Mde,+B+Day,+The+State

Business Day, 24 May 2005
=More to jobless crisis than Mbeki cares to admit=


 * Vukani Mde, political correspondent.**

ONCE again, the faint but unmistakable odour of denialism wafts from the presidency.

Writing in his weekly letter to African National Congress (ANC) members, President Thabo Mbeki has questioned the accuracy of South African employment statistics as given by Statistics SA (Stats SA).

Let us ignore for a moment any suspicion that this is another example of government’s complete loss of confidence in Pali Lehohla, the statistician-general. The cavalcade of embarrassing errors in Stats SA’s recent history, and government’s stop-start response to them, is a subject for another column. What is certain is this: the political upshot of the errors has been to provide ammunition to those who may have an axe to grind. This group clearly includes the president.

Whether the issue is statistics on AIDS-related mortality rates, the rate of inflation, or unemployment, the president exhibits a tendency to turn Einstein on his head: if the facts do not fit the theory, change the facts.

Mbeki begins his letter with this challenge: “The question all our social partners will have to answer honestly is what they have to do individually and together that will demonstrate that the workers were right to celebrate Workers’ Day in a spirit of hope and confidence.”

Where the president is concerned, the answer to this question is simple: he must at once desist from telling the workers there isn’t an unemployment problem, or that if there is one, they are it. Mbeki, it will be remembered, has expressed the view that SA’s unemployment problem is one of a skills shortage rather than absence of work. This he determined after scanning the Sunday Times Careers section.

This week the president tells us that SA has not experienced jobless growth at all, but “unemployment has increased because of poor labour absorption”.

This is simply not true.

Most reliable statistics on the patterns of economic growth suggest that the highest growth has occurred in capital-intensive sectors of the economy, which has done nothing for employment creation, even for skilled workers.

The vehicle industry, which has experienced phenomenal growth over the past 10 years, has in fact shed jobs during its period of government-assisted growth.

But the president is unconvinced. For him, it “seems unlikely that the Stats SA figure (for unemployment) is correct”. This figure, 26,9%, would suggest that “at least 4-million South Africans (are) walking about in our villages, our towns and cities”.

“This is such a large number of people that nobody could possibly have missed the millions that would be in the streets and village paths ‘actively looking for work’ in all likely places of employment.”

Is the president unfamiliar with the sight of men standing on the side of the road, waiting for passing bakkies and the hope of daily menial jobs? Such men are “actively looking for work”. To have their existence receive a presidential denial is hardly the stuff of hope and confidence.

The president clearly needs to walk around more, and familiarise himself with the miserable scenes in his major cities.

Why would Mbeki have a problem accepting the reality of SA’s unemployment crisis anyway? He unwittingly points the way: “The central matter at issue is that … we would have to undertake actions to address unemployment, fundamentally different from virtually any other country in the world”. That is the point, surely, and labour unions have called on government to declare unemployment a national emergency, without any sign that government is listening.

Further on, the president writes: “Among other things, this might suggest that we should undertake a radical review of our economic policies.” Could this be what the resistance to reality is all about? Surely it cannot be that the president is simply a professional iconoclast, prowling the internet at night looking for vulnerable facts to dispute and oddball theories to replace them?

This is a government that tells anyone who listens that the fundamentals of economic policy are in place and will not change.

It should also be said that the ANC’s recent broadside against its alliance partners for their “partisan” or “sectarian” interests is disingenuous. Mbeki attacks “some trade unions” for “projecting” the economy as a job-shedding one, in order to serve the interests of their employed members. But make no mistake about it, the state is partisan. Its sectarian interests — usually class-determined — are institutionalised and projected as objective reality.

It took Mbeki years to accept the “premise” that HIV causes AIDS. How long do we have to wait before he concedes there is a crisis of unemployment?


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A47987 **