I was on a flight to East London last week when I started feeling hot, agitated and generally highly vexed. It wasn’t the usual turbulence over Joburg at this time of year. I glugged the lukewarm beverage I had bought on board just to still my swiftly fraying nerves. I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
On page three of Business Day a huge headline shouted: “Law reform body proposes maternity support grant for poor pregnant women.”
The piece went on to report that this recommendation by the South African Law Reform Commission would cost R3bn a year. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s the commission’s job to advise the government on the development of the law. But this is just obtuse. It doesn’t matter how you cut this pie, the reality remains that we are broke.
Just two weeks ago finance minister Enoch Godongwana said South Africa has about R4.3-trillion of debt and spends 18c of every tax rand that is collected on debt service costs. He said revenue is in the doldrums due to low growth, the cost of borrowing is ratcheting up daily and foreigners are dumping South African government bonds.
“If we don’t do anything, we won’t have cash by the end of March. Am I scaring you too much? We have to cut expenditure and increase borrowing,” he told the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation inclusive growth forum in the Drakensberg in late October.
I am writing this column from my mother’s village of Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria. It could be any village in semirural South Africa. The poverty is endemic. The challenges are heartbreaking: the scourge of the street drug nyaope is everywhere because addicts cause terror among households as they steal for their next hit. Thousands of young people are unemployed and playing dice on street corners; there are teenage pregnancies, police corruption and so many other issues. The elderly are on government pensions. The young are on child grants. The unemployed are on the just extended R350 social relief of distress grant.
We need to attract foreign investment and skills, grow our own entrepreneurs, retain our talent and make it easy to start and run businesses
Believe me, the people of this and many other depressingly poor areas across this land need those grants. Without grants, many would starve.
Anecdotally, it seems people in this village want a basic income grant (BIG). It would be, those I spoke to say, the crowning glory of the ANC’s rule. Of course we can afford a BIG, a woman from my mother’s church group said, echoing the statements of many others with whom I had raised the fact of Godongwana’s bare cupboards. “Look how many bodyguards the ministers have, and they are useless,” she said.
But she drew the line at a pregnancy grant. It was not about the money, she said. “If you want to have a baby, you must get a job.” I nearly asked her if that meant we should scrap the child grant as well. However, I was a guest in my mother’s house and I think she loves her church group more than she loves me.
But seriously, the next South African government, whether ANC or opposition, needs to make up its mind: grow the economy and create jobs, or continue to dole out money to a populace whose country is going nowhere. We need to be single-minded: we have a low-growth problem. If this economy does not grow, there will be no jobs and there will be no money to pay social grants, current or envisaged.
It boggles the mind that we are still talking about new forms of spending that do not support this goal of growth. The economist Duma Gqubule has pointed out that with growth expectations as they are now (1.4% over the next three years) there will be no jobs for the cohort of young people who pass matric in the years 2024 to 2026. We must relentlessly pursue the goal of growing this economy so that it starts absorbing our young people into the work force.
Our politicians and institutions are not listening. The economy is in a state of emergency. Indeed, if we do nothing about this sickly economy, our ills will multiply. We need to attract foreign investment and skills, grow our own entrepreneurs, retain our talent and make it easy to start and run businesses.
Otherwise, there will be no social grants of any kind, let alone one for poor pregnant women.
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