THE HARD FACTS OF POVERTY

Statistics SA rudely reminded us this week how much poorer we’re getting in SA. The agency says 55.5% of South Africans — 30.4m people — were living in poverty in 2015, more than in 2011, when 53.2% of our compatriots lived below the “upper-bound poverty line” (UBPL) of R992/person per month.

Pitiful as this amount is, these are among the luckier, less-poverty-stricken ones among us. The agency tells us 21.9m people were living in what Stats SA calls the “lower-bound poverty line” (LBPL) where they had to make do with R647/person a month. Then there were the 13.8m living in extreme poverty, the “food poverty line” (FPL) of R441/month. These are all April 2015 figures, and are adjusted to account for inflation.

Stats SA divided the poverty levels into three categories, and these make for grim reading. “These lines capture different degrees of poverty and allow SA to measure and monitor poverty at different levels.”

The FPL (at R441/month) is the rand value below which individuals are unable to buy or consume enough food to supply them with the minimum energy requirement for adequate health. Consider this: only in April this year did the lowest social grant payment rise to R380/month.

Though the survey covers the years to April 2015, Stats SA adjusted the numbers for the following two years. The result is that the food poverty line was R531/month in April 2017 — leaving a 39.7% deficit to adequately cover nutritional requirements.

It is only at income levels above this R531/month that Stats SA says the individual can aspire to acquire more than just food to survive. But those whose income is lower than R758/month in April 2017 must constantly choose between buying adequate food and nonfood items, and “are therefore forced to sacrifice food to obtain essential nonfood items”.

While it is a relief to note that the old-age grant payment of R1,600/month is more than a third above the inflation-adjusted “upper-bound poverty line” of R1,138 in April, the concern is how long the economy will be able to carry this burden.

There are 17m grant recipients, almost three times the 6.7m individuals who submitted a tax return last year. It is these income earners who pay to the income recipients the R490.4bn that government has budgeted for social grants over the next three financial years, according to the 2017 budget review.

With unemployment having hit 28% this year, the number of taxpayers has no doubt declined while that of recipients has grown. And that was before we recorded a recession and credit downgrades!

Making the wrong choices

It is the choices we have made as a people that have landed us in this state of affairs. Not so long ago we seemed to be on the right track to eradicating poverty. The number of people whose life fitted into the upperbound poverty line was two-thirds of the population in 2006, before dropping to 53.2% in 2011. At the same time, those who lived in extreme poverty made up 28.4%, and dropped to just over 21% five years later.

The only sustainable ticket out of poverty is a welleducated, productive workforce. Only through worthwhile education can we hope to end poverty.

But there are easy fixes and low-hanging fruit: boost confidence by cutting the nasty beast of corruption and lawlessness that is so prevalent at every level of national life. A bit of that can be achieved by simply replacing the useless people at the top of the law-enforcement agencies like the NPA.

Getting rid of their bosses in the executive seems a bridge too far at this point, so sacrificing Shaun the Sheep would go a long way to boosting investor confidence in the short term.

We can boost confidence by cutting the nasty beast of corruption that is so prevalent at every level of national life