Christmas data release points to massive policy and resource vacuum among our youth
Statistics South Africa - the fact finder that delivers the South Africa I know, the home that I understand, to the nation and to the world - has provided some of the nuggets of knowledge that should awaken policy to important challenges that have been left unaddressed for a long period of time.
They posted a report - 30 Years of Data: Shaping South Africa’s Equitable Future - on December 24, 2024 as a Christmas gift. The report should be a thorn in the barefooted policy maker due to two areas - health and education - that stand out and define the futures of South Africa and its children.
Earlier this year in his State of the Nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa told narrative of a child named Tintswalo, born in 1994, who symbolised the transformation of South Africa's society since the dawn of democracy.
The latest StatsSA report, which pierces through the lens of concentration ratios demonstrates the ordeal of black suffering and the blinding mirage of Tintswalo’s failed intergenerational value. This is revealed through the nature of participation in the social and economic affairs of the nation by race.
It points to how monopolies remain fully cushioned and milk it all the way to accumulation on the back of the numerically preponderant Black population whose impoverished status as they are, forms the broad base guarantee of extra profits exacted through the systematic leaches of concentration.
Basically, the surplus population beyond the 9.2 million target profit of business, have an aggregate demand that just adds surplus to the economic design of South Africa. Be it through the SDR or social grants.
Nowhere is this as ominously obvious as is in health and education. Suggesting that a poorly managed public system is an entry point, but a massive cash cow stomach for private sector.
Let us answer the question of how many people in South Africa have medical aid by race and how many matriculants write the International Exams Board. The numbers do not make any policy sense.
Yet these numbers dominate the policy space, not because of their significance, but merely because of the snobbish noise they generate and the super profits the noise materially garners for private business.
The report notes that while 71% of the White population have medical aid scheme against 9.7% amongst the Tintswalo population. In absolute numbers 9.2 million people are in a medical scheme, which includes Indians and Coloureds.
In absolute numbers 3.2 million Whites are on medical aid and 5.0 million amongst the Tintswalos. This lens is quite telling because the economy of South Africa’s domestic market is focused by and large on this figure of 2.4 million households in which reside the 9.2 million people.
The rest of the 15 million households, count for extraordinarily little except as conveyors of substantial profits by fact not of their modest incomes, but on the contrary because of their desperation race to the bottom driven aggregate consumption effect.
This consumption effect manifests itself in food and transport significantly. The medical aid schemes do not need the impoverished because they will diminish and dilute their profits into thin air. They are basically the surplus population who have extraordinarily little by way of propagating intergenerational value.
About 1.7 million of the households accommodated in the medical aid schemes are Tintswalo’s in the civil service. They enjoy the benefits of private care whilst fourteen million households of their Black brethren are left out of this club of privilege.
So, when public services collapse under our Tintswalo’s watch, it matters not because they do not participate in the system that should be making them proud.
Whilst the raison d’etre for waging struggle for emancipation was to drive a Tintswalo wave, the wave petered and got swallowed by the sand and disappeared into nothingness.
By Wednesday, a day after the national school certificate results that adjudicates outcomes from 800 000 matriculants, who would have written the national exam, the 15 000 Independent Exams Board outcomes will be dominating our TV screens and hogging the national attention.
In South Africa this infinitesimal elite hog the news and is projected as the measure of success. Indeed, they succeed. The pass rate is a measure and, in this regard, almost 98% of these are guaranteed to go through matric with a decent pass, whilst in the National School Certificate 69% are guaranteed not such palatable news whereby just under 250 000 will go through with a decent pass.
However, the universities have a biblical mantra that says many are called, but few are chosen. Only 160 000 places are available in these institutions.
At the outcome level things get even worse if we turn the page on labour market indicators. Whites in South Africa represent South Korea at levels of proportions of skilled employed by age group.
They average 60% and above today having surged from 40% since 1994. On the other hand, the Tintswalos come out 14 percentage points below the 33% matric pass mark. They, as a proportion of the skilled in their own population are less than a third of their White counterparts.
In fact, the Tintswalos have been fossilized at just about 18% as a skilled proportion of the workforce. Under such circumstances a South African Tintswalo does not have skill, is unemployed and has no chance of ever achieving a generational value despite having gone through a painful and derogatory demographic transition.
A demographic dividend for Tintswalo is a nightmare that does not stop. This reality comes against an economic reality of levels of concentration in the South African economy that cannot deliver a different and positive future for Tintswalo.
StatsSA has been very thoughtful in delivering industry concentration statistics. The statistics are particularly useful not for holding no hope for Tintswalo, but for revealing systemic failure around the life of not only a delusional, but an elusive Tintswalo.
Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.
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