My primary schoolteacher was a disciplinarian of note, an athlete who led from the front with the athletics team and who never spared the rod both in class and on the sports field. He Mr Motete, who pupils referred to as Hlathe, certainly would not survive today’s environment where corporal punishment is not allowed. I am sure he would suffer withdrawal symptoms and he would have left teaching. So passionate was he about sport, the athletics team would arrive two hours before school started at 8am and go for a 10 or so kilometres jog. Whoever did not cope along the path was left to their own devices, but would ultimately arrive to join the academic programme. The results were clear. Our primary school won trophies, but he also unearthed sporting talent among us.
At times when I reflect on our country in terms of development, I remind myself of Hlathe’s passion for overall development as a teacher. Once we had been caught stealing peaches by Mots’elisi Mokete, who at the top of her voice repeated that she would report us. She was going to report us obviously to Hlathe, the ogre of the school. There was no need for whistle-blower protection for fear of reprisals against individuals. You will know why that was the case in the unfolding story.
One of the critical determinants of poverty is access to energy. If households have limited access to energy, they can be trapped in poverty for good.
Twelve of us got together and concluded we should cross the border into the Wepener farms where we would serve as herd boys on the Afrikaner farms. We put on our blankets and went by stealth along the riverbed so as not to be seen heading for the border. At the border was a pool of water at the bottom of a cliff from where the river formed a nice waterfall and flowed out of the pool. We took a swim before crossing over along the river and underneath the fence. Then it was time to proceed on the mission. Divisions and debates arose, and the threat that elders like Ntate Samuel Mokete and his son Mokholoane would come for us riding Scott, the horse that would be snatching flesh from our shoulders and peeling our heels with hooves, was too terrifying. The best was to go back and report our actions to Ntate Mokete, who also terrified us. So by the evening we convened and arrived at his home under darkness. We were allowed in and we confessed. Surprise, surprise, the human side of the ogre was just as passionate. He said, thank you for letting me know. By the way, the peaches are not ripe and can cause you deadly diarrhoea. Some of us had experienced that diarrhoea before. After that lecture he thanked us for reporting and let us go. That side of Hlathe was absolutely not contemptible and unbelievable when it got revealed to us. The village was one on the matter of discipline and there could not be protected disclosure. Each was their brother’s or sister’s keeper.
What are the lessons of my village governance for governance today in many countries and for South Africa specifically? I was on a population census mission in Kabul, Afghanistan. On my way I went through Delhi. On my way back I had to go through Dehradun on the foothills of the Himalayas. The then-minister of finance had asked me to meet Abhijit Banerjee and hold discussions on poverty. We had an evening at a prestigious school where Abhijit’s son attended, and we discussed poverty measures and what we are doing about them in South Africa. While we touched on poverty being multidimensional, our focus remained on money-metric measures, and on the poverty lines we agreed on aspirational and not minimalist lines. Minimalism, we argued, can only fit in with trickledown economics and cannot have a lasting impact on poverty.
One of the critical determinants of poverty is access to energy. If households have limited access to energy, they can be trapped in poverty for good. In South Africa access to the grid rose rapidly among the populace. Many could get the benefits of the modern world. But increasingly those gains have been reversed.
More critically the last six years were a horror movie that decimated people and property because of a grid that was human-caused not to function. Limping people and a limping economy are the diarrhoea that arose out of our equivalent as boys from eating peaches that were not ripe. Speaking of diarrhoea, we are reminded of the Hammanskraal cholera and not far from that the crisis of rodent poison that has left children dead.
The question that confronts us is, what do we do about poverty? My first take on this is to explore why Mexico and Brazil bucked the trend. In the past two decades Brazil and especially Mexico, together with Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, invested heavily in the diagnosis of poverty.
Banerjee has just released new findings on inequality across the world. He says since World War 1 the world has never been this unequal. He highlights that while Brazil and Mexico led in inequality stakes, they have not increased their inequality, and in fact inequality has declined, while everywhere else it has increased. This is the first time that this phenomenon manifests.
The question that confronts us is, what do we do about poverty? My first take on this is to explore why Mexico and Brazil bucked the trend. In the past two decades Brazil and especially Mexico, together with Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, invested heavily in the diagnosis of poverty. They came to a conclusion long known to Amartya Sen that poverty is multidimensional. They used this knowledge to design new instruments of power to attack a multidimensional phenomenon. They especially, unlike other countries introduced the tools. They did not run away like boys who stole peaches. They feared not so much the horses’ snatching chunks of meat from their shoulders but more the failure to speak truth to their society and seek a joint remedy. They realised they have to speak to Hlathe. True to form, Hlathe advised them against eating peaches that are not ripe because that will cause diarrhoea.
In South Africa, the new instruments of power have been with us close on 15 years, but we have stubbornly paid no attention to them as enablers of design thinking and system design. Despite abundance of resources, public diarrhoea refuses to leave us. We need to talk to Hlathe like we went back to talk to him because running across the border as we did to herd the cattle of the Afrikaner will not solve our problem of stealing peaches.
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 South Africa
For opinion and analysis consideration, email Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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