Opinion / Columnist
Xenophobic Attacks in SA - Blame the politicians and their politics of redistribution and patronage
15 Apr 2015 at 06:15hrs | Views
Yesterday, the war cry was "kill the Boer." Today, the cry is "kill the BLACK immigrant." Black on black violence. Tomorrow, the war cry would be "kill the Indian," and finally "kill the white men." The picture in South Africa, for a long time, looked comparatively rosy, at least from the Northern border of Zimbabwe. The Xenophobic attacks, dubbed "Afro- phobic" by my colleague in South Africa, are just a tip of the iceberg.
In fact, the whole of the Southern African region has been a time bomb waiting to explode. Many of us can still recall the chilling cry of "kill the white farmer" in neighbouring Zimbabwe. Today, Zimbabwe has exported approximately 3 million job seeking migrants to South Africa.
Let's take a moment to credit and look at facts as presented by Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst in Africa's Third Liberation (2012).
For all its progress, sub-Sahara Africa still faces extraordinary challenges, of which jobs for young people is perhaps the most important. If the SADC countries cannot leverage their economies to provide jobs (and therefore income) to young people, the countries could face powerful poverty-fuelled unrest of the kind seen in the Arab Spring.
South Africa, with approximately a third of continental GDP, has failed to increase formal sector employment sufficiently. Labour laws have made employment less attractive for employers. The South African Treasury has noted that 13.1 million South Africans are employed. South Africa would need to employ 18 million people. To keep pace with the number of people entering the labour market, this would require the economy to create about 9 million jobs over the next 10 years. The unemployment rate among South Africans from 15 to 24 years old is 51 per cent, more than twice the national underemployment rate of 25 per cent. The challenge is to generate youth employment and to move workers from the informal to the formal sector.
The future of the sub-region is entwined with the country's fortunes. The case has been exacerbated by the populist policies of other SADC governments making promises of job creation to their youth – but, going by past practice, delivering very little – to their alienated youth. Empowered by technology and emboldened by their new-found power, youth are less tolerant of leaders than they once were and more likely to take things into their own hands.
The contribution of South Africa's manufacturing sector to GDP shrank more than six percent during the 2000s. In Dimbaza, where once 120 factories operated in the 1980s, many of the buildings have been picked clean of their steel work and fittings, like rotting animals in the bush.
A similar sight is sadly repeated elsewhere across South Africa, from once thriving industrial areas. The domestic textile sector, once a key employer, lost about 75 000 jobs during the 2000s to mainly cheaper Chinese and South Southeast Asian competition.
Compare this deindustrialization to South Africa's port city of East London, where Mercedes Benz has specialized in state–of-the-art technology to manufacture its C-Class sedan. That business has returned to virtually what it started out as 60 years ago: an assembly plant called "Car Distributors Assembly (CDA) Pty Ltd". The number of workers declined to 3000 in 2011 to 7000 a decade earlier.
Mills and Herbst (2011) further noted that:
First, there has been a constant balance of payments crisis, with South Africa's shrinking share of global merchandise exports unable to fund the economy's import requirements. At the same time, the economy has remained reliant on imported technologies, and over reliant on mining.
Second, South Africa productivity remains low, despite the government spending 20 percent of its budget on education (more than five per cent of GDP). This expenditure ensures free education in two-thirds of schools, yet fewer than half the pupils who enter the educational system reach the final year, grade 12, and the quality of education is among the lowest in Africa.
Third, government spending has crowded out private sector investment and South Africa has been starved of domestic growth capital.
Actions to promote investment have been constrained by vested political and economic interests. In particular, the labour unions – a critical part of the governing alliance – have consistently resisted calls for deregulating the labour market, which, while lowering wages, might increase the number of jobs. Until the emphasis shifts from redistribution to the politics of growth, frustration over the slow development of the now-enfranchised, but still poor black majority will remain.
Again, across the Northern Limpopo River border, Mugabe of Zimbabwe preferred redistribution to growth. Mugabe tried to win much larger constituencies with patronage, a play that is doomed to fail because there is simply not enough wealth to go round. In the early 1960s Supersonic exported radios from its factory in Bulawayo to the United States. By the 1980s, Zimbabwe was reputed to be one of the most industrialised economies per capita in the world.
Thirty years later, Zimbabwe is a commodity exporter, reliant on sending unrefined gold, agricultural products, diamonds, platinum and people abroad to keep it-self going. There is a staggering rural poverty and countrywide joblessness. There was the same number of formal sector jobs in 2012 (850 000) as in 1980, though the population has more than doubled to 13 million.
It is interesting to note that Mills and Herbst (2011) dispute the suggestion that Mugabe and ZANU are responsible for all of Zimbabwe's problems. However, they admit that the country's leaders since independence have undoubtedly made those problems far worse. The problem is that no Zimbabwean, black or white, at least until the advent of the MDC, ever believed in market forces.
Mugabe has successfully created a feudal system, where the elite are kept onside through patronage and the remainder left poverty stricken and dependent on hand-outs in the rural areas. He has kept Zimbabweans pitifully poor, poorer than they were, on average, at independence in 1980.
Male life expectancy has declined since 1990 from 60 to 42 years. Infant mortality rate has climbed sharply from 53 to 81 deaths per 1000 live births over the same period.
To protect Zimbabwe youth from xenophobic attacks in South Africa, Zimbabwe's economic model has to change overall, from one focused on redistribution and patronage to one embracing growth, and also from its intent on bucking the market through protectionism to a focus on harnessing market forces and interests.
I am not surprised that the President of Zimbabwe and current chairperson of the African Union has not called for country men and women to go back home. The fact is, Mugabe has not got any jobs to offer them and the jobless Zimbabweans are better off in South Africa than in Zimbabwe.
