Evidence needed to back up EFF claims
In a previous incarnation whenever I stood before fresh undergraduates at the start of each semester I would trick them into discussing things such as “progress” or “development” as a way to immerse them in critical thinking.
I used this trick as a heuristic device to get them to question the question, examine the ways in which statements are presented as facts, and how facts can be selected to tell particular stories that reveal more iniquitous motives and states of affairs. The general rule in class was that if you made a factual statement it was usually good practice to provide evidence to support it.
What is the point of this? Well, I want to make the statement that Julius Malema would strengthen his case on two of his policy statements if he were to provide evidence.
The first statement is that all land in SA is stolen property. The second is that all land, banks and industries have to be nationalised to tackle SA’s problems, especially inequality. If Malema is to be taken at his word, when property is returned to the people from whom it was stolen, and when everything in the country has been nationalised, we will reach the promised land of prosperity, stability, cohesion and equality.
There is little wrong with those objectives, of course. However, if Malema is to be taken seriously and not merely as a master manipulator of populist emotions, he may want to provide us with evidence of theft. This would enable us to approach the policy of restitution based on facts, and avoid rapine and retaliation.
Some points of clarity may be useful. Evidence-based policy making has become somewhat of a pejorative term, not for all bad reasons.
It is certainly true that at times ethical and moral questions, or issues of reliability, manipulation of data and the withholding of facts, weaken evidence. There are also times when evidence may be arranged to underscore single narratives, or tell particular stories. This is the nub of my argument.
The statement that all land is stolen is, essentially, a legal claim. Sure, there are political, economic and historical claims, but we can only generalise.
Europeans did, indeed, arrive with little more than the clothes on their backs, and their descendants went on to occupy vast tracts of land they acquired by various means of coercion and consent. However, if Malema believes we are a country of laws, as he must do given his use of the Constitution to help remove Jacob Zuma, he has to provide evidence of theft.
It is perfectly reasonable to make the claim that not all land in the country is stolen property. It is also reasonable to say that not every square metre of land in SA is owned by the descendants of those Europeans who arrived with or after Jan van Riebeeck.
Very many people who own land today paid for it, and many of these people are not settler colonialists. Both of these claims can be proven with actual evidence.
As for the second statement on nationalisation, the burden of proof is on Malema. He has to provide the electorate with evidence of where in the world mass nationalisation has been successful over the long run.
He also has to show evidence of where and when mass nationalisation secured prosperity, stability, expanded the economy, resulted in full employment and freedom of expression, built social cohesion, eliminated inequality, crushed patriarchy and racism, and ironed out class, racial or rural-urban differences.
With respect to inequality, I can help Malema out with evidence of how the Soviet Union initially set out to create a more equal society and did, in fact, become a more equal country. Inequality followed a modest Kuznets curve when land was redistributed for agricultural production, rising at first, then falling.
But this shift towards equality did not last very long.
With increases in industrialisation and the movement of people from rural to urban areas, where many different types of jobs are available, inequality returned with a vengeance.
Moscow’s pro-poor policies rapidly stripped the rich of their wealth to feed the small ruling elite — people like Malema.
By the last years of the Soviet Union, that country had returned to the inequality of the Tsarist era, and today the politically connected own much of Russia’s wealth. Long-run evidence is, however, not a strong point of Malema’s EFF.
None of this suggests that there is no need for land reform. Some of the most successful of political economic reforms across history began with land reform. The point is to avoid violence, bloodshed and vengefulness and, of course, self-enrichment by corpulent cadres. Let us have the evidence, though. That, I may have told my students, is a reasonable statement.
Lagardien is a former executive dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University, and has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
MALEMA ALSO HAS TO SHOW EVIDENCE OF WHERE AND WHEN MASS NATIONALISATION SECURED STABILITY AND EXPANDED THE ECONOMY