Pali Lehohla
The Changing Face of South Africa
Dr Pali Lehohla - The Changing Face of South Africa
- So well, thank you very much. I love that prayer. I was sitting, listening and I really feel I’m sitting here in New York and really, it always feels so heartfelt and it’s always so warming, just when I reconnect with my South African friends because, as my team know, I am very connected to South Africa. I love South Africans and I love the country, and we really just only wish South African well. And I really decided for lockdown and also warm welcome to everybody because I haven’t been on “Lockdown” for a while. But I really wanted to do this series because as you know South Africa is heading to the polls on the 29th of May. And for the first time there will be more people going to the polls that have never experienced apartheid than mean in age in South Africa today is 27 years. So this curated series of talks will be a journey over the past 30 years to build a context of some of the decision policies and people that have led the country to this place in history. A well-rounded companion ahead of this historic election, a deep dive into this fascinating country that is both informative and entertaining. So I really wanted to give an overall couple of weeks for all our participants to really understand where we are heading, where we came from and what’s ahead of us. And to help us navigate the series, we, “Lockdown”, have partnered with the burning platform, South Africa’s top podcast in political and social commentary. we’ll have Gareth Cliff and his co-host, Phumi Mashigo. They will be our companion hosts alongside an expert panel. So that is very, very exciting.
Gareth is a very old friend, a very close friend. Gareth is the Founder and President of cliffcentral.com. He’s host of the “Gareth Cliff Show” and former South African Idol’s judge. Gareth Cliff is one of South Africa’s radio’s most prominent personalities as most of you know. In May, 2014, Gareth took the giant leap from traditional terrestrial radio to the future of internet and mobile with the aim of creating the preeminent infotainment online content hub. Wow Gareth, that is a mouthful, but absolutely. And today is the biggest podcast in Africa by offering a variety of authentic and relevant conversations, informative and entertaining, empowering and inspiring. Phumi is another close friend. Phumi Mashigo is the Co-founder and Managing Director of South Africa’s Promise, a nonprofit company, whose mission is to help fulfil South African’s Constitution of improving the quality of life all citizens and free the potential of all citizens. Phumi is also the longtime co-host with Gareth Cliff on Cliff Central’s flagship podcast “Burning Platform,” a current affairs show with an array of relevant guests. So I’m real, very honoured and grateful to have this amazing podcast, co-host to help us navigate the next two weeks. Today, we are truly honoured to have Dr. Lehohla, who will be with us. He is the former Statistician General of South Africa. He has served as Co-chair of Paris 21 and the Chair of United Nations Statistics Commission. He was the Founding Chair of the Statistics Commission of Africa and Chairs the African Symposium for Statistical Development.
He was Vice President of the International Statistics Institute and sponsored the Young African Statistician Movement. He served as one of the 25 member panel on Data Revolution appointed by the UN Secretary General and has recently been appointed to the independent accountability panel for the health of women, children and adolescents. Mr. Lehohla has been a forceful advocate for improving the civil registration and vital statistic systems in Africa. He was recognised by his alma mater, University of Ghana for his contribution to the development of statistics in 2015, and was also awarded an honorary doctor by the University of Stellenbosch in the same year. Today, Dr. Lehohla is speaking to us about Changing South Africa. Dr. Lehohla, it’s a great pleasure and honour to meet you online. I look forward to us meeting in person. I want to thank you on behalf of all of us for being here today with us, and I am now going to hand over to our esteemed panel. Thank you, Gareth. Thank you pmi. Thank you, Jess. Thank you for everybody for being on here and thanks to all our participants. Over to you.
Well, thank you Wendy. And I saw for a little while there, I was called Phumi Mashigo, as well. So Phumz I’m not going to steal your thunder, but Pali Lehohla is really exactly the right person to start this conversation with today. And I’m thrilled that he could be with us because he has had his eye on the ball when it comes to all the numbers. And South Africa is such an interesting and dynamic place that things change both quickly as they always do in an election year, which is what we’re likely to have happen at the end of this month. But also they change slowly and almost imperceptibly. And that is where somebody like him is most helpful because he can give us a much bigger, better idea of what actually has happened in 30 years of democracy. And there’s an incredible story to tell there, right, Phumz?
And I think that the best place to start being a social context of thinking about South Africa and how it’s changed and the change in face of South Africa over the past 30 years where I recently read that our population has almost doubled in the time from 1994 to today. And a lot has happened and Ntate Lehohla is the only person that has all of this information in his head. So I’m going to let him start and later on I will jump in with some questions, hopefully to jumpstart the Q & A in about 40 minutes, so Ntate Lehohla over to you.
