Give them handouts, keep them poor!

By Nkazi Sokhulu

South Africans love poverty. For too long our government has come up with ill-considered policies for poverty eradication and then we as citizens empower it to carry them out. Yes, we love poverty!

To illustrate my point I want to share a story about my grandmother. She was raised by uneducated and jobless parents in a family of 12 children, living in a two-room quasi-house/quasi-rondavel structure. She despised the poverty cycle in which her extended family was stuck in so she committed to becoming the first in her family to complete high school. She worked menial jobs after that and used the little she had to train as a teacher in college. Years later when she was a well-respected teacher (who had to travel a daily 80km round trip to work on a bicycle) and had her own large family, they still couldn’t afford a fancy lifestyle. But she rallied her community to build their own homes by agreeing with the local bricklayers to help them out at a discounted rate. Today, although the community of Bethania in rural KwaZulu-Natal has few completely electrified homes with running water, the individual community members own large three or four-bedroom houses. And having seen many villages in KwaZulu-Natal, I can tell you that this rural community’s story is no anomaly.

I ask then, how is it that on the dawn of democracy, having seen such examples of community-triumph over the oppressive apartheid regime, our government decided to dedicate billions of rands to free housing? We had proof of enterprising black folk countrywide in spite of their abject poverty but they decided to create the largest free-housing programme in the world. And yes, I’m aware that by implication, the patriarch of the scholarship that breathed life into this Mandela Rhodes Scholar blog is partly responsible for this policy. Free housing has had an immeasurable effect on our progress as a people as it has led to widespread corruption ie when councillors sell RDP houses and the beneficiaries in turn rent them out, when public servants occupy RDP houses even though they did not qualify for them. On top of it the total estimated bill to fix all shoddily built houses, through tender irregularities and sub-par contractors, was estimated at R58 billion by Tokyo Sexwale last month. All of this has set us back a generation as we no longer know how to fend for ourselves or strive to attain a better life.

Our government has overpromised on many other so-called “essentials” when ultimately money should have been going into free education for the poor all the way up to tertiary level. The folks of Bethania are self-educated and have shown the positive effects of that education in how they managed to fend for themselves without the government’s help. All they had to do was look at Singapore’s 50-year development story. Singapore’s government dedicated its resources fully to a professionally-run, free education system. It incentivised students to take on public-sector jobs once they graduated to ensure that the country could be built from the ground up. This is a country that went from having less infrastructure than South Africa in the 1950s to becoming a developed country today.

I am not against governments playing their part in looking after the poor. I am a big supporter of free education as it requires work on the part of the recipient but free housing and ever-expanding child grants don’t require ANY work on the recipients’ part. In fact, I would go further and say that it’s the lack of free, quality education in 17 years that has seen poverty persist in our great nation. Sadly, we have continued to support bad decision-making on poverty eradication. And then compounded the issue by being complicit in the cover-up of our public officials’ corruption and incompetence when running essential services by continuing to keep them in power. We, as citizens, continue to short-change our future by insisting on “essentials” today. The Singaporeans had a long-term vision they worked towards and never substituted it for short-term pleasures that required no work.

This is my rally call to get people to vote for the local government they deserve come May 18. But then again perhaps I’m alone and the majority of the citizens of this country do in fact want the status quo to remain. Perhaps our leaders prefer to only have a small portion of our citizens educated as it ensures they hold on to power despite these atrocious policies. Perhaps this is indeed the government we deserve …

Nkazimulo Sokhulu finds practical solutions to the problems he encounters daily. And no, he is not a part of “Sokhulu and Partners”.