Читать книгу New South African Review 2 - Paul Hoffman - Страница 8

While the progressive realisation of decent work focuses on the necessary social inclusion of those most destitute – the unemployed and poor – deracialisation of the higher echelons of the economy continues to be attempted through black economic empowerment (BEE) and broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE). While the policy shift to B-BBEE, emerging largely in response to criticisms raised by black business and organised labour, has been presented as a means of preventing the process from benefiting elites and individuals, the experience has continued to be one through which a minority has gained. Situating the evolution of BEE as an institution in post-apartheid South Africa at the level of the development of the business– state relationship, Don Lindsay’s chapter argues that the absence of a proper controlling policy framework has allowed corruption and cronyism to flourish.

Lindsay argues that, coming to be viewed as the vehicle through which good relations between the incoming ANC government and business could be built, the interests of elites and individuals in both spheres have dominated and defined how this process has unfolded. While policy discourse then reflects commitments to economic redistribution among the entire South African population through increasing the access of all groups of black people to economic opportunities, in reality it has been a few individuals and families (with the right political capital, and/or with access to financial capital) who have benefited from the actual policies of BEE and B-BBEE.

Also in this volume, Jane Duncan provides an analysis of the failure of BEE and B-BBEE policies in meaningfully transforming print media in South Africa. She argues that in spite of the newspaper industry being significantly different from what it was twenty years ago – with more racially representative newsrooms and cutting-edge investigative journalism that contributes towards holding those in power to account, and the support of black small business and corporate social responsibility – it ‘tends to prioritise the worldviews of those with power and money, who predictably tend to occupy the centre of the political spectrum’, with a lack of linguistic and geographic diversity, and women still lacking a significant voice. She writes: ‘The fact that newsrooms have more black people and women has not automatically led to a transformation of content on these levels’. Noting a continued lack of diverse forms of journalism or media models, with the professional model of journalism and the commercial model of media remaining the dominant models of media production (even in the community-media sector), Duncan also highlights that BEE and B-BBEE deals that saw the transfer of ownership to black hands (as well as to trade unions and women’s organisations) after the end of apartheid, unravelled ‘as they were financed through debt rather than equity’. This spelt the withdrawal from the print media industry of BEE companies like Kagiso Media, Dynamo and New African Investment Limited and New Africa Publishers, leaving control once again to the big four companies that have dominated the market – Independent Newspapers, Avusa Ltd, Media24 and Caxton.

Duncan supports the idea of a transformation charter for the print media through which goals, models, and measures set for transformation of the sector are not reduced to a narrow framework of BEE or even B-BBEE. For Duncan, it is not only the deracialisation of the newspaper industry that is necessary, but also a change in the ways in which content is produced, editors appointed, editorial priorities set and determined, audiences defined and prioritised – overall thinking, in other words, about models of media production. Through a close analysis of the industry since 1994, Duncan provides a rich and nuanced case study of the failures of BEE, and of the print media post-apartheid.

Returning to the issue of inequality at the level of individual income, Don Lindsay argues that even where statistics do demonstrate improvements in individual income levels, the post-apartheid period continues to reflect race-based patterns of income inequality, perhaps an argument for why greater emphasis should have been placed on more direct mechanisms for changing patterns of ownership in South Africa to form part of programmes such as BEE.⁵ Although the per capita disposable income of Africans increased by forty-nine per cent between 1994 and 2007, this amounted to a mere increase from R6 381 to R9 495, while for whites per capita disposable income in the same period increased from R47 674 to R58 926, reflecting an increase of twenty-four per cent. Such changes cannot be attributed solely to BEE and B-BBEE programmes, as many African individuals have benefited from increases in social grant allocations, in particular from 2002 onwards. What is clear, however, is that state policies directed at addressing racialised patterns of inequality, poverty and wealth have not been successful.

In January 2010, researchers from the South African Labour and Development Research Unit (Saldru) released a report on poverty and inequality (in the form of income distribution) since the end of apartheid that made use of national survey data from 1993, 2000 and 2008 (Leibbrandt et al., 2010). The report shows that income inequality increased in South Africa between 1993 and 2008, generally and within each racial group. In addition, it shows that while there was an ‘unambiguous increase’ (ibid.: 14) in poverty between 1996 and 2001, there has since been a slight decrease in income poverty at an aggregate level. However, it points out that poverty ‘persists at acute levels for the African and coloured racial groups’ (ibid.: 4). The report also compares poverty in rural and urban areas, highlighting that poverty rates in the former have always been, and continue to be, higher than in the latter. However, it shows that poverty rates ‘increased unambiguously in urban areas between 1992 and 2001’ and that ‘while a much higher proportion of the rural population are poor, the proportion of the poor who are in rural areas is declining’ because of the increasing migration from rural to urban areas that happened over this period (ibid.: 15).

The report flags the fact that ‘intra-African inequality and poverty trends dominate aggregate inequality and poverty in South Africa’, pointing to rising inequality within the labour market (owing to increasing unemployment and rising earnings inequality) as the primary reasons for rising levels of aggregate inequality as they ‘have prevented the labour market from playing a positive role in poverty alleviation’. The report confirms that social grants, in particular the child support grant, the disability grant, and the old-age pension, ‘alter the levels of inequality only marginally but have been crucial in reducing poverty among the poorest households’ (ibid.: 4). In the light of such information, it is significant that the progressive realisation of decent work has been prioritised by the NGP over the provision of alternative forms of access to income, such as a universal grant for all those outside the protections of full-time, permanent, waged employment, especially given the fact that the labour market has been shown to be failing to address the poor economic situations even of a large number of those considered to be working – that is, those who have come to be known as ‘the working poor’.

One of the more promising aspects of the NGP, given these levels of inequality, is its call for restraint on earnings for upper income groups. With such intense debate, it will be interesting whether the call for restraint will be enforced in any meaningful way.