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We enter this year’s national election with few achievements to celebrate since the last one five years ago. That old slogan “A better life for all” remains just that: a slogan, with little meaning in its impact on the daily lives of the vast majority of South Africans.
In our preparations to convey the findings of the Oxfam International 2019 report, titled Public Good or Private Wealth, Oxfam South Africa realised that we felt a collective disillusion with where the country is today. We wonder what kind of statistics should be conveyed to confirm what we already know – that inequality, both at home and abroad, is out of control and poverty continues to increase.
Billionaire fortunes just this last year increased by $2.5 billion a day and the super-rich are enjoying lower tax rates than they have in decades. Yet the rest of humanity’s income fell by 11%. Here at home, the fall in the number of billionaires from eight in 2017 to five in 2018 did not result in a trickle down to the vast majority of the country’s materially poor. Rather, it trickled up to this spoilt billionaire class of five; increasing their fortunes by 15%.
What is the significance of this calamity? Let’s say that I am what they call the youth and belong to two-thirds of the population. My name is two-thirds. Two-thirds of children they say “left” the school system before matriculating. They say I left as though it was a choice. My surname is 50%, meaning I am among the 50% of youth who are unemployed. At 25, I wait on the corner of a busy street in a leafy suburb belonging to the old pale mlungus and the new black mlungu arrivals. The streets have eyes: militarised private security guards euphemistically called community safety; high security walls with CCTV cameras; and security dogs euphemistically called pets, with no pretence at labelling me an intruder with their searching eyes. My black physique clad in blue overalls loiters on this street corner as a symbol to them of an impending crime.
These all-seeing eyes conspire to protect homes built like palaces, out of which will exit the miniature hippo-like 4x4s that transport the younglings to the King Mang Mang, Queen Mang Mang and St Mang Mang private schools. For these younglings are the heirs who will take over as kings, queens and saints of mines that filled my retrenched fathers’ lungs with TB, a disease rendering him unemployable at a young age as he awaits his death. The death that awaits him in this diseased country of South Africa that contributes 80% to the total global burden of all TB cases and that has one of the worst health outcomes in the world. Without a job, he is deemed by this government unworthy of quality medical care. For nearly 50% of the budget subsidises the private healthcare system that caters to only 16% of the population. The other half subsidises a crumbling and unaccountable public healthcare system catering to 84% the population.
These materially rich younglings will one day be taught how to fool the tax system so that they do not pay their fair share of taxes, despite having benefited from the dispossession and privatisation of the commons: land, water, healthcare and their lower corporate rates for electricity. What supports this class additionally is how they benefit from the unpaid care work in families that support workers who build and work their mines, factories and farms.
So, I sit in my blue overalls on this street with its violent eyes, and then back in my shack settlement I sit with cramps in my stomach, the knowledge of death that awaits me in my waterless, street-less, toilet-less, electricity-less informal settlement located next to the fat cats’ golf course. I sit in our shack settlement with others who have so far escaped various forms of death: shack fires, the dejected nyaope boys, expensive coffins on wheels that pose as our public transport system. Then we face the violence from the police when we resort to protest. Instead of being called freedom fighters in this post-apartheid South Africa, we will be labelled violent protestors, without context, in the dailies.
What should anger us all is that two-thirds are born and live above a grave, with all the richness in potential creativity and intellect that will never be realised. They are rendered materially poor by this economic system that does not meet their basic needs of universal, free, quality, accountable public services, so that they too can count. What is troubling is that the numbers are growing. The population living in poverty increased from 27.3 million in 2011 to 30.4 million in 2015. And poverty is both racist and sexist, with black women at the bottom of the pile.
Our message is that governments the world over are fuelling this crisis by massively under-taxing the wealthiest (individuals and corporations) in our society, even as vital public services – healthcare, education and social protection – are crumbling for want of funds. In apartheid South Africa, corporate taxes were at 50% in 1990 and since then they have declined to 28%. According to the Budget Coalition, personal income tax rates for the rich have declined considerably over the last three decades. Instead of alleviating the burden of material poverty, this government choses to reward the high-income earners of our society through tax breaks.
We all suffer when public services are neglected, including the middle class. Instead of fighting alongside the working class, we do two things in this sequence: We run to radio talk shows that do a good job of unintentionally being the people’s therapists. Perhaps they are required to as a means of generating a collective voice. But then the potential for finding each other through this medium for collective action stops there because, as soon as we drop the phone, we do the second thing – privatise that suffering to secure our individual futures.
These are short-term measures to a structural problem. In the process of privatising our pain to find refuge in privatised services, as the middle class, we enslave ourselves to the banks. Refinancing our mortgages to pay for our cancer, school, university. Debt kills and disintegrates the family structure.
The Competition Commission’s Market Inquiry into the Private Healthcare Sector found that deregulation of private healthcare has resulted in a highly concentrated sector that has committed abusive market practices. The cost of care is ever-rising as we make unaffordable out-of-pocket payments. The extent of services has been reduced and is concentrated in urban centres. Importantly, women and girls pay the highest price for crumbling public services as they clock up hours of unpaid work, looking after sick relatives when healthcare systems fail.
The private sector is not accountable to us, it is accountable to its shareholders who are in Sandton, in London, and expect profits. But our government is accountable to us, and we must demand and organise for its accountability, because privatised services are a burden to us all in the middle class, working poor and unemployed. This is a year for change; #Jikizinto.
Baloyi is the senior fellow for research and policy at Oxfam South Africa
