EDITORIALS
Editorial:
Editorial 02 Jun 2017 00:01


Head of Stats SA Pali Lehohla. (Gallo)

COMMENTS
When Pali Lehohla, statistician general at Statistics South Africa, unpacked the quarterly labour force survey on Thursday, he all but confirmed that South Africa is indeed hurtling towards a recession.

The most urgent statistic for the rest of us to mull over right now is this: South Africa’s rate of unemployment in the first quarter of 2017 increased by 1.2 of a percentage point to 27.7% – the highest figure since September 2003.

The expanded unemployment rate – which includes those who wanted to work but did not look for work – increased by 0.8 of a percentage point, or 391 000 people, from 35.6% to 36.4% of the population. That amounts to a total of 9.3-million people who were unemployed but who wanted to work in the first quarter of 2017.

And there is little respite in sight.

The rating agencies’ downgrading of the country to junk status earlier this year has further eroded levels of investor confidence. With little new investment expected, the economy is not likely to expand sufficiently to create jobs for nearly 10-million people.

The rhetoric of radical economic transformation fails to address how President Jacob Zuma has himself been complicit in the systematic impoverishment of the South African people – most of them young black women.

It certainly is tempting to point out that it is under Zuma that R100-billion of value was wiped off funds that invest money with the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) – the fund with the greatest potential for social transformation – in just two days. It is tempting to point out that it is under Zuma that the ANC has lost control of three more metros. It is tempting to point out that it is under Zuma that the ANC has expunged some of its most promising leaders, leaving the party as easy pickings for a nefarious, self-obsessed elite.

We cannot, however, pin this on Zuma alone.

It is successive ANC governments that have promised jobs and then left millions of South Africans with little hope of securing employment. It is successive ANC governments that have ensured the public education system is so severely strained, and so poor in its outputs, that it is not likely to equip South Africans with the skills they need to thrive. It is, after all, successive ANC governments that have allowed a culture of waste, corruption and nepotism to fester under their watch.

It is the ANC that is the problem.

Despite an avowed sentiment of dissatisfaction with Zuma within the party, the president and his merry band of loyalists have all but secured his survival until the next election. And here, too, it is the party itself that failed to hold its leader to account.

So, when trade union federation Cosatu’s affiliates told the Mail & Guardian this week that they would cast their ballots elsewhere should Zuma’s heir apparent, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, become the next ANC leader, the severity of the ANC’s problems became ever more profoundly clear.

The ANC has been cannibalised, so Mmusi Maimane was right to pronounce the death of the ANC in Parliament this week. There is no saving the ANC, except to watch it burn. It’s just that millions of South Africans are burning with it.

 

https://mg.co.za/article/2017-06-02-00-editorial-as-the-anc-burns-we-burn-with-it