White woman was MK hero
SOUTH Africans are not happy. According to the recent Bloomberg’s Misery Index, it is the second-most miserable country on earth. Venezuela tops the list of emerging countries.
This isn’t too surprising considering that the country is embroiled in multifaceted crises. It also has among the highest unemployment and inequality levels in the world.
Unfortunately, recent credit rating agency downgrades as well as the fact that the country is in recession mean that these conditions are unlikely to reverse soon.
Consequently, the poor in South Africa have little chance of improving their lives. They will therefore be even more reliant on the provision of state services. They will also increasingly be on the receiving end of the two extractive systems that are deeply embedded in the country’s socio-political and economic systems.
The first is the patronage and state capture machinery, as recently documented in a report by leading academics. The effect of this corruption is that the capital allocated for service delivery is wasted, the private sector is crowded out, and the monopolising positions of dysfunctional state owned enterprises distort the economy.
The second is where state capture merges with patronage politics at local government level. This is accomplished by managing and staffing municipalities with unqualified party loyalists – or close associates – who disseminate services inefficiently from a shrinking pool of capital, while further extracting rents through a sub-layer of corruption.
The effect is that the poor must pay an additional tax in the form of bribes for access to mispriced and inefficient state services. In addition, as the looting via state capture and municipal corruption intensifies, service provision and delivery declines. This means that the poor are then subject to bribe inflation to gain access to shrinking capacity. Violent service delivery protests inevitably escalate.
South Africa’s five year average economic growth rate declined from 4.8% over the 2004-2008 period to 1.9% over the 2009-2013 period. Between 2014 and 2016 it averaged 1.1%. At the same time irregular, wasteful, and unauthorised expenditure ballooned. It’s therefore not surprising that the number of violent protests increased from an average of 21 a year between 2004 and 2008 to 164 a year between 2014 and 2016.
Unfortunately, South Africa’s demographics and education statistics do not suggest that this trend is likely to reverse soon.
South Africa’s youth statistics are depressing. Young people between the ages of 15 and 35 comprise 55% of the country’s 36 million working age population. Of the 19.7 million youths, only 6.2 million are employed while 3.6 million are unemployed but still actively looking for work, and 1.53 million have stopped looking for work. The remaining 8.4 million are at school, tertiary education, or are homemakers.
Youth unemployment is 36.9%. This is nearly double the unemployment rate among adults. Among black youth, 40% are unemployed compared to 11% of white youth.
Taking the level of education into consideration, 2011 data show that the unemployment rate for 25 to 35 year olds who had less than a matric was 47%, compared to 33% for those who had a matric, and 20% for those with a diploma or postschool certificate. But if one looks at the younger group of 20 to 24 year olds, 16% are in school, 12% are in post-schooling education, 21% are employed, and 51% are unemployed and not in any education or training.
Considering that the percentage of black professional, managerial and technical workers in the 25 to 35 age bracket dropped by 2% over the past 20 years (meaning that this generation is less skilled than their parents), the statistics in the 20 to 24 age bracket indicate that this trend is likely to worsen.
Worryingly, studies show that countries, such as South Africa, that have a youth bulge and poor education attainment are likely to suffer from political instability. This is because if the demographic transition occurs in a stagnant economy with a high level of corruption then the low opportunity costs increase the likelihood of political violence by poorly educated young men.
South Africa’s current crisis is a systemic failure extending across national and local government. Although it’s possible that the political cost of corruption is now reaching unacceptable levels, reversing the effects of state decay on the poor will take short-run and long-run interventions.
Short-run measures will need to include holding public officials to account, reforming state owned enterprises and reversing the numerous institutional weaknesses at all levels of government.
But public and private stakeholders will also need to formulate long-run policies that will improve the quality and through-put of the country’s junior and secondary education systems, and entrench youth employment incentive schemes. In addition, skills training will need to be reformed and reinvigorated, and the technical vocational educational system will need to be reconstructed.
