Staring+at+sad+SA+human+face,+Anthony+Butler,+Business+Day



=Staring at SA’s sad human face=


 * Anthony Butler, Business Day, 12 November 2007**

President Thabo Mbeki recently and memorably insisted that “today is better than yesterday”.

He boasted that seven in 10 households now live in a formal dwelling, eight in 10 use electric lighting and that the once-deprived now enjoy an abundance of refrigerators, cellphones and TVs.

Ministers similarly observe that the African National Congress (ANC) has presided over a decade of unbroken economic growth. In terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per person, “purchasing power parity” adjusted for purposes of international comparison, SA is ranked around 55 among the world’s 180 or so countries, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Malaysia, Croatia and Chile.

Income per head, however, tells us little about the quality of human experience in a society. To explore the ability of households and individuals to command the resources necessary for a “reasonable” standard of living, we need more complex measures that include nonmonetary elements such as health and education.

Perhaps the best known indicator for comparing human wellbeing in different countries is the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP’s) Human Development Index (HDI). The index measures a population’s ability to develop its three “most basic capabilities”: to be able to lead a long life; to be “knowledgeable”; and to have access to the resources needed for a “decent standard of living”. In order to compare countries in these terms, UNDP collects data on life expectancy, educational enrolments and achievements, and GDP per head, and uses them as proxies for the three “capabilities”. It assesses a score for each proxy, and the index is a simple average of the three dimension scores. This allows UNDP to rank countries by human development and to track changes in their performance over time.

Indices such as the HDI are intended to help policy makers and citizens remember that the overall lives of ordinary people, and not bald economic growth statistics, should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the “development” of a country.

SA performs exceptionally poorly in terms of HDI. Placed 121 out of 177 countries, it lies some 66 places below the ranking one would expect judged on the basis of income. Countries with similar GDP per head fare much better, with Mauritius ranked 63, Chile 38, and Croatia 44. In HDI terms, SA is ranked alongside countries that are far poorer in terms of income: Honduras (per cap GDP $2876), Tajikistan ($1202) and Morocco ($4309).

This gap between SA’s GDP and human development is politically sensitive because it has grown in the post-apartheid era. Between 1975 and 1995, HDI improved fairly steadily as life expectancy and educational enrolments improved. Since democracy arrived, HDI has fallen, hitting a new low last year. When UNDP releases its 2007 report on November 27, the expectation is that SA will have slipped further still.

Why does this relatively affluent middle-income developing country perform so badly in terms of human development? One answer lies in persisting income inequality, which results in a concentration of resources in the hands of a small and privileged segment of the population. A second factor is widespread poverty, driven by an unemployment crisis that has deepened considerably over the past decade. The share of the poorest half of households in national income has changed very little since Nelson Mandela entered the Union Buildings.

In addition, and despite some remarkable successes, access to public services that contribute to a healthy and knowledgeable population remains highly unequal. Poor households often cannot pay the incidental costs and user charges required to access them. One result is appalling deficiencies in health and educational opportunities in rural areas. This is reflected in poor localised HDI scores in predominantly rural provinces such as Eastern Cape and Limpopo.

Falling life expectancy, however, has been the key factor bringing down SA’s HDI. And the central cause of this fall in life expectancy — to 47 years, according to last year’s UNDP estimate — is the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

AIDS in fact explains wider continental changes in HDI performance across the past decade. Asia has seen HDI improvements accelerate from the mid-1990s. Central and Eastern Europe, after a post-socialist fall in the early 1990s, have seen a strong recovery. Sub-Saharan Africa, however, has mostly experienced an unremitting decline since 1995, in part attributable to economic reversals but most often driven by HIV/AIDS.

When this year’s UNDP Human Development Report is released — which will be in two weeks — officials and spokespeople in Pretoria who might otherwise be more usefully employed, will instead be pre- occupied with their annual attempt to “discredit” the HDI as a simplistic and inappropriate indicator.

It is true that the weight that UNDP places on the proxy of “life expectancy” does have a distorting effect on the overall index, particularly for countries that are in the middle of a major health crisis. It is also true that ANC successes in disbursing poverty- reducing social grants, building houses, and providing water and household energy are not directly reflected in the UNDP indicator.

Because HDI reflects badly on the glorious revolution of Thabo Mbeki, and draws attention to the devastation wrought by HIV/AIDS, the state broadcaster is unlikely even to register its existence. Governments, however, should use indicators such as HDI in the spirit in which they are intended, as a spur and aid to reflection.

It cannot be right simply to rule out of consideration any measure of the human condition that does not reflect well on the performance of the national government or upon leaders who are campaigning for re-election.

If mortality patterns remain unchanged, a child born today in SA has the same chance of surviving to the age of 40 as a child born today in Guinea-Bissau or Cameroon. That is a reality worth reflecting on.


 * Butler teaches public policy at UCT.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A610804**

970 words