A COUNTRY IN DECLINE
Hard statistics confirm what many South Africans feel — areas of progress, there is more bad news than good. This is sapping confidence and damaging the social fabric
An annual report by the Bureau for Economic Research (BER), assessing SA’s progress towards achieving its development objectives, makes for bleak reading: the country has regressed in many more areas than it has improved over the past few years.
Some of the deterioration — especially in areas such as trade, tourism, and health care — clearly reflect the impact of the pandemic. But this doesn’t explain a general downward drift in perceptions of the effectiveness of the police, the quality of governance and the rule of law.
One of the more worrying aspects of the report is how this is eroding the sense of unity among South Africans.
For instance, in 2019, most respondents in the SA Reconciliation Barometer believed there was more that united South Africans than divided them. Now, the numbers are equally split between those who believe there is much more that divides us than unites us (23% of respondents) and those who believe the opposite (24%).
In addition, close to a third feel more strongly about their ethnic than their national identity, and only 37% of respondents trust people from other ethnic or religious groups. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were more incidents (63) and deaths (23) caused by xenophobic violence in the first 10 months of 2021 than in the whole of 2020.
Confidence in the police has also deteriorated steeply, with 48% of respondents saying in 2021 that they were “not at all” confident in the police, compared with just over 40% in 2018.
This makes sense when viewed against the fact that SA’s murder rate has remained a deplorable 36 victims per 100,000 people over the past three
that the country is sliding backwards. Though there are
years, against a global average of 5.8. There has also been a steep downward trend in the detection rates of contact crimes and murder — something the BER regards as “concerning”.
Just over one in 10 South Africans currently rate crime as the most important problem the government should address, second only to unemployment — the top-ranked concern of almost a third of the population.
The overall assessment of BER senior economist Helanya Fourie, who compiled the report, is that while economic policy reforms — the drive for investment, the push for more renewable energy and the focus on employment — are undoubtedly moves in the right direction, they will take time to manifest.
Meanwhile, SA’s social fabric is fraying.
“We see it in the high number of murders, from the deterioration in the effectiveness of the police and from the rise in the number of people identifying with their ethnic group over their common SA identity that these economic changes aren’t yet filtering down to everyday life,” she says.
SA’s performance improved in 24 areas and regressed in 33. If this were a report card, the country would have received a failing grade
The average person seems to be losing confidence and becoming dispirited about the SA dream
“The average person seems to be losing confidence and becoming dispirited about the SA dream.”
This is not to say that SA is on a downward spiral; that’s a more pessimistic reading than she allows. In fact, she says, “for the first time in a while, the right moves are being made and action is being taken. It’s just that we’re not seeing it trickle down to the real economy yet.”
Some positive trends identified in the report involve agriculture, which shrugged off the pandemic to expand by 6.4% between 2019 and 2020. The output of citrus, grapes, macadamia nuts and dairy has even exceeded targets in the National Development Plan (NDP).
Moreover, the report’s estimates show that while black farmers’ contribution to total agricultural output remains low, trends around land reform are more positive than often realised. By August 2021, SA had achieved 69.1% of the land reform target set in the NDP, up from 67% in September 2020, with the government having redistributed more than 16-million hectares of land.
Also positive is that new energy regulatory reforms signal greater political commitment to SA’s energy transition, creating a more attractive environment for international investment. On the other hand, the report highlights that SA’s ratio of gross fixed investment to GDP has slumped below 14% against an NDP target of 30% by 2030.
One of the areas where this is evident is transport and logistics. There was a sharp decline in SA’s ranking in the World Bank logistics performance index, from 20th out of 160 countries in 2016 to 33rd in 2018. SA’s performance deteriorated in most areas, including in logistics infrastructure, timeliness, customs, and tracking and tracing.
In 2020, there were slight perceived improvements with respect to regulatory quality and government accountability, but perceptions about government effectiveness, the rule of law and control of corruption all declined.
Close to one in 10 South Africans now see corruption as the biggest problem that the government needs to address, with more than 60% of respondents in the 2021 Afrobarometer survey saying the government is handling the fight against corruption “very badly”.
In 2020, Corruption Watch received 1,000 more whistle-blower reports about incidents of corruption than in 2019. During the first half of 2021, 43% of whistle-blower reports came from Gauteng, 55% involved the public sector and 31% the private sector.
On the other hand, some encouraging trends have emerged in education. Despite the pandemic, the proportion of matrics attaining a bachelor’s pass rose from 17% to 23% between 2018 and 2020.
SA also climbed two places on the global innovation index between 2019 and 2021 — from 63rd to 61st position out of 132 countries, placing it above the expected level for its stage of development.
However, SA is constrained by the low share of graduates in science and engineering. This ratio dropped from 19.6% to 18.6% of total graduates between 2018 and 2020, against a
What it means:
median of 22% among uppermiddle-income countries.
Similarly, there is both good and bad news when it comes to economic growth. On the one hand, SA’s GDP is expected to recover to its prepandemic level by the second quarter of this year; on the other hand, per capita GDP growth has been negative since 2014.
This means the average South African is poorer today in inflation-adjusted terms than they were in 2014. If SA had just maintained a consistent growth rate of 3% from 2015 onward, the average person in the country would have been 10% more wealthy by 2019.
In summary, SA’s performance improved in 24 areas, regressed in 33 and remained the same in nine out of 66 areas measured. And though many of the setbacks were due to Covid, the country should be concerned about its deterioration in so many crucial metrics.
If this were a report card, SA would have received a failing grade.
Helanya Fourie