If South Africa is to recover, then the country’s badly frayed socio-economic fabric will need to be restitched, not just patched. – The Conversation
Gossel is a senior lecturer at the UCT Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
TO HER torturer Nic Deetlefs she was an evil communist and terrorist, but to South Africans who fought against apartheid she was a hero of the Struggle. Please meet Helene Passtoors.
This week the SACP bestowed on Passtoors a special recognition award at its national congress and, as the ageing veteran took to the stage, the sea of red-clad comrades broke into cheers, giving her a standing ovation. The honour comes six years after she was bestowed the national “Order of the Companions of OR Tambo” for her role in the Struggle.
As she boarded a plane back to Belgium on Tuesday night, her eyes filled with tears to again leave the country she was willing to give her life for.
Passtoors was immensely brave, and sacrificed so much for a cause that became her own. What makes her story unique is that she is a white Belgian national who became deeply embedded in South Africa’s liberation Struggle, performing highly secretive special operations in the 1980s, under direct command of Joe Slovo, and Oliver Tambo, commander of ANC special operations.
For a foreign national to have been entrusted with such sensitive and secret work was a testament to her trustworthiness, and the high regard the ANC leadership had for her. Her colour and profile provided a convenient cover for the work she did, which involved reconnaissance of strategic coal export/import lines, and oil imported covertly by the apartheid state. She identified targets for MK, and regularly transported weapons from Mozambique and Swaziland into South Africa, setting up caches in the country.
All this was in the context of a brutal war of liberation, where apartheid security forces were bombing ANC targets in the front line states and killing ANC members as they slept. There were abductions of comrades from the front line states who were brought back into South Africa and brutally tortured in John Vorster Square.
It is the time when apartheid agents sent a letter bomb to Ruth First, killing her, and set off a bomb in Albie Sachs’s car which was intended to kill him. Not to mention the endless torture and killings that took place inside the country. There were no limits to what the PW Botha regime would do to maintain white minority rule.
Risk
It was in this context that Passtoors risked her life on an almost daily basis. This was a dedicated mother of four young children, who understood the consequences of her actions could mean indefinite separation from her children, or even death that would leave them motherless. What drove her to engage in such dangerous missions was a belief that freedom in South Africa was a cause worth risking one’s life for.
She paid a heavy price for her commitment, as in June 1985 she was arrested and kept in solitary confinement in John Vorster Square for eight months, where she was tortured. Deetlefs never asked for amnesty for any of the torture he exacted on her and many other detainees, and today he lives a normal life in the suburbs of Johannesburg.
At the time, such high-profile detainees were subjected to mental torture, and kept in cells with Perspex walls which were windowless, and hardly let in any ventilation. But when the tactics failed, Passtoors was sent to an isolated prison in Kroonstad in the Free State, where the Security Branch was determined to break her. Left alone for months in the freezing cold winter, she developed frost bite on her hands and feet, making it unbearable to walk.
In the midst of her desperate condition in 1988, a Belgian diplomat forced his way into the Kroonstad prison to deliver her a message – she had been awarded European Woman of the Year, over even the wife of French President Francois Mitterrand, who was a contender.
With her frostbitten hands and feet, Passtoors declared that she certainly didn’t feel like European woman of the year.
But the lowest point came when the Security Branch did to her what they had already tried on Thandi Modise – chemical torture. She was brought a plate of pasta that was a welcome change to the usual mielie pap, but it was laced with chemical poison that would cause her body to malfunction.
The effect was almost immediate, and she was unable to even walk. Unaware of what was happening to her, she wrote to her children saying that she believed she was dying, but from what she didn’t know. Her symptoms were similar to that of malaria but without the fever, and it caused her to have an epileptic fit.
These were the trail of tears walked for our liberation, even by a white foreigner who was prepared to pay the ultimate price. To Deetlefs, she was a terrorist, but to most of us she was a freedom fighter, and it is right that her contribution is remembered.
Ebrahim is Independent Media’s group foreign editor.