THAMSANQA D. MALINGA | Brutal betrayal of poor masses continues in democracy

SA’s poverty problem is institutionalised as it was during the apartheid years. In fact, SA is still an apartheid state. It is a state where black people continue to be perpetual serfs, and their white counterparts remain the privileged few with bread and salt easily available to them.

This is not a thumb-sucked argument. It was confirmed by former president Thabo Mbeki. During his tenure (1999-2008), Mbeki  said SA is “a country of two nations – one that is white and wealthy and the another that is black and poor”.

Lack of jobs and the resultant poverty is an institutionalised problem that is entrenched in the state’s systems, which hold black South Africans in bondage as serfs. Writing his prologue to my seminal treatise, Blame Me on Apartheid, legal baron Vuyani Ngalwana SC noted: “Sadly, since 1994 that most evil and enduring apartheid achievement seems to be perpetrated by successive governments of what used to be a liberation movement, sacrificing the cerebral development of the black child at the altar of political expediency”.

It is a fact that ruling over an ignorant population is less complicated than having to account to a population that thinks and, therefore, can reason and, therefore, can make informed choices, especially when the ruling elite has nothing to offer except promises of “a better life for all”, which often translates to food parcels and poverty trap social grants. Ngalwana was spot on. Since the advent of democracy, our government has crippled black South Africans.

It started by making frivolous promises they knew very well they couldn’t fulfil. From free houses, free electricity, free education and free this and that. Even with jobs, the ANC government had promised them and said they would be available here and there. These include many other sorts of lies that served as building blocks for institutionalising poverty.

To receive these free packages, people had to do one thing only, look up to the government for the manna and you shall be saved. Perhaps it is for this reason that former ANC president Jacob Zuma arrogantly declared that “the ANC will rule until Jesus comes”. At the time he probably knew the damage his political party had done, in trapping black South Africans in enduring poverty.

Unfortunately, many in our communities fail to grasp this institutionalisation. Instead, , when the issue of jobs is discussed the only irrational escape that some among others resort to is that “South Africans are lazy” – oh please!. That is a lame excuse. The so-called democratic government has mentally incapacitated the unemployed, and largely black South Africans, by not empowering them.

Instead, it has been promising them that which it could not deliver in almost three decades – nor will it deliver in four more decades to come. This is no different from the apartheid government that rendered blacks debilitated by denying them quality education.

On the matter of education, I have written in my book Blame Me on Apartheid that, It is not common sense that there will be investment in a black child’s education. It is not common sense that the infrastructure of a public school in Zola, Soweto, or KwaMagxaki in Port Elizabeth – is going to be the same as that of a public Hoerskool in Akasia, Pretoria – simply for one reason: the education of a black child is an apartheid social paradigm. In SA, where employment is offered, the requirements are made stringent for the black child.

This has been the case with the government sector as well. The one largest provider of jobs in SA, a black majority administered government, has been found wanting by encouraging young people to flood universities and yet making them mere interns, only to discard them after internship programmes. At least on their part, they would have fulfilled the statistical requirement for reporting for budget votes and the State of the Nation Address.

I therefore cannot be faulted when arguing that poverty in its current form in SA is institutionalised, just like how apartheid institutionalised it. It is all in the promises and lies, the bureaucracy and systems, of our democratic government, the corridors of the building our people visit daily – a crime against humanity.

• Malinga is a director at Mkabayi Management Consultants, a columnist and author of Blame Me on Apartheid and A Dream Betrayed