Tintswalo, who has progressed in spite of government, especially under apartheid, is the indentured labourer from India. Successive censuses, which are time machines, show how the Indians/Asians who were clustered at the same performance level as coloureds and black Africans, diverged dramatically after Verwoerd in September 1953 said in parliament, “What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?” Since then, the trajectory of the Asian/Indian changed as they took matters in their own hands. Indians’ performance is bound to surpass that of whites in terms of acquisition of skills. This is a Tintswalo from whom we should learn.
Our real Tintswalo is captured as Thandi in the National Development Plan (NDP) YouTube narrative. The NDP took time to look at the 1996 and 2001 census data and truly characterised the Tintswalo challenge as one of churning out people who will live an empty life and only start getting money when they reach the age of morente. The 2011 census and the 2016 community survey, similarly having studied the facts, updated Thandi’s story and came up with Lerato and her family, which is neither middle class nor very poor. It concludes with a sad story of Lerato over 10 years.
If the Tintswalo character captured an Indian equivalent in the future, the characterisation and path could be correct. But as the definition of a current Tintswalo, it fit a social scientist’s definition of an ecological fallacy. When I raised the issue of postponement of the election, it was for purposes of defining, quantifying and path creation to solve what has undeniably become our mission challenge. When an election occurs with the level of characterisations and quantification of our problems, as has to date been done, Amilcar Cabral shall not have been heeded when he said: “Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.” The critique of the Sona by Black Business Council president Elias Monage was on point on this score.
Dr Pali Lehohla is 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 SA.
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