But thank you very much, I’m excited to be in this panel, today, as we look back to the past 30 years and ask ourselves the question, when in 1994 we were on the verge of a brighter future, how do we look back to that moment and what can we say about it today, reflecting on the excitement, the euphoria, the promise of a different future that we had then. I thought that I would paint a picture. And I’ve chosen that deliberately, that picture will be around education and employment but importantly around education, because that’s the cornerstone of any nation. And one has to look at how have we progressed since then to now. And then probably on the basis of that we may have an understanding of the intractable challenges and how they have been persistent and very, very stagnant around things. So I’ve chosen this very, very deliberately. And then we can talk about other things that I’m not going to put a picture on, but I’ll talk just to those. So if you allow me to share my screen, I can now share my screen and illustrate a few things that are very important in the case of South Africa. And you’ll see that here we are probably presenting the situation of beginning of life.
And that’s very, very important as some of the problems that we encounter in South Africa are defined in this beginning of life where the average lifetime of partners amongst men age 15 to 49 and who have ever had sexual intercourse, is 15 years. For women who have done the same ever experienced sexual intercourse, is four years. Now this is the environment around where life begins in South Africa, 15 years for men, four years for females. It’s a very unstable environment for upbringing a child. And a good part of that, not a good part of that. The reasons for that are the apartheid legacy and that apartheid legacy was embedded in migration, labour migration, and that separates men from women. So I want to put this slide because if we have to solve the problems of South Africa, we actually have to ensure that we deal with that challenge. Now I see that my name has been changed to Lehola instead of Lehohla, it’s L-E-H-O-H-L-A. The name should not change. Now given that kind of situation, when it comes to the question of marital status of fathers and mothers, it is not unsurprising that we have 60% of fathers saying they are married against 31% of mothers here, that’s 60 and 31%. Now, in a population that is 50:50, the question that we have to ask is who are these men married to? Of course, if South Africa was polyandrous, that is women married more than one man, you would actually understand, but it is not, it’s polygamous.
Our former president was, is polygamous. Now children grow up in a very unstable environment, and that happens to define how South Africa has progressed over the years, and largely because of the migratory patterns that apartheid embedded in the system. Now you need to go into education. And for each location, census is a time machine, it’s a time plot. It says what has happened over a period of time, 1950 up to 2010, you can see that amongst Blacks, you see that they had very low levels of education, but whites already had high levels of education. All of them by about 2010 had grade three, that is your grade seven. You can see Blacks have caught up, the Indians have caught up there. But when it comes to grade nine, you can see Blacks fell well below coloureds there, Indians have caught up. And then when it come to grade 12, you see that situation even dropping further. So you can see that while democracy, you can see by the turn of democracy things actually encouragingly, stir up. For whites, they had already been better. So have been for Indians, but for Blacks, you can see that’s the problem. The situation gets a little bit trickier when it comes to those who having a degree that is university. And this is the slippery slope of a leaking skills vessel. And when you look at these graphs, you’ll realise that although during this period around the ‘70s, Blacks were performing almost in an improving manner like the Indians, as well as like the whites, if you look at this intercept here, but beyond 1995, you see that Blacks and coloureds started declining in terms of completion of degrees, whereas whites were improving it.
I’ve looked at the same graph now based on the census of of 2022, but before I go into the census of 2022, we are looking here at the proportion of whites who have degrees vis-a-vis the proportion of Blacks who have degrees. You can see as a proportion is a very small proportion amongst Blacks and the large proportion amongst whites, you could actually be living in Korea here, and you are living not in South Africa here. For whites this is Korea, and here it’s more real about South Africa. So with this kind of situation where this side here it’s about 90% of the population, and here it’s about 7% of the population. You can understand that the skill level, the capacity to drive the economy is very, very much lacking. So if you look then in absolute numbers in the population by race, you can realise that we are actually walking on a very weak branch. This is all the people who have a degree. Here it’s all those who finished matric. Here is those who finished standard nine. And here it’s those with no schooling. Obvious, the population with no schooling declined sharply but they didn’t go far enough to create what is necessary. Now, I’ve done the same kind of analysis. Fortunately the Statistician General released the census results of 2022. So I looked at the numbers for 2022 data.
And here what we see, I see that the system has double booked. But we see here for those who are English speaking with a degree, those who are Afrikaans speaking with a degree, those who are English speaking Indian, English speaking coloured and Afrikaans speaking coloured. Now you can see undoubtedly that the English speaking whites actually pump at about 60% of their population at the degree. Here, Afrikaans it’s about 40%. Afrikaans speaking whites. When it comes to English speaking Indians it’s at about 25%. English speaking coloureds slightly lower than that, but African speaking colours less than 10%. Now I see that these slides are sitting one on top of the other. I’m not sure why but they are doing so. But when we come to English speaking on its own, you can see that it drops from the 70/60% to about 30% here. And then we have the Afrikaans speaking, and then there is the big surprise. The Tshivenda, the Venda speaking have shows improvements although declining over a period of time there, you see that they are showing improvements. And then we’ve got the Isixhosa speaking who are half that of Tshivenda, and then the rest of the African languages. Now here we are looking at people who have degrees by language, English speaking, Afrikaans speaking, and you can see that this Afrikaans speaking here is all Afrikaans speakers which increase the whites. So you can see the graph declines due to coloured population. You saw that when we looked at Afrikaans speaking whites, the graph was moving upwards that way, just like the English speaking. The rest of the graphs are downward looking. What is very interesting is the Tshivenda.
