Grants encourage liberation, not dependence

ABOUT a month ago, I argued in a column that we needed universal welfare in SA. The only thing preventing us from seeing this, I said, was the unrealistic hope that we would one day create jobs for all.

Once we acknowledge that mass unemployment is permanent, it becomes clear that universal welfare is urgently necessary. The alternative is to have low-wage workers pay for chronic joblessness, for they are closest to the destitute and are thus responsible for them. Asking them to shoulder the burden is intolerable. It is this, above all, that has triggered violence and instability in the mining and grape sectors. If we do not help the working poor with the burden, there will be more anger and violence to come. Many people replied to what I said. Those who agreed did so with an air of resignation. Those who disagreed accused me of despair. People need to work in order to be fully human, some said.

People must be industrious and creative if they’re to thrive. Once we give them a grant instead of a job, we are condemning them to a life that is less than human.

This juxtaposition — thriving, working people on one side, rotting welfare recipients on the other — is not right. It made sense many years ago in another country, when Margaret Thatcher found a language with which to diagnose Britain’s ills. It does not make sense here and now.

The money we put in their pockets is fuel for their souls. With cash at hand, they now have a modicum of power.

Welfare brings life, not idleness, to the worlds of the South African poor.

I know this because I have seen it happen. I have spent time, and become close to people, in the coastal villages of Pondoland in the wake of the big cash injections of the early 2000s — the pension increases, the spread of child welfare grants. Welfare creates entrepreneurs. People have money they didn’t before and they want to spend it where they live. And so the enterprising begin selling everything, from building materials to airtime.

Within a few years, a poor person becomes well-off and sends his kids to a good school, setting his family on a new trajectory. This happens before the eyes of the poor, for it is one of them on the up, and as they watch him, their own horizons expand.

Welfare also gives young people the means to find work.

University of Cape Town economist Cally Ardington and her colleagues have recently found that young men at a research site in KwaZulu-Natal are significantly more likely to become labour migrants when someone in their household becomes age-eligible for the old-age pension. This puts paid to the stale old mantra that people stop looking for work when their families receive welfare. In fact, the opposite happens. With money in their pockets, people have the means to go out into the world and search.

You can see on pension payout day that welfare brings people closer to the mainstream, closer to life. These are not days of shame or resignation. They are festive and generous days, days of laughter and good spirits. With money to spend, people are feeling at their most human.

The world has changed, but our ideas of welfare have not caught up. It made sense to associate grants with idleness in 1970s Britain when full employment was a fresh memory and a living ideal.

But in SA today millions have inherited structural unemployment from their parents. For them, decent jobs are not even a living memory. To argue that welfare makes such people lazy borders on madness.

The money we put in their pockets is fuel for their souls. With cash at hand, they now have a modicum of power, a smattering of self-direction.

Look at Brazil, at India, where poverty has been shrinking fastest.

New forms of welfare are taking root in these countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, which gives cash transfers to every household that vaccinates and sends its young children to school, has altered the course of innumerable family histories. People who spent the whole of the 20th century on the margins are becoming citizens of their cities.

I am not suggesting that we give up looking for ways to create jobs. Of course not. But once we recognise that full employment is a pipe dream, that vast sections of our country are destined to transmit joblessness to their children and their grandchildren, the idea of welfare takes on new meanings. It is not something that pushes people away, making them idle and useless. On the contrary, it brings them in from the cold. It gives them some control over their destinies and thus renders them more alive, more like us.

The structural forces shaping our country are making us more and more unequal, driving us further and further apart.

Universal welfare is among the few bridges we are able to build. Can we afford it, you may ask? The bigger question is for how long we can afford not to have it?

Steinberg teaches African Studies at Oxford University.