SA’s poverty head count has been dramatically reduced

SA’s exceptionalism in the political demography stakes from colonialism, apartheid and democracy provides us an opportunity to understand our transition, writes Pali Lehohla.

The contribution of political demography has ever been present in development contours of political economy and has influenced the shape, size and momentum of the contours of revolutions, evolutions, social uprisings and democracy.

Paradoxically political demography can elevate democracy to absurd political practices at times. In this regard sociologists observe that as demographic democracy of identity takes root, political demography influences electoral determination under what politically becomes demographic censuses of ethnic, tribal or regional domination and subjugation. All under the signature of democracy.

South Africa’s exceptionalism in the political demography stakes from colonialism, apartheid and democracy provides us an opportunity to understand our transition. Over the past 22 years South Africa ploughed deep and succeeded to dramatically reduce head count poverty.

However, one has to search hard to find success in translating a democratic dividend into a demographic dividend. In the main the milieu of the #FeesMustFall sheds a critical ray of light on this dilemma.

In their classics, Polybius and Cicero a century before the birth of Christ, were concerned about the sustained low number of children the patrician elite had versus the unfettered breeding by their barbaric competitors and the implications of this differential species propagation on the balance of forces and sustenance to levers of power by the elites in Greece and Rome.

This two thousand old worry of political demography was to be embraced with glee by the apartheid architects and got translated and perfected into practical action with unrelenting energy by successive apartheid regimes.

The column today lays as the foundation, the concerns of Polybius and Cicero of Greece and Rome and draws on the rich and intellectually revolutionary work of the 1970s by Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe. It applies the work of the latter in understanding the speciality of capitalism in apartheid South Africa as 22 years in democracy South Africa faces the vexed question of differential and race-based challenges and fault lines of demographic dividends for some and demographic deficits for others which are largely driven by exigencies of political demography.

Harold Wolpe’s 1972 work Capitalism and cheap labour-power in South Africa: From segregation to apartheid remains a foundational intellectual work in understanding these fault lines and why, according to evidence drawn from successive surveys by Stats SA, with the most recent being Community Survey 2016, South Africa has been and will be denied a demographic dividend.

For this the discourse of Polybius and Cicero could have predicted and shed light on the worries of settler colonialist in South Africa emanating from the racial composition of the country and how they dealt with the problem. In particular theirs would have been to opine on the “success and brilliance” of Verwoerd in the post-1948 era where a cocktail of deliberate strategies were deployed to address the worry that haunted them millennia ago.

First it was apartheid’s duty to intensify labour migration against all odds, second it was to recruit Europeans to manage the apparent deficits in the balance of racial forces, and third and as a crucial corollary to the first it was apartheid's duty to avail contraception facilities to black persons and not education. This was a total, and whilst it lasted, a very successful strategy deployed to abet the swart gevaar (black danger).

A near comparison to South Africa in terms of exposure to brute force, is Korea at the hands of Japan from around 1910, for the ensuing three decades. Korea in 1945 unshackled itself out of bondage from Japan, who like Verwoerdian South Africa used educational deprivation for black persons as the key lever to subjugate the Koreans.

Park of the 1950s understood this very well and upon liberation from Japan the then South Koreans under Syngman Rhee pursued quality mathematics education for Koreans as part of a critical warhead in the arsenal of development armoury. Sixty years later South Korea speaks a different language as it looks forward to having at least 65 percent of its entire population as graduates.

This is indeed no longer a dream because foundationally with those aged 25 to 34, South Korea is highest in the world with 65 percent against that of their former oppressors Japan, which stands at 57 percent in this age group for graduates.

Five times lower

In South Africa the corresponding percentage for white persons stands at 47 percent in this age group against that of black persons, where the corresponding figure is just about 9 percent. For black persons this is five times lower than that of its former oppressors. This is according to Community Survey 2016.

While South Korea’s own national effort was the driving motive for its development, Japan poured resources to compensate for their atrocities just shortly after their defeat in 1945 and continue to convey messages of regret and apology including continuing to provide material resources to Korea.