The Tshivenda is declining, but closer to now, the Tshivenda has tended to improve, decline and improve. Again, I don’t know whether it’s because the president is Venda but the Tshivenda has improved even long before that time. And there’s a reason for that and I wrote an article today about it.` In 1988, I was in Swaziland on a languages programme and people were asking, “When as statistician, why are you coming for a language programme?” I said, “I like language because it captures our being as human beings.” And Tshivenda, I learned from a presentation that was made there that Tshivenda in the Bantu languages actually acts in different ways it’s whether it’s Nguni, whether it’s Sotho, whether it’s Shona, actually Tshivenda is a very versatile language and therefore the Venda people or people who speak Venda have insights into all the languages that are Bantu, and they perform better at degrees, they perform better at mathematics. IsiXhoza, Sepedi. And of course, down here we see IsiNdebele really performing very, very badly. So what are we observing? What we are observing is that the English speaking whites, Afrikaans speaking, and Afrikaans, I’m going to look at by race, people who are white perform better. Those who are Indian perform better. Those who are Black and coloured actually have declined with the advent of democracy.
And the consequence of that is in terms of the skilled in the labour force, the skilled in the workforce. You see in 1994, what the proportion of the skilled was in 1994 among Blacks. By 2016 there had been very little movement. What is very disparaging is that while in 1994 these were 17%, by 2016 that had declined by 14%. Now we move forward into time, look at 2017 and see what changes were occurred. We can see the changes were occurring amongst whites and amongst Indians, actually having a bigger share of their population as the skilled. Here the Indians have 35 to 44 has almost doubled in fact have grown by more than double in this age group from 26 to 55%, they doubled. Amongst the coloureds, very little movement. And amongst Blacks at worst stagnated at 19, 20, 18 in 2017. The same we see in 1994. So the dividends of democracy have not come to Blacks and colours or somewhat have come to colours, but certainly not to Blacks. It has definitely come to Indians and wise. The consequence of this is that while employment in 2008, of those who are 25 to 34 was 4.8 million, the employed were 4.8 million, 4.8 million there And those who are 15 to 24 were 1.673 million. By 2022, they had dropped to 1,050,000. And by 2022 they had dropped to 4.4 million from 4.8 in a growing population that is very important to understand, in a growing population.
So the issues that we are faced with in South Africa, as we commemorate 30 years of democracy, there is a major challenge that is anchored in the beginning of life, which is very difficult and has to be tackled with the consequence that it has gone through the economic system and actually shows that there is no Black middle class that we can talk of in the country. And as we look at the next 30 years, this is something that we actually have to look at and say, why are Blacks not moving in the same pace likewise? The answer is simple. The answer is that this part of our education, this part, while at primary things seem to be moving, while at Grade 9 things have plateaued completely here and they’re not moving. We are stuck completely in advancing our education into higher education or technikons. I leave it there as an introduction, then we can talk about other things like service delivery and so on and so on. But those are really peripheral. They are not going to improve until we have cracked this dilemma at birth and this consequence and the sequence of events that lead to the life of economics and employment. I’ll stop sharing my screen now and then we can go and look at, I didn’t want to stop, I wanted to stop sharing my screen but thank you very much for giving me this ability to give you an introductory remark that shows you what are the anchors of our dilemma. And if this is not sorted out, the next 30 years are going to be worse.
Some alarming things in there. And a lot of us have been led to believe that South Africa had this incredible wellspring of opportunity post 1994, particularly for Black families. And we heard about the growth of this Black middle class according to those graphs, though it doesn’t look like it.
Well, these are facts from the censuses that I ran in the country from 1996, 2001 and 2011, and then the community `survey that I ran in 2016. And I’ve just analysed the data from my successor in 2022. And that’s the picture that we have. And then of course the surveys, which is the one where I’m showing you the middle class, the working middle class, those who are skilled, the Blacks have been stuck in that group and data for 2023, which shows the same kind of result. So these are the facts about the country,
Which is really a grim view. I’m very glad that you chose education to be the anchor on which we have this conversation because I think going into the elections, we’re asking ourselves how people are making the decision of who they vote for and with what you’re showing us is that there is a large part of our population which is undereducated and that then has a bearing on skills, but it also has a bearing on decisions that they make. But in terms of access to what they see as a better life, all of these young people and as they grow older, and from your experience with the censuses and the community service, do you see a life improved outside of the educational sphere?
