How to root out poverty

THAT’S THE ANSWER

and the presidency are no longer shocked.

Disturbingly, in the past five years since the economic slowdown, those at the helm appear to have run out of ideas on how to fire up their engines and simply prioritised party politics above national interest.

The StatsSA report, GDP numbers, recession, Mining Charter, ratings agencies’ downgrades and job losses are some of the devastating evidence of the gap between government’s policies and leaders’ rhetoric against the grim reality.

If the poverty report is taken as an indicator, it means policies being designed and implemented by government are not working. Instead, we are deep in an economic sewer and are about to be swept away. In the past ten years, economic and social inequality has erupted to extreme levels.

The middle class is shrinking and suffocating under household debt, while 30 million people live in poverty, with 13 million children growing up in poverty.

I use the phrase “common vision” a lot in my columns, to remind us that business is as much part of the failures or successes of this country.

British economist John Maynard Keynes noted in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: “the ideas of economists and political philosophers both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.”

The reader will perhaps join me in hoping that business will work with government and citizens to design and apply policies that will produce life-improving prospects.

If they don’t, the bad leadership and poor policies quicksand of poverty, unemployment and failing economy will bury all.