GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
1 March 2024
Note to editor: This is the speech that was delivered by GOOD Secretary-General and Member of Parliament, Brett Herron, during today’s debate tabled by the GOOD party: Addressing the triple crisis of low economic growth, high unemployment and entrenched poverty.
The foundations of our democracy are wobbling under a triple crisis of low economic growth, high unemployment and entrenched poverty.
But we can’t prioritise bracing the foundations because we’re stuck in a perpetual cycle of political contestation.
The two most important dates on our annual political calendar, the State of the Nation and national budget addresses, have over the years become less and less about inclusive justice, and more and more about applying sticky plasters over gaping wounds ahead of the next election.
Our hopeful vision of 30 years ago, of creating a re-calibrated society of equal opportunity and common purpose, has been suffocated by inadequate redress and unsustainable inequality.
Government has delivered millions of free homes, but where they have been built – on the edges of towns and cities, far from job opportunities – mirrors the spatial injustice of the Group Areas Act, and millions more homes are required.
We have delivered electricity connections to millions of households, but buying electricity has become increasingly unaffordable to people without livelihoods.
We are delivering social grants to nearly half the population – about 26 million people – nine million of whom receive R350 a month which is less than half the income needed by an adult to feed him or herself.
While constitutionally empowering women, a plague of gender-based violence disempowers them.
In an environment of extreme have-and-have-notism, our ruling class has taken on the character of the emperor, in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, more focussed on the acquisition of fancy possessions and lifestyles regardless of cost, than on managing affairs of state.
At the expense of prioritising real transformation and real redress…
The state’s bumbling, instead of delivering, greatly benefits the official opposition, which isn’t interested in transformation and redress, but is heavily invested in proving that the ruling party is incompetent and corrupt (because it is led by Blacks).
Like hamsters on an exercise wheel, we’ve become hooked on a perpetual cycle of elections – national and provincial, local, and ruling party. Making promises, pointing fingers, and moving onto the next election. With little energy left for such irksome matters as addressing inequality…
The only way to release South Africans from the poverty trap is by growing our economy and creating jobs. We need at least 5% – 6% economic growth to create employment that will meaningfully reduce extreme poverty; what we’re getting is 1% on average in the medium term.
According to the African Development Bank’s Economic Outlook 2023, the continent can expect 4.3% growth this year, with 22 nations surpassing 5% growth.
But not in Southern Africa. “Growth in Southern Africa is projected to decelerate by 1.1 percentage points, from an estimated 2.7 percent in 2022 to 1.6 percent in 2023…The projected sharp decline in 2023 largely reflects continued growth weakness in South Africa, the region’s largest economy and trading partner,” the continental bank opined.
South Africa’s economic growth rate trails way behind its population growth rate that recorded a massive 19,8 percentage point increase between 2011 and 2022, from 51,7 million persons in 2011 to 62 million persons in 2022.
With an election three months away, however, we skip over these things because there’s more important stuff, like pointing fingers at each other and engaging in identity politics.
We need reliable electricity, and functioning transport networks and digital communications connections, and we need to invest in infrastructure.
Fourteen years ago, in the 2010 New Growth Path Framework, we identified ramping up public investment in infrastructure as a growth opportunity.
The 2010 framework argued that investment in infrastructure was identified was a force multiplier –
“a trigger to build a local supplier industry for the manufacture of the components for the build-programme.”
The framework also identified priority areas to create jobs: The “green economy” which was projected could create 300 000 jobs over a decade; and agriculture, mining, manufacturing and tourism.
This year we’re discussing the self-same things…
The New Growth Path framework followed other plans starting with the Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), then the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) plan, then the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South (ASGISA).
The failure of our government to create jobs is directly linked to the failure to implement these economic growth plans in an integrated and comprehensive way.
We cannot accept the extremely high unemployment rates – especially youth unemployment – as normal. Nor can we accept that our economy will muddle along growing at only 1.1% per annum.
Instead of building a healthy and values-based post-apartheid democracy, our management of the economy is prolonging and perpetuating apartheid injustices that are fundamentally unsustainable.
Even if we triple our projected economic growth rate, South Africa will not eliminate or meaningfully reduce its unemployment crisis over the next decade and a half. This is a matter of fact that cannot be wished away.
At 3% economic growth over the next 13 years, we’d gain 6.5 million jobs by 2037, but the number of unemployed people would remain more or less constant at more than 8 million.
The truth is that while we work on turning the economy around millions of people will remain trapped in unemployment and poverty.
The State has to prioritise the provision of food and dignity to the masses of people who are suffering without work and with rapidly diminishing hope for a better future.
The R350 monthly SRD (Social Relief of Distress) grant, that more than eight million citizens receive from the State, is barely better than nothing.
It must be converted into a Basic Income Grant (BIG) of around R1000 per month placing the poorest South Africans who would receive BIG, above the food poverty line and just below the lower bound poverty line.
The correct question is not: “Do we have the money?” It is: “What wasteful line items in the budget can be scrapped so we do have the money?”
An expanded cash transfer system is the only realistically effective way, in the coming years, to ensure South Africa meets its Section 27 Constitutional obligations to progressively realize socio-economic rights.
South Africa urgently requires the implementation of a coherent, pragmatic economic approach that embraces the needs of business, but also the needs of the millions who remain on the margins where apartheid chucked them.
The country cannot afford to continue deferring this conversation until after the next election.
Media Enquiries:
Brett Herron, GOOD: Secretary-General & Member of Parliament
Cell: 082 518 3264
Email: bretth@forgood.org.za
Janke Tolmay, GOOD: Media Manager
Cell: 073 367 1223
Email: janke@forgood.org.za