It’s very difficult to say whether you see life improving out of education because education gives you a lifelong possibility for better things to come. Chief Mohlomi, the Principal of the School of Leadership in Modile in 1720, in Modile in Lesotho which of course was expropriated by the English and Afrikaners, when they took the Free State from Basotho. That institute was anchored by Chief Mohlomi in something called intergenerational value. And by intergenerational value, you actually have to see how progressively you improve your lives. Now you can see that amongst Afrikaners and whites, you don’t see it amongst Blacks because the graphs are going down. It means that there’s no intergenerational value. So when you see at the heart of what changes life, that kind of graph, then whatever seems to be improvements are trivial. Yes, houses, yes, accommodation has been better, electricity has been better and all that, but it hasn’t impacted where it has to impact the most. Now here is the issue around South Africa. It’s just that I don’t have that slide, but I would be able to pick it up here. In 2016, we asked South Africans what their priorities are. The first one was around water. Of course now it’ll be electricity, I’m sure because we only have had 40 days of electricity now, but we know that we have been in the dark all along and businesses have gone out of business because of the issue of the power. And then number three was other things, water and so on, et cetera, et cetera. Education was number 15.
Wow.
Now when we have that kind of situation, they you know you’re in trouble. Let me show you a graph which is here, that is very, very important to illustrate that which I’m talking about I’ll ask that I share the screen. I’ll switch off some of these and share the screen here. I want to go straight to those crucial graphs. Yes, here, go here. I’ll ask that I share the screen again and I’ll share the screen of Amartya Sen who says that human lives, although I wanted to go quick to Amartya Sen’s screen. You see here is Amartya Sen, poverty is multidimensional. And he argues that, “human lives are battered and diminished in all kinds of different ways. And the first task is to acknowledge that deprivations of very different kinds have to be accommodated within a general overarching framework. Now we measure that what the priorities are. And when we looked at what afflicts South Africa using the multidimensional lens, we found out that unemployment afflicts South African’s lives very badly. This is in 2001 where unemployment was contributing 33% as a burden of poverty. It increased to 40% by 2011, and it increased to 52% by 2016. If you look at this difference here is 77 percentage points. If you look at the difference here, it’s a 12 percentage points, it’s seven percentage points in 10 years, it’s 12 percentage points in five years, it doubled in half the time. So if you double and you decrease the time by half, that’s acceleration of monumental magnitudes. Now you see years of schooling as a driver of poverty. Some improvements in education ensured that years of non-school going, contributed less and less in poverty and up to 11.
But when we look at 11 plus 52, 63% of our problems today are driven by unemployment and poverty and the years of schooling. And if years of schooling give you the leverage to find jobs, we have seen that it is impossible to achieve that given the trend that we see in education. Now, when we come to the youth themselves, you can see that it is actually educational attainment that defines their poverty, the absence of that, the one adult employed in the household, and then 15%. So when you add 15 to 35, you get up to 50% and then 66% of the youth problems are defined by that. Now, if you come to an election year, and I want to come back here, you see what sanitation contributes about 7%, assets, energy for heating, water. And of course this is the noise politicians will be talking about instead of on these two important things that define 63% of South Africa’s and for the youth, you can see.
I want to ask you Dr. Lehohla, these are all pretty damning statistics and most especially because things have got worse since '94 when we were obviously hoping they would improve on all of those metrics that you showed us just now, it seems that the most recent one is worse than the one from 10 years ago, and that one is worse than the one from 10 years before that. So in 30 years we really have gone backwards.
Absolutely. Absolutely. This is the reality, this is the evidence, this is what the evidence is saying. And I’ve chosen what Madiba said is the important, is the key resolving problems, education,
When things go wrong in education, then you know you cannot get them, right?
So can we talk about overall demographics because we will have some questions and answers a bit later on, but I saw someone asking just now overall population dynamics. And in that respect, how many people are in South Africa now as compared to in 1994, what is the gender split? What are the racial splits? We’ve come under pressure. You say that we’re losing a lot of skilled people to emigration. We’ve got immigration and some of that is from the rest of Africa. What did those dynamics look like?
In 1996, we counted 40.3 million people. Whites were still about 10%. India’s the settled around 2.5%, Coloureds about 7% and then the rest were Black. And then fast forward to 2001, we moved to 46 million and then fast forward to 2011, we were 53 million. Now the Statistician General tells us that we are 62 million. South Africa is growing at about 1% per annum. And then of course when we think about the dynamics. A 1% growth per annum or 1.6% growth per annum is a very low rate of growth for a population. Although now because we are growing at a lower percentage in terms of GDP than growth, people have started saying the rate of population growth is higher than that of GDP. Indeed, when that happens, it means the standards of living are going down. Now there is an unfortunate thesis that might just be emerging that the rate of growth of population is too high and I want to dismiss that. Absolutely. There’s also a myth and urban legend that young girls go fall pregnant so that they can get grants. I want to dismiss that myth and that urban legend with the distastefulness that it deserves because nothing of the sort is happening. These are excuses of urban legends that are noted in data, in the evidence.
