South Africa Has A Reservoir

Wishful thinking remains the order of the day, and there has been no genuine, good faith attempt to grapple with the reality that the public education crisis has created

Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash

That South Africa has had a public education crisis for ages is no secret. While many mainstream analysts have correctly linked it to the country’s socio-economic problems, there appears to have been no attempt to systematically categorise the millions of people affected by it and to examine their reality without any wishful thinking.

Much of the mainstream discourse remains rooted in vague references to the “poor” or the “unemployed”. The urgent task, then, is to create a specific category for the millions of people who have been failed by public education and to examine their reality without any idealistic assumptions.

South Africa has what can be termed the ‘reservoir’ phenomenon. Broadly speaking, the reservoir is overwhelmingly constituted by millions of predominantly black South Africans who are either unskilled or low-skilled because of the public education crisis, notwithstanding a tiny yet growing skilled portion who are also beginning to feel the sting of a stagnant economy.

In more specific terms, the reservoir can be subdivided into three sub-categories, which overlap when it comes to social security. The first sub-category consists of people engaged in unskilled and low-skilled work in the formal economy. Examples range from domestic workers to construction workers to petrol attendants.

The second sub-category consists of people who operate in the informal economy to generate an income, with examples ranging from street vendors to taxi drivers. The third sub-category, which is the largest, consists of mostly young people who are both formally and informally out of work. The social security overlap refers to the fact that people across all three sub-categories are either beneficiaries (whether direct or indirect) of some kind of social grant or come from households that benefit from welfare.

While it is true that some people across all three categories can re-enter the public education system, formally upskill or learn a trade/skill informally, or try their luck as entrepreneurs in both the formal and informal economy, it is not unreasonable to argue that many find themselves in a particular reality that cannot be wished away with a magic wand. A reality that they must live in without entertaining the illusions that politicians and some academics may try to sell.

Any realistic discussion about overhauling South Africa’s centralised, one-size-fits-all public education system can only focus on the young people currently within it and those yet to enter it. It cannot, and should not, preoccupy itself with those people who already find themselves in the reservoir.

Having said that, the reservoir should not be seen as a doom-and-gloom concept, nor should it be read as a subtle nod to socialist-esque thinking. There is no indignity or “exploitation” in unskilled and low-skilled work, and there are many untold stories of people who do amazing things for themselves and their families through it. There is also no indignity in informal economy work, regardless of its difficulty and precarity in many cases. There are many South Africans who are succeeding as entrepreneurs and generating real wealth in an informal economy that has become dominated by immigrants in some sectors.

There is a big difference between veering into pessimism and describing reality as it truly appears.

Sadly, there is indignity in being completely out of work and reduced to loitering and other social ills that continue to ravage the lives of millions of young people across the country. The third sub-category of the reservoir is a ticking time bomb, and only so much time can pass before it triggers a political crisis of massive proportions.

The Free Market Foundation has long argued that deregulation can absorb a huge portion of the latter into the formal economy and a sizeable component into the informal economy. But the ruling political elite, other political actors, and a handful of influential academics have consistently rejected this proposal with the usual retort of “exploitation”, empty rhetoric about state-driven industrialisation, and the grand plan of engineering a more “equal” society where wealth can be “democratised”.

Alongside them, their ideological cousins, the modern monetary theorists, believe that money generated out of thin air can magically solve the problem by getting an already bloated state to absorb millions of unemployed young people.

Wishful thinking remains the order of the day, and there has been no genuine, good faith attempt to grapple with the reality that the public education crisis has created. Basic economics continues to be subordinated to cheap, opportunistic sloganeering, academic abstraction that is detached from reality, and kindergarten economics.

There will be more space and time in future to discuss other important dimensions of the reservoir, but the hope is that its presentation and brief examination have, at the very least, provided readers with a lens to understand the outcomes of educational dysfunction in South Africa.

Ayanda Sakhile Zulu is a Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation. He holds a BSocSci in Political Studies from the University of Pretoria.