27.7%, the highest on record since 2003. Indeed, in the decade since 2006, unemployment actually rose, remaining at the stubbornly high rate of 25% for five years. This missed government’s own targets by a mile. The so-called New Growth Path (NGP), one of three competing economic policy blueprints for South Africa’s economy, promised to initiate 6–7% annual growth by 2020.16 In the process, it vowed to create five million jobs and reduce narrow unemployment to only 15%.
The National Development Plan (NDP), launched a year later, set similarly lofty targets. This time, the annual growth target was 5% leading to 2030, with the creation of 5–6 million jobs.17 Miraculously, these jobs would come from different places compared to the NGP. Whereas the NGP saw jobs coming from infrastructure and large industry, the NDP focused on small businesses serving the domestic market. Despite this, South Africa’s unemployment situation has declined since the announcement of both plans, and remains worse than it was in 1994: ‘unemployment, using the expanded definition, has actually risen from 31.5% recorded in 1994 to almost 36% in 2014’.18 Worse still, youth unemployment is at the eye-watering level of nearly 65%.19 The same is true for poverty. In a report issued by Stats SA in 2015, a rebasing of poverty levels contradicted earlier, optimistic census data. Poverty is measured in three incremental bands: first, the ‘food poverty level’ measures people’s ability to buy the equivalent of the minimum caloric intake necessary to sustain human life; second, the lower-bound poverty level is when a person splits income between food and minimal non-food expenses. Finally, the upper bound assumes that people don’t sacrifice any food expenditure to meet their basic needs. All levels of poverty are negative and mean that people are unable to sustain minimally decent lives.
In 2011, government celebrated ‘decreasing’ extreme poverty to ‘only’ 20.2%. After Stats SA reviewed the cost of living, South Africans were startled to learn that the already devastating figures were underestimated. Instead of 20%, it emerged the figure was closer to 21.7%.20 To put this in perspective, that’s a million more living below the breadline than initially thought. Clearly, people need more than just food, which is why the measure is called ‘extreme poverty’. But the story worsened when the upper-bound poverty line was also underestimated: instead of being at 45% in 2011, it was over half the population at 53.7%.21 This is a staggering figure: more than half the South African population lives in poverty, two decades after ‘freedom’. That’s about 27 million people.
What about economic growth? Under Zuma, it was tepid for the first term; anaemic in the second. But government is neither willing to admit failure, nor change course. Instead, it argues that ‘global forces’ have blunted South Africa’s growth prospects. This is totally disingenuous. First, the South African government announced its economic plans well after the 2008 global economic meltdown. It knew full well the global economic climate when it made glossy promises in the elections of 2009 and 2014, and it has known these conditions ever since. Second, other economies more directly affected by the global economic crisis – not least the United States – have grown faster and reduced unemployment quicker than South Africa. Developing economies in Africa and elsewhere have recovered and prospered while South Africa has lagged.22 There have certainly been global headwinds since 2008, but the overwhelming blame for South Africa’s economic morass lies squarely at the door of our own government.
Government also argues that economic progress needs more time. Again, this is disingenuous. In the 21 years between 1994 and 2015, South Africa’s real GDP per capita increased by a relatively modest 31%, from $4 520 to $5 917. Let’s compare what other countries have achieved in similar periods. In 21 years, Malaysia expanded GDP per capita by 119% between 1965 and 1986. Singapore did it by 324% in the same period. Since 1984, Vietnam has expanded GPD per capita by 166%. Namibia’s economy between 1990 and 2011 outpaces South Africa’s, with GDP per capita growth of 53%.23 There are many other examples. So, the notion that South Africa could not have moved any faster is clearly unfounded. It’s time we looked facts soberly in the face: whether it’s unemployment, poverty, inequality or economic growth, South Africa has drastically underperformed since 1994. In the next section, we examine South Africa’s record at delivering basic services, especially to its poorest people.
Service delivery
In 2014, then Minister of Human Settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu, admitted that ‘the delivery of houses has dropped drastically across all provinces, some reaching lows of a 30% drop in delivery’.24 She continued, ‘this, we have been informed, is due to a number of what my officials call “blockages in the pipeline”, whatever that means’.25 Sisulu was reflecting on a particularly bad year, but the story was all too familiar. For the entirety of the Zuma era, government has consistently failed to meet its own housing targets. According to the Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute, government has targeted 200 000 houses per year since 2010.26 But, every year, it has failed to meet its expectations by about 100 000 houses. More puzzling is the attendant problem of underspending, another phenomenon that accelerated under Zuma. In the 2009–10 and 2010–11 fiscal years, underspending by the Department of Human Settlements was in the order of 13%, already alarming considering the dire need for housing in South Africa. But in the following two years, underspending shot up to 34% of the proposed budget, or approximately R5bn.27
Moreover, government has failed to reduce the percentage of people living in informal dwellings, which remained roughly constant between 2004 and 2012.28 The problem goes deeper than this: government’s housing failures have reinforced apartheid spatial planning. Today, housing policy is based on a rigid distinction between shacks (informal dwellings) and ‘formal houses’. Government’s policy mantra is therefore to ‘build houses and eradicate shacks’. But this creates a perverse incentive to evict shack-dwellers. Moreover, formal houses are just new townships on the outskirts of cities, which residents don’t own. Instead, as in colonial times, citizens in desperate need of housing are only allowed to occupy government houses, unable to convert them into assets:
For more than a decade, the state has turned informal settlements into illegal built environments. It has then tried to address these informalities and illegalities by governing them through institutional arrangements that blame poor people for the failures of the state, punishing them through evictions and relocations to newly constructed slums and still sub-standard housing stock.29
Another crucial pillar of service delivery is sanitation, also a disappointment since 1994. Over the last 23 years, access to an improved water source has only increased by 10%, from 83.4% to 93.2%.30 This is below Botswana and Brazil, who have reached the high 90s. The reason for South Africa’s inability to reach adequate water access is a systemic inability to focus on the excluded sectors of the economy. Apartheid geography – strengthened by ANC policies – has made excluded areas hard to service. As a result, the public health crises hit the poor hardest. Whereas we would have expected a steady increase in life expectancy since the end of apartheid, systemic failure to deliver services and the HIV/AIDS crisis led to a dramatic fall between 1994 and 2014: life expectancy went from 61 to 57 in the first decade of democracy.31 Again these figures were below comparator countries, like Botswana and Brazil, by significant margins.
The same is true of water rights. Since 1994, the government has done too little to overturn old water rights laws, which trace their origin to the 1913 and 1936 land acts. These acts allocated water rights like land rights: white farms had them, but people in the former homelands didn’t. After the Water Act of 1998, little was done to interrupt these relations, largely because of heavy lobbying from financial and agricultural interests.32 As a result, water use can’t be collateralised as an asset by at least twenty million South Africans. By contrast, commercial agricultural ventures are able to capitalise on the private ownership of water rights.33 As such, many black South Africans, especially those gendered as women, don’t own or control their access to water. Moreover, poor water governance led to water restrictions in 2016 in major South African cities. Government claimed restrictions were due to drought, but this is not entirely accurate. While drought exacerbated the crisis, consultants have warned for years that water infrastructure has received shocking levels of attention and chronic levels of underinvestment.34 As water consultant Wiero Vogelzang recently told Reuters: ‘Many water and waste water treatment works, pipelines, pump stations and reticulation pipe networks are in dire need of rehabilitation if not past their “sell by” date.’35
Electrification