We have to confront our demons that we should not turn young people into the animals we are turning them into by depriving them education. One of the problems that is happening here and that we are missing and politicians are missing greatly is that there is a nation building challenge that we have to confront. And when you look at the analysis, when we start analysing the data, you realise that index of integration in South Africa is very, very low. We are not integrated as society. One, when we go to work, we are already absolutely divided, when we go to worship, we are absolutely very divided, when we go to schools, we are absolutely very divided. So there is no space where the interracialness of ourselves, where we come together, absolutely no where. And this is a very sad situation. Now, students in 2016 said, "Fees must fall.” And when you look at the university, that is where we have students in numbers and that’s where you can integrate socially. And the index of integration can happen at university because we have quantities, although not proportionate by population group, but we have good enough numbers there. And these students were saying fees must fall. They were united as Black, coloured, Indian, and white. And the politicians, EFF, ANC, DA, they went and destroyed that movement instead of taking advantage of what the students had expressed. And then the government stupidly started nitpicking and saying, “We will pay for the poor and not the rich.” Is it a high price to pay for the student body, everyone that has passed and unite them. My contribution at the Commission was pay for everyone because you need a national building exercise here and it is only in that space where you can actually build a nation.
Moreso, that these people are the elite and as I thought about what my contribution was there and I’d be writing to universities to say, “Look, we must pay for everyone.” We must ask the students when they are in that space, the only thing they should do every year is to define what South Africa they wish for. And that must go into government, that must go into policy because we can then distil what South Africa we are wishing for. We don’t have those spaces where these things can happen. Now the Afrikaners have built their own university and they’re building something else as well. This disintegration at that level of intellect in those spaces, those internet have been destroyed and very soon even those ivy leagues like Wits, Stellenbosch and so on will deteriorate because we have failed to capture the moment when it is desirable. We started nitpicking instead of understanding that the task of nation building is so massive and once the students gave us that stadia for it, it was the stadia that we should have gone to play in instead of saying we are happy when the Boks are going to play or Bafana Bafana is going to play. It’s important, it’s nice, it’s good, but we are not focusing on the right things. It’s unsurprising that South Africans say education is priority number 15 because we have not understood what the role of education in transforming society is.
Ntate Lehohla, I think that it’s a good place to ask one of the questions that somebody has asked, John Mattison, in the comments just about why the educational outcomes are so different by race. Why is it, and I know you put the various languages that are spoken in South Africa and where each one of them are and you started speaking about it when you spoke about Tshivenda being a very versatile language. Do you have any thoughts on why it is that the the educational outcomes are so different by race?
Yes, indeed. There is a a reason why they are so different. And I’ll come to that shortly and I will even go a bit further. You see in 1953, and I’m trying to look for the slide that dramatically shows this point. In 1953, Verwoerd was in parliament in September and said was the use of teaching Bantu child mathematics when it can’t use it in practise. It was in that year that the Indians took a different route in their education and it show in the numbers, it shows in this time plot. Census is a fantastic thing because it tells you what is happening. The Blacks and the colours got stuck at that time and they never got out out of that rut until today. The Indians took a different route. Whatever reason they gave to themselves to move in that direction is something that we have to understand and start asking ourselves as South Africans. Why did the Indians, having been subjected to the same kind of level of oppression and everything, took a different route when all of them were bundled as kafirs whose task it was not to learn mathematics. That is the entire reason. But of course then mathematics started being taught very, very badly in schools and I really wish to show something here that is very, very , this is where we are. Yes, I want to share a screen again so that you see this for yourself. You don’t say Lehohla is making up this numbers in his head. Do you see the screen?
Yes.
Yes, let me enlarge it. Why does it fall on this?
Oh, it’s going backwards.
Yes, yes, I’m going backwards into the future. You see this graph here. Children who were in grades eight and 12, I have a graph that precedes this, which shows boys and girls in grade three to grade seven, their graph, their most favourite subject is mathematics. It comes up to here, boys and girls, and you see a grade eight to 12, that graph drops to 15 and 11 from a high of 30% for boys and 25% for girls. Somewhere here. At eight to 12, they start fearing mathematics. That happens because the president likes them to pass. The minister likes them to pass. The principal likes them to pass. The parents like them to pass. The children also like to pass, but they want to pass the easy way. And because mathematics is badly taught as a consequence of Verwoerd asking the question, “What’s the use of teaching Bantu child mathematics?” So the school encourages children not to do mathematics. And then of course our government has come with this thing called the MS Literacy. Even children who could do mathematics, but the president, the minister, the parents, the children, all go for this maths literacy. It’s a serious disease of the nation. Now you see that’s the graph for favourite subject grades three to seven it’s mathematics. I said 30, it’s 17.3 and 14.8. Now, once they go grade eight to 12, that drops to 7.2 to 6.3 because of the encouragement by teachers so that children in December or between December and January, they can show a certificate that they have passed also, even passed nothing because they can’t even go to university. Now then the issue around education here, you see girls coming with family commitment because they’ve gone pregnant and then of course poor academic performance, no money for fees. Yes, the schools are free, fee-free schools, but 18% of the children can’t go there because there’s no money. There’s transport, there’s all those other things. And then of course comes boys who say education is useless.
