Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick
I don't know of a country that gives free houses to young people. Free housing in a few years will be something of the past. (Young people) have lost nothing (to Apartheid). If it is not clear - none of you (young people) are ever going to get a house free from me while I live. - Lindiwe Sisulu If I am wrong, come and tell me which country did as we did. Once we were free we said our major focus is to address the plight of the poor. In no country in the world have you seen government giving people houses free of charge because they are poor. - President Zuma
Policy and administrative reforms will raise at least R12 billion in 2015/16, R15 billion in 2016/17 and R17 billion in 2017/18… This ceiling means that expenditure will continue to grow and the real value of our social spending will be maintained.
- MTEF Statement
As I have written before
(see Zuma: the smartest guy in the room), those who underestimate Jacob Zuma do
so at their own peril. Of course Zuma is prone to gaffes, and yes, he is
increasingly uncomfortable in front of the media. But his statements about poor
people waiting for handouts, and his particular reference to housing, followed
closely by Lindiwe Sisulu’s contemptuous statements underscoring this attitude,
are unlikely to be coincidental. Read in conjunction with the abovementioned
MTEF statement, it is hard not to suppress the creepy feeling that we are
watching a new ideology in the making, one that will drive social spending
down, and will seek to blame the poor for their poverty.
The state will need to
alter its fiscal plans dramatically. The reasons for this are myriad: chronic
mismanagement of departmental budgets, a weakening rand, cronyism between big
capital and the ruling party (evidenced most shockingly in the coziness that
were crucial ingredients in the lead up to the Marikana massacre) loss of
market confidence, and so on.
It will be important to
remember each of these factors when the state begins to slash the benefits of
the poor. Pretending that people under forty should be denied access to free
housing because they “are lazy,” or because they “lost nothing [to Apartheid],”
is insulting, self-serving and dangerous.
The purpose of these
statements is to begin to develop a narrative that suggests that the state is
innocent and the citizens are guilty. The intention is to introduce the
time-tested strategy of blaming the poor in order to condone bad economic
policy and administrative indiscipline. Until now, it was unthinkable that the
ANC – which understands all too well the structural underpinnings of Apartheid
and the ways in which they make themselves felt today – would speak in this
manner about poverty in general and about poor people in particular.
Cabinet is clearly
worried about having to make tough decisions that will affect the ANC’s core
constituency at a time when its popularity is clearly on the wane. Instead of
introducing cost-cutting measures and blaming over-zealous credit ratings
agencies, our leader and his henchmen are blaming the poor for their poverty
and suggesting that the cuts to which they will soon be subjected are the
result of laziness and lack of drive.
Nothing could be further
from the truth. As we all know, the legacy of Apartheid is an inherited one: a
recent SAHRC and UNICEF report on intergenerational poverty amongst children
makes precisely this point. A child living in a poor household has a
significantly reduced chance of reaching Grade 7 (36% less) than a child from a
high-income family.
It seems that the ANC’s
relationship with the poor – much like its alliance with workers – is fracturing.
The ANC can scarcely afford to alienate both organised labour as well as those
who are unemployed and to some degree or another, dependent on the state for
basic survival. Yet this is precisely what the new statements signal. They are
of course not isolated comments. Nomvula Mokonyane’s infamous ‘dirty votes’
rant was another example of the contempt the ruling party is beginning to
demonstrate to the troublesome poor – those who dare to complain and protest
and ask questions.
The party is on a
collision course that has been in the making for some time now. The fact that
it is likely to crash into its largest and most faithful constituency should
worry us all. And yet there is something almost inevitable about the place in
which we now find ourselves. The public anger against Marikana and the outcry
against Nkandla can easily be dismissed as middle-class outrage. Party
apparatchiks argue that these people – ‘clever blacks,’ and ‘CIA agents’ - are
not connected to communities and have no real constituencies. This name-calling
has masked some hurt feelings about the black middle class. The ANC can take
some credit for helping to create black diamonds, and yet they seem to be
turning against it.
Poor people who are
organised are less easy to challenge than the clever blacks and whiny whites.
This is why the ANC has so been badly shaken by the service delivery protests.
Despite intimations amongst the senior leadership of the ANC that a third force
has stoked resentments, the truth is that the protests by poor communities
actions have been conceived and driven by poor people themselves. The ANC’s
base seems unsure of whether it will remain loyal. In light of the emergence of
the EFF as a potentially viable space for poor people’s articulations of
political ambition, the ANC has not taken kindly to being bitten by those it
feeds.
