In 2023 on a trip from Bloemfontein to Bram Fischer Airport, I had a ride with an Uber driver who had been on the social relief of distress (SRD) fund. He intimated to me how the flow of funds of those on the system is tracked. It is distressful that the government suspends and stops the SRD arbitrarily. The banking system is supposed to report such transactions and the hawk-eyed government systems arrest it.
This is not only cruel in design but it has been adjudged illegal by justice Leonard Twala. Twala went at length to chide the unfettered overreach of the Treasury, which exercises supremacy by financial designs that trump policy designs and decisions. Gilad Isaacs of the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) at Wits University said: “The judgment refuses to allow the National Treasury to justify indignities visited on the most vulnerable by claiming that the enjoyment of our rights is unaffordable.”
Perhaps this victory unravels the persistent irrationality of finance over policy. It was minister of trade & industry Rob Davies who said industrial policy is hardly a policy for as long as the macroeconomic policy design exists outside it. The uninformed and de facto oversight of the Reserve Bank and the Treasury over industrialisation policy suffocates the industrial policy and deprives it of its growth potential.
Case studies of Japan’s ministry of economy trade industry (METI) illustrate conclusively how the triad of the Treasury, central bank and ministry of economy trade and industry deliver greater results and value. The policy design captures the ambition and delivers future-proofing. Then the Treasury and central bank make the resources available to enable the resourcing of the programme. Continuously, METI stress-tests the validity of future-proofing and provides continuous fool-proof policy. This iterative process provides confidence for implementation of science as a central feature of policy design and implantation.
The government may not just lick their wounds and pay. They may very well appeal the judgment in this case that they lost on SRD funds or stubbornly refuse to implement it until a court order is issued
Systems design and design thinking open up the space for thinking about the future in broad yet concrete terms of what-ifs. The design attempts to absorb the complex and inexhaustible universe of knowledge. The court judgment on the SRD grant handed down on Thursday is anchored on the systems thinking and system design of the South African constitution interpreted correctly through the legal apparatus.
To bring perspective to the conclusion of the legal apparatus, we seek counsel on the debates captured by Joe Pateman in his “Lenin Without Dogmatism”, published in Studies in East European Thought (2019). He concludes that the intellectual virtues underlying “Lenin’s philosophy of science — his anti-orthodoxy, his anti-dogmatism and his insistence on debates that meet the standards of rational inquiry — are now in as much need of being reclaimed as the core virtues of politics as they were when he first defended them”.
The second coming of Donald Trump must, however, be as terrifying to Pateman as it should be to South African society in the SRD case. This is because the government is not immune to second-coming appeals. The government may not just lick their wounds and pay. They may very well appeal the judgment in this case that they lost on SRD funds or stubbornly refuse to implement it until a court order is issued. Pateman possibly never anticipated such, and the IEJ should remain alive to the possibility of an appeal by the government. He wrote his article in 2019, in which he interpreted the conduct of American politics.
He wrote: “With the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, unbalanced news reporting and social media, more political commentators now argue that Western societies are living in an era of ‘post-truth politics’, a political culture in which debates are dominated by appeals to human emotion and irrationality rather than facts and rational argument. The increasingly anti-scientific tone of this discourse — as seen, for instance, in the debates concerning the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election — carries the danger of degenerating into forms of dogmatic assertion that are immune to rational debate.”
This observation is adequately ventilated in the rational statements made by their lordships, who went for the bull’s eye when in their judgment the Pretoria high court declared some SRD grant regulations unconstitutional. Justice Twala ordered the government to progressively increase the grant to align with inflation and the cost of living. They declared as irrational the snooping and spying over the poor’s financial transactions with the aim of determining a threshold. The judge said that gifts and one-off payments must be excluded from the income threshold for the SRD.
For the longest time, SA’s political and economic debates have lacked what Lenin said. Pateman correctly reminds us: “Lenin is not the narrow-minded vulgariser of Marxism that he is routinely taken to be.” Systems thinking, systems design and praxis in governance can be attributed to Lenin.
Ploughing into the vanity of the arguments by the government, Twala is correct in concluding on the basis of facts: “It is unconscionable for government to accept that the number of people who are with insufficient means to support themselves and their dependents is more than 18.3-million but only budgets to provide for 10.5-million.”
The underspending of the budget by the Sassa in the previous financial years is not because there are no eligible people to meet the estimated number but because of the exclusionary barriers put in place by the regulations
The regulations have placed barriers to exclude eligible applicants from accessing the SRD grant. The underspending of the budget by Sassa in the previous financial years is not because there are no eligible people to meet the estimated number but because of the exclusionary barriers put in place by the regulations.
Twala further says: “There is no merit in the respondents’ contention that there has been progressive realisation in the SRD grant since its introduction in 2020 in that there was an increase in the means threshold amount from R595 to R624 and recently the SRD grant was increased by R20 to R370. According to the statistics, the food poverty line for 2023 was R760 and the SRD grant remained at R350 at the time, with the means threshold being R624. Even the means threshold amount is far below the food poverty line for 2023, let alone 2024. Therefore there is no meaningful progressive realisation of the SRD grant, and this is in breach of the provisions of section 27 of the constitution.”
Twala reminds us of the three enemies of transformation, and his judgment coincides with the conclusions that Lenin made a century ago when he identified the three enemies of the Bolshevik Revolution. Chief among these relates to lack of care to those who have presumably anchored their mission in life as care.
Lenin says: “In my opinion, three chief enemies now confront one, irrespective of one’s departmental functions. These tasks confront the political educationist if he is a Communist — and most of the political educationists are. The three chief enemies that confront him: the first is communist conceit, the second illiteracy and the third bribery.”
This case is about policy conceit that advocates left and finances right and consequently leaves many outside. The evidence is clear in Twala’s arguments.
• 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, e-mail Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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