Dr. Lehohla, this is especially awful because we proportionally spend more on education in South Africa than almost any other country on earth. By our total budget.
Indeed.
Our budget is dominated by education spending and yet our results are so shocking, so something doesn’t make sense.
Well, it doesn’t make sense in many respects that when we don’t have content and we’re focused on form, this is what happens.
But again, money is obviously not the solution because it seems like a bottomless pit with no results.
Well, it’s about money. I’ve shown you that first slide, it shows the environment,
Family.
Where life begins. It is that environment that needs to be changed and it can’t be changed by education. It has to be changed by how our settlement patterns are defined with migratory labour and long commuting distances, that condition has not changed. And that’s where children are born, are raised. By the time they come to education, they’re already damaged goods. And we think that the police and education can, this is not a policing issue, this is not an education issue. It is at that beginning of life. And you can look at the response to Fees Must Fall, the response of government TO Fees Must Fall was saying go for the poor, go for that and then come this term, which is called “missing middle’, I don’t know what ‘missing middle’ is. Msholozi, before he left, he said pay for everyone. He was betrayed by everybody else who said, "No, no, no, we can’t afford.” We cannot afford this level of disparity and performance that is so terrible. This is what we can’t afford. What we can afford is to pay for everyone. Because what happens in the Fees Must Fall movement and the way it was solved by government, absolutely stupid. They were devoid of the knowledge of what happens at birth. 60% of fathers say they’re married against that 31% of mothers. For heaven sake, the children that are in that space should be heavily schizophrenic.
The mother herself who is said to afford education with the so-called husband. They say, “No, we’ll not finance this child because the mother and the father can afford, but the mother has already dismissed the father. And then you are forcing this mother to go to that husband who she had dismissed all the time. You’ll not stop gender-based violence. So not understanding the chain of events in this country that is reflected in the statistics in order to adjust the policies. And we are busy trying to think that we can cause stop gender-based violence by conference. It can’t. It’s rotten at birth. So we are unable to understand these things because people don’t want to look at data and the analysis that the government does is so shallow that even in the presence of this data, they can’t see it. And they think that by summits and summits on gender-based violence, they can resolve, it can be solved. It’s absolutely not solvable and you are right, we spend so much on education, but we .
It almost sounds like if we think of people as computers and we think that there are software problems, that’s the education system. You can upload courses and you can upload an improvement, an upgrade of an app for example. But if the hardware is damaged, then the computer will never function properly. Are we saying that may be it. That’s the best analogy is that the hardware is so damaged that software upgrades won’t work.
I believe that the call for a convention that President Mbeki talked to and was supported by President Ramaphosa should focus on these issues that I’m raising. When I said postpone the election, it was because of what I see and what the data is telling me and has told me over the years. Now here is the point, you see on this slide. This is 1950, this is whites, that’s grade three to grade 10. These are Indians, coloureds and they are bundled together here at the bottom and Verwoerd says in 1953, "What’s the use of teaching Bantu child mathematics.” And this is data from the census and you see how the Indians moved, that one, and the coloureds and Blacks were clunked together there. And of course when it comes to Grade 10, the Indians had caught up with the whites and the Blacks and coloureds were stuck here at the bottom. So this is the situation. So it is that announcement. We never improved on teaching mathematics. By the way, what was that year? When the demutualization happened. One thing that happened that it’s also in the data, I don’t have the slide. The insurance companies, when Blacks started fearing death and because they fear death and we have these stockvels, but insurance companies saw that there’s money there in the stockvels, so they started going to Blacks to do these kinds of things and say, “Well, can you enlist for insurance because our stockvels were just putting some money there and when I’m dead.
But now they started showing some benefits. The people they went for from 1976, after Soweto riots, were the teachers. And which teachers? The mathematics teachers Who could use a calculator and add the premiums and so on, so and so on. And then of course there was a demutualization and then people started getting their money and technology came. The data shows that by that time later in life, as late as 2014, 2010, those people suffered the highest unemployment, mathematics because they left education. They went in there and when computerization came. So we’re actually in a mud. People don’t want to look at this data and it is time we look at this now that we are 30 years, I don’t have the slide for that. Now let me also say that in the ‘80s, the people who actually graduated. We graduated amongst Blacks, about 5,000 Blacks, by 2014 were graduating 48,000 Blacks you see there? 20,000 whites. You can see whites have always steadied there. So the Indians have been growing from that low number to that number. But while this representation by its four is a true number, but to present it graphically is the wrong thing. This is the real growth. This is where the Blacks are because you have to always undergird them with their proportion. Proportionately, this is the performance of Blacks because this doesn’t show performance of Blacks compared to whites or Indians. We have to make that comparison here. So where you see for every one Black person there are 4.5 whites who succeed. The question then is how do we improve this in order for them to achieve that? How do we change this graph such that for Blacks this red should go that way instead of going that way. That’s the policy question and the Fees must Fall was trying to answer that policy question. But then the ANC, the EFF, all the political parties came and destroyed that beautiful movement and the government stupidly then decided on a non policy in as far as higher education funding.
