Zuma was disastrous, but denial of poverty will negate recovery
While the former president worsened inequality, the problem began before his reign and must be tackled
Former president Jacob Zuma can and should be held accountable for in effect treating SA like a second-hand car lot, where key institutions and state-owned entities were sold off at questionable prices — often to people who didn’t know how to drive. By the time Zuma finally relinquished power on Valentine’s Day in 2018, SA was too numbed by multiple political and legal scandals to fully react. There were no Zimbabwe-style scenes of jubilation. The now infamous footage of eNCA reporter Nickolaus Bauer asking clearly inebriated young South Africans for their opinion on Zuma’s resignation perfectly captured the heart of a country numbed, tired and angry. They swore at the man who had led SA for eight years. They didn’t even grant him the dignity of summarising his period in office with a sentence — they resorted only to obscenities.
It was a telling moment. Zuma had been cast as the country’s own giggling Lord Voldemort. He was the evil villain who was at the heart of all our problems, surely? So why were we so placid about his removal?
In the days and weeks and months that followed Zuma’s rather strange and ungracious exit, it’s become apparent that the former president — who dominated headlines with his vast array of irrational and indefensible decisions, his apparent handing over of his powers to the Gupta family and his unfortunate choice of cabinet ministers — had become central to a convenient mythology that sought to blame one man for all of this country’s problems.
Don’t get me wrong: Zuma’s manifest support of and alleged involvement in corruption and state looting has left a devastating economic legacy for SA, one that will take years to undo and that has had a deeply damaging effect on the lives of the poor and vulnerable.
But Zuma was never the biggest threat to our democracy. SA has been described as the most unequal society in the world, and the consequences of that inequality are becoming more and more apparent, and more and more difficult to ignore.
Earlier in 2018, a report released by the World Bank showed that inequality has actually deepened since the dawn of democracy. The report revealed that only one in four South Africans could now be considered either “middle class or upwards in terms of means”.
The Bank’s Paul Noumba Um said more than 75% of South Africans slipped into poverty at least once between 2008 and 2015, with the poverty headcount being higher in rural areas.
To put this in perspective, 54% of our population survives on R17 a day — less than the price of a takeaway cappuccino — and 52% of our young people are jobless. Our total unemployment rate is 26.6%.
The Gini coefficient assigned to SA is truly terrifying. This statistic shows the measure of income inequality, ranging from zero to one, in a society. Zero is a perfectly equal society and a value of one represents a perfectly unequal society. SA is on 0.63.
The level of inequality reflected by that figure speaks of a society dangerously unbalanced in the distribution of its wealth and opportunities. This should be the number one priority of the government and the citizenry as we try to build SA up from the violence and structured racism that birthed and sustained the inequality.
But it doesn’t seem to be the priority. And why is that? Perhaps part of the problem is that serious socioeconomic upheavals in SA – such as Fees Must Fall, land invasions and the growing number of service delivery protests we see on our screens almost every day – are viewed in isolation from one another, as if they are disparate and unconnected events. Except they are not. They are manifestations of the sometimes violent consequences of an exhausted society, increasingly angry about the unfairness that defines the lives of its people.
People will often accuse the media of having an agenda in how it chooses to portray politicians, or political debate, or opposition parties. But no one says anything about how the media portray or examine poverty. And that shows how utterly we have failed to prioritise journalism that speaks to the lived consequences of deprivation, and examines how those in power – and those who want it – can tackle that deprivation in a sustainable and effective way.
Earlier this month, Municipal IQ reported that service delivery protests in SA were increasing, with a staggering 94% of them turning violent. “April was a particularly protest-prone month in North West‚ Northern Cape and Free State municipalities, often affecting roads and basic services‚” Municipal IQ economist Karen Heese said. “Of great concern is that 94% of the service delivery protests we have recorded this year [2018] have been violent – a significant uptick when compared to 76% since 2004.”
Protests have also flared up in Cape Town and Durban, making headlines almost daily. A key part of why these demonstrations have reached this scale has been repeatedly articulated by the protesters themselves. As Siqalo community leader Thelma Tshabile told journalists during a protest in Mitchell’s Plain in April: protesting is the only language authorities understand.
By giving attention to service delivery issues only when they turn violent, SA’s government – and, arguably, the media – have in effect engendered and sustained a culture of destructive protest that is deeply damaging to the health of our democracy. At the heart of that dysfunction is this: our society has become so numb to the lived consequences of poverty that we only see these realities when things start burning. And, even then, our focus tends to be on the destruction, not the utter desperation that drove it.
One of the most damaging things the Zuma presidency did was to demonise the discourse around SA’s urgent need to tackle inequality. Zuma used the term “radical economic transformation” as a cynical political slogan designed to silence his critics and undermine the legitimacy of their criticism.
At the heart of the Zuma lunacy, South Africans seemingly had to choose between condemning state capture or condemning so-called white monopoly capital. The choice was a false binary that sought to cast the then president’s opponents as rich and unfeeling capitalists, intent on protecting their own wealth. Zuma insisted, as he did even before he ascended to power, that he was being targeted because he was a proponent of radical economic transformation. A champion of the poor.
The deep and almost tragic irony and cynicism of these claims is breathtaking. But they also clearly demonstrate that Zuma, even at the height of his leadership’s insanity, had a sense of where the greatest threat to SA’s democracy truly lay: a country where more than half of citizens live on the margins of society.
The truth is Zuma was never our biggest problem. His leadership worsened the inequality created by apartheid and sustained by selfperpetuating cycles of poverty, but it can’t be wholly blamed for that inequality.
Now Zuma is gone, and South Africans can either start acknowledging that we had, and have, a part to play in the renewal and rebuilding of this country – and demand leadership that palpably starts tackling our dangerous inequality – or we, like the man we like to blame for everything, will destroy ourselves with our own denial.