First, they can fend for themselves and their families back home. Second, demonstrations for jobs in Zimbabwe will be quickly starved off as the irate unemployed youth are preoccupied somewhere else.
Finally, the violence against immigrants is "an expression of a terrible failure of memory by South Africans." We gave them refuge in our countries during their struggle against apartheid.
Tendai Kwari
@tendaikwari
#StopXenophobicAttacks #Africa'sThirdLiberation
In fact, the whole of the Southern African region has been a time bomb waiting to explode. Many of us can still recall the chilling cry of "kill the white farmer" in neighbouring Zimbabwe. Today, Zimbabwe has exported approximately 3 million job seeking migrants to South Africa.
Let's take a moment to credit and look at facts as presented by Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst in Africa's Third Liberation (2012).
For all its progress, sub-Sahara Africa still faces extraordinary challenges, of which jobs for young people is perhaps the most important. If the SADC countries cannot leverage their economies to provide jobs (and therefore income) to young people, the countries could face powerful poverty-fuelled unrest of the kind seen in the Arab Spring.
South Africa, with approximately a third of continental GDP, has failed to increase formal sector employment sufficiently. Labour laws have made employment less attractive for employers. The South African Treasury has noted that 13.1 million South Africans are employed. South Africa would need to employ 18 million people. To keep pace with the number of people entering the labour market, this would require the economy to create about 9 million jobs over the next 10 years. The unemployment rate among South Africans from 15 to 24 years old is 51 per cent, more than twice the national underemployment rate of 25 per cent. The challenge is to generate youth employment and to move workers from the informal to the formal sector.
The future of the sub-region is entwined with the country's fortunes. The case has been exacerbated by the populist policies of other SADC governments making promises of job creation to their youth – but, going by past practice, delivering very little – to their alienated youth. Empowered by technology and emboldened by their new-found power, youth are less tolerant of leaders than they once were and more likely to take things into their own hands.
The contribution of South Africa's manufacturing sector to GDP shrank more than six percent during the 2000s. In Dimbaza, where once 120 factories operated in the 1980s, many of the buildings have been picked clean of their steel work and fittings, like rotting animals in the bush.
A similar sight is sadly repeated elsewhere across South Africa, from once thriving industrial areas. The domestic textile sector, once a key employer, lost about 75 000 jobs during the 2000s to mainly cheaper Chinese and South Southeast Asian competition.
Compare this deindustrialization to South Africa's port city of East London, where Mercedes Benz has specialized in state–of-the-art technology to manufacture its C-Class sedan. That business has returned to virtually what it started out as 60 years ago: an assembly plant called "Car Distributors Assembly (CDA) Pty Ltd". The number of workers declined to 3000 in 2011 to 7000 a decade earlier.
Mills and Herbst (2011) further noted that:
First, there has been a constant balance of payments crisis, with South Africa's shrinking share of global merchandise exports unable to fund the economy's import requirements. At the same time, the economy has remained reliant on imported technologies, and over reliant on mining.
Second, South Africa productivity remains low, despite the government spending 20 percent of its budget on education (more than five per cent of GDP). This expenditure ensures free education in two-thirds of schools, yet fewer than half the pupils who enter the educational system reach the final year, grade 12, and the quality of education is among the lowest in Africa.
Third, government spending has crowded out private sector investment and South Africa has been starved of domestic growth capital.
Actions to promote investment have been constrained by vested political and economic interests. In particular, the labour unions – a critical part of the governing alliance – have consistently resisted calls for deregulating the labour market, which, while lowering wages, might increase the number of jobs. Until the emphasis shifts from redistribution to the politics of growth, frustration over the slow development of the now-enfranchised, but still poor black majority will remain.
Thirty years later, Zimbabwe is a commodity exporter, reliant on sending unrefined gold, agricultural products, diamonds, platinum and people abroad to keep it-self going. There is a staggering rural poverty and countrywide joblessness. There was the same number of formal sector jobs in 2012 (850 000) as in 1980, though the population has more than doubled to 13 million.
It is interesting to note that Mills and Herbst (2011) dispute the suggestion that Mugabe and ZANU are responsible for all of Zimbabwe's problems. However, they admit that the country's leaders since independence have undoubtedly made those problems far worse. The problem is that no Zimbabwean, black or white, at least until the advent of the MDC, ever believed in market forces.
Mugabe has successfully created a feudal system, where the elite are kept onside through patronage and the remainder left poverty stricken and dependent on hand-outs in the rural areas. He has kept Zimbabweans pitifully poor, poorer than they were, on average, at independence in 1980.
Male life expectancy has declined since 1990 from 60 to 42 years. Infant mortality rate has climbed sharply from 53 to 81 deaths per 1000 live births over the same period.
To protect Zimbabwe youth from xenophobic attacks in South Africa, Zimbabwe's economic model has to change overall, from one focused on redistribution and patronage to one embracing growth, and also from its intent on bucking the market through protectionism to a focus on harnessing market forces and interests.
I am not surprised that the President of Zimbabwe and current chairperson of the African Union has not called for country men and women to go back home. The fact is, Mugabe has not got any jobs to offer them and the jobless Zimbabweans are better off in South Africa than in Zimbabwe.
First, they can fend for themselves and their families back home. Second, demonstrations for jobs in Zimbabwe will be quickly starved off as the irate unemployed youth are preoccupied somewhere else.
Finally, the violence against immigrants is "an expression of a terrible failure of memory by South Africans." We gave them refuge in our countries during their struggle against apartheid.
Tendai Kwari
@tendaikwari
#StopXenophobicAttacks #Africa'sThirdLiberation
Source - Tendai Kwari
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