Phumi, do you want to take one or two questions quickly in the Q & A and perhaps answer one or two of those? Because I’m aware of time and we’re already over. I think that they asked some. Let me come here before those questions come.
Okay.
From 2001 to 2011, poverty was declining in all municipalities. Monotonically, this green represents that. From 2011 to 2016, 81 municipalities, poverty increased. I’m sure once we start looking at 2022, we are likely to see all these municipalities poverty increase. This is average household income as of 2011. It hasn’t changed that much. The disparities are the same. 60 for Blacks, 365 for whites. Now this is where the dilemma is. You can see the distribution of Black income gives you this bridge that you can’t cross. You can’t cross this bridge. Lack of education. Here amongst whites, this distribution is normal distribution. Here it has a bimodal thing which shows the difficulties that the country’s facing. Now you will never see income and this is going to be the case for many who do not have schooling. They’ll only have income when they reach 60, when they go for pension. When they have grade 11, they suffer the same and so is grade 12. They’ll only start seeing income when they reach here up here they can’t because they’re unemployable and unemployed. So this issue of education is so crucial. You can see now with diploma, with a bachelor’s degree, you can see that people have a higher possibility of having income. Here, life matters you so badly that you look 60 when you are only 20 and you’ll try to qualify for pension. So this is the dilemma. You see these 20 year olds can never have income. At 30, they don’t have income blah, blah. And only when they are about 60 they will go for the pension. Yes, you can ask questions now.
So Dr Pali, I just want to say it’s three minutes past seven. Can we have another five minutes of your time? I see a lot of the questions that have been asked, as you’ve been talking.
You have an hour from me.
Yes, we had an hour.
I’m saying you you have one more hour from me.
Q&A and Comments:
- Oh, well let’s see how much we can get through in the time that we’ve got. There’s people asking, thank you, it’s illuminating, but a very painful talk.
Q - There’s somebody who’s asked for maybe you to cast into your crystal ball Ntate Pali. In your view, how long it would take, with the right policy decisions, to change the grim view, grim picture that we are looking at. What does that take in terms of time if we make the right policy decisions?
A - I don’t give this so that I don’t come with some solutions. Let me share a screen again so that you can see that indeed there is also a solution. There are possibilities but only if we as South Africans can come and do the right things and it is possible to do the right things if we get the right people to lead this country. I was thinking that I could start from that slide. You see, any country has to look at scenarios and I’m not going to go through these scenarios. I’ll only say there were four times when we had scenarios. Towards a Settlement which are the Mont Fleur Scenarios. Establishing Government. We had Memories of the Future 2002 to 2007 and The Future We Chose 2007 to 2008. But that Future We Chose was projecting at what will be happening now in 2025 and that Future We Chose, we fell in a Muhvango scenario where everything that is happening was defined by that Muvhango scenario. The only thing was we didn’t know who will be acting which part in that. And of course we had the vacuum since 2009 where we didn’t have scenarios. We had the birth of the NDP but the NDP was neither a plan. And of course a group of ourselves stood out by 2016 and we started Indlulamithi scenarios.
Now if you look at the Mont Fleur scenarios, what they were saying is, is a settlement negotiable? Is transition rapid? Are the government’s policies sustainable. We ticked a yes in each of those, but what we ended up with was we were able to go and vote for a government of our choice, but there was no inclusive growth. So if democracy were to mean growth and development, even this inclusive democracy didn’t give us that possibility of growth and development. Government then changed gear in 2001 to 2007 and we looked at this Shosholoza scenario and the outcome indeed we had the ’S'gudi S'nais Skedonk, Dulisanang and Shosholoza. We were on a Shosholoza scenario from 2002 to 2007 growth was 5%, I was measuring that. Gross capital formation was at 22% annually. Access to credit was growing at 15% annually. Debt to GDP ratio had declined to about 25%. So we were actually going somewhere and of course we know one Polokwane happened, we don’t have to ask that.