This is an act of ensuring that their wayward ways, whilst it cannot be forgotten, can go a long way in building humane and economically viable relations for the future. As recently as 2010 the Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada apologised to the Korean people for this sad national misdemeanour.

The centre piece of apartheid political infrastructure was political demography as an instrument of domination.

First through the migrant labour system the emergent capitalist mode of production coexisted with peasant agriculture, whilst deliberately inflicting immiserising growth and vulgarised development that was detrimental to the sending nodes in the homelands and neighbouring countries.

In this way the economic basis of peasant agricultural production was dissolved and sucked in the white capitalist economy of gold and maize whilst retaining a mirage of tradition and social relations in the social superstructure to maintain and tie the “Bantu” out of the city space to his traditional hinterland. The quarterly labour force (QLFS) of Stats SA shows that peasant and smallholder commercial agriculture is non-existent in South Africa where less than 7 percent are employed in agriculture.

In large part this contributes to high unemployment rates and persistent inability for households to provide for themselves. This is unlike in the other Brics countries, especially Brazil and India where agriculture absorbs close to 20 percent in the former and upwards of 30 percent in the latter.

Secondly apartheid South Africa was open to inviting Europeans or whites from all over the world to compensate for their rapidly declining fertility. But despite all those efforts, the force of demography is much against the white population numerically. So the “white recruitment drive was not going to lead to sustainable white population growth”.

However, whites managed to undergo a successful demographic transition that also for them yielded enormous demographic dividends.

Graduate whites constitute 47 percent of the white population in the age group 25-34, thus guaranteeing that their future generations are secure and in terms of employment outcomes this group has increased its contribution to the skilled amongst whites in the same age group by almost 20 percentage points in the last twenty years. Amongst black persons the proportion of graduates is 9 percent. Their composition of skilled workforce has declined from 18 percent to 16 percent in the twenty years. This is regressive. The benefits to whites have now been buttressed even further by the dividend of democracy which has enabled South Africa to be open for business.

Indeed in terms of income distribution whites have gotten better according to the income and expenditure survey and Census 2011 data from Stats SA.

Amongst whites as a population group inequality is the lowest with a gini coefficient of about 0.45 which dropped from 0.56 in 2006. Amongst black persons as a population group it is the highest and has been increasing and inching towards 0.66.

Third and as a corollary of the first, that is forced migratory labour system, the apartheid regime used availability of contraception devices to manage black population growth. This was going to be easy to adopt as migratory labour exposed people to relationships that would be detrimental to established spousal arrangements should there be children conceived and born whilst spouses are on their own on extended sojourns in the mines, townships or farms.

This facilitated easy adaptation of use of contraceptive devices especially by women. This thus explain why in the absence of education, South Africa has had a very rapid demographic transition, to where now the total fertility rate (TFR) is close to 2.4.

Not only did TFR decline but also parenting by single mothers increased rapidly.

Declining fertility

The prolific expansion of HIV and Aids infection against a declining fertility suggests that methods exclusively at the disposal of women have been used for contraception. Another startling statistic is that 60 percent of fathers say they are married against 30 percent of mothers.

Political demography is at the heart of South Africa’s complex political economy. The social relations of production, the illusive and delusional coexistence of capitalist mode of production with its race based particularities, and filial relations reminiscent of peasant production, high unemployment rates, challenges of funding education, responsible parenting, the explosion of HIV and Aids in not only South Africa but in the region of its influence all constitute an exceptionalism of South Africa as defined in the ensemble of spatio-temporal challenges brought about political demography.

Political economists like Wolpe and Legassick could with clarity answer the question of Polybius and Cicero as this act plays itself through statistical evidence in South Africa.

South Africa has transited into democracy and claimed its space amongst nations, but the dividend of democracy will not translate into a demographic dividend. The #FeesMustFall campaign by students that has arrested our attention in the last twelve months pierces at the crucial question of whether South Africa is aware of the deep and excruciating consequences of a missed wave of a demographic dividend.

* Dr Pali Lehohla is South Africa’s Statistician-General and Head of Statistics South Africa. South Africa will be hosting the very first UN World Data Forum in Cape Town from January 15 to 18, 2017. Check out the undataforum.org website to register.

* The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.

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