When Polokwane happened, we went into this Muvhango scenario where bang the boom, politician versus politician, the champ slips up and when you hear President Mbeki saying the brink of a new era, saying that we must have a discussion, he presided over these scenarios and in this Muvhango scenario we said these are the things that will happen and they have all happened. Now the question is what should happen on the brink of a new era? The African National Congress will go to the nation and say we are sorry. Probably this is what we are in at the moment. But the Muvhango scenario actually ended with an outcome that is what we are seeing. We predicted it in 2005, this scenario. Now when it comes to the NDP, it was not a scenario, not design quantified therefore not a plan, a storyline of one scenario and there was no NDP. However the NDP was good in terms of we agreeing as a nation that these are the things we want, but it was left there like a date that only gets remembered when we want some favours. We go to eat when we want to go and ask for budgets. After that we dump it there. Now in 2016 we came together outside government. So you can see government abandoned scenarios abandoned the plan. We came together as ordinary citizens and we said these are the likely scenarios, but then we quantified the scenarios which is Nayi-le-Walk, Gwara Gwara and Isbhujwa.
The outcome was Gwara Gwara This is where we are a nation torn between mobility and restless energy. We’ve now built another set of scenario at 2035. And what we are seeing from what we are having here, instead of the Weaver Work, we actually moving fast into the Vulture Culture. That’s where is the outcome now. That is why I think a convention is called for. I was saying that convention should happen before the election so that the people can say this is what we’ll want and we’ll not tolerate anything less than that and that’s what we’ll be voting for. Now we are going to vote before, well we’ll see. Now business came to government in 2020 at the height of the Covid. They said we as business we believe that South Africa can double its GDP by 2030. They said we believe that we can go to a triple D. That we believe that the Gini Coefficient can drop to 43. That unemployment can drop from 29 to 15% and that growth can be at about five percentile. Government ignored what business came with. Here are the metrics of business. 5.2, 6.8 15%, 4.3. Under Indlulamithi scenario we had in 2018 we are saying this country can grow at 6.2 8 to 10 million jobs, 12%. Indlulamithi scenarios through quantification and econometric modelling, we said these are possible. Government came with nothing in as far as these are concerned because it doesn’t have the tools. Neither did the treasury come with anything on these, poverty rate inequality and so on.
So there was nothing in the government camp, it was Business for South Africa and Indlulamithi scenarios. I hold no brief for Business for South Africa but the targets were the right targets and this is how we at Indlulamithi scenario with the assistance of Applied Government Research Solutions. This is the staircase that we set business as usual will generate and we tabulate the policies that if we go business as usual, we’ll only get 0.7% as growth. If we add to that macro reforms that we have been looking at only 0.97 and if we add to that trade and industry under the business as usual situation, it will be only 0.38. What we should tackle is the macroeconomic framework where the treasury and the reserve bank come and ensure that we can help and do the things that those institutions can do, contribute in economic development. We say even the big social grants will be growth enhancing. And of course once we have done all that business, private sector will come in to work with the government on those targets. And indeed a 5.7 percentage growth is possible in South Africa. It is still possible. But now what has happened, government has isolated only three things, which is energy, which is a logistics and crime. You cannot go into projects without committing to targets. And what we are saying is business and government and society must commit first to these targets and only then when we’re committed to these targets, these one’s here, which are possible in terms of econometric model, then we can talk about projects. Because if you go to projects before you commit to targets, then you are on a wheel and on a path to super corruption. Zondo Marx II, mark my words. I thank you very much.
I think that is a beautiful place to stop. But thank you Ntate Pali and there’s still many comments and many questions but I don’t think we can get through all of these today and maybe I’ll come and bother you again and ask that you come and visit us and we can drink from your well of knowledge one more time. Gareth, is there anything on your side? But I do think that because there is a second session that starts in about 45 minutes Gareth, so maybe we need to.
No, I just want to thank everybody for being a part of this and I’m sorry we didn’t get to every single question, but be sure to join for the rest of these discussions that we’ll have during the course of this, and the next, and the next week. They’re going to be various subjects covered, arts, culture, there’ll be stuff about people, society, the economy, the politics. Obviously, we’ll talk a little bit about the political parties and the leadership and what’s going to happen in the elections. We’re going to speak to some of the cleverest people that we can find including today, Dr. Pali Lehohla And it’s an absolute pleasure to spend some time with you, Phumi and Pali. It’s very nice to see you both. And thank you everybody. That’s pretty much all from us for tonight. We’ll have another session tomorrow.
Before you end. One of the things when we start talking about culture. An economy stripped of culture is a financialized economy.
And we must actually look at cultural economic geography so that place matters, culture matters. Then we have an economy. Without those legs and which is what South Africa doesn’t have, we are actually a financialized system and there cannot be an economy.
Amazing.
On that note, I want to say million thanks to all of you for an outstanding and presentation. Thank you everyone. Thank you for being with us and I look forward to seeing all of you in 45 minutes. Thank you, Dr. Lehohla
Thank very much. Thank
Thanks everybody.
Thank you. Thank you. Gareth thanks. Thanks Phumi.
Thank you.