Salutations.
Let me start by expressing my appreciation - firstly, to each of the researchers here who have already contributed to the work available in this phase of the process. Thank you both for work done, and the hard work still to be done. And secondly I want to thank the University of Cape Town for your leadership and the resources you have made available.
In expressing appreciation to UCT, I want to apologise for my behaviour - specifically for being so impossible. I sense that, on the odd occasion, some of you may even have sought my arrest for disturbing the peace. I am over the moon that the old firm, “Wilson and Ramphele” that so ably steered Carnegie II thirty years ago, is back in charge.
I am greatly encouraged by the enthusiasm shown by everyone involved in Carnegie lll –304 papers have already been submitted for discussion! Our task now is to make sure that the papers present not only a detailed analysis of the pervasiveness and the harsh elements of poverty, but that they also assist us in identifying what needs to be done to address the problems.
I know we have already heard about the previous Carnegie processes this afternoon. But let me add to this with my own: Carnegie I was run at a critical period in world history, between World Wars 1 & 2, and in the throes of the great depression. That process produced a handbook that gave apartheid its awful granularity. The Carnegie I report focused on solving the poor white problem and, as a consequence, entrenched the poor black problem. Carnegie II was convened at a particularly interesting time in South Africa’s history – in the wake of the 1976 and 1980 uprisings. The information put together in that report assisted greatly in mobilising virtually each of the communities that had been researched during the process.
Carnegie III is being convened at a propitious period: both in South Africa and across the globe.
Here at home, we are just short of entering our second decade of democracy. We have gained much and reached extraordinary political milestones over the past 18 years. But we haven’t arrived at the Promised Land and we are woefully behind delivering economic freedoms and rights to the majority of South Africans. Put simply: we have yet to make our magnificent Constitution a living reality for millions of South Africans.
Looking beyond your borders, it’s clear to all of us that the world economy is going through convulsions that are having profound effects on our continent, and on our country. The certainty that underpinned so many policies and ways of governing after the fall of the Berlin Wall has vanished. From Brazil to Belarus, from Chile to China, governments and peoples are grappling with fundamental questions about what democracy means in the 21st Century, and specifically how to manage poverty and widening inequality.
I am hoping that Carnegie III will produce a handbook that will set out a range of practical steps aimed at eliminating poverty, not just here, but across the world. It is the kind of handbook that people and their governments across the globe are calling out for.
As many of you are probably aware, the National Planning Commission identified poverty and inequality as the two biggest challenges facing us as this time. We still have a great deal of work to do to ensure that these two scourges are relegated to history.
In the plan we set out six pillars that we believe are necessary preconditions for fighting poverty and inequality.
They are to:
- Unite South Africans of all races and classes around a common programme;
- Involve all citizens actively in their own development, to ensure that democracy is strengthened and government held accountable;
- Raise economic growth, promote exports and ensure that the economy is more labour absorbing;
- Focus on the key capabilities of both people and the country. (We interpret the idea of capabilities to include health, skills, infrastructure, social security, strong institutions and partnerships)
- Build a capable and developmental state; and
- Ensure strong leadership throughout society to work together to solve problems.
We also articulate the critical success factors as:
- Focused leadership over a longer period of time;
- The assertion that this truly is a plan for all South Africans, and that everybody should own it sufficiently to be involved in its implementation;
- The need for institutional reform – the building of capabilities will require significant institutional reform;
- The mobilisation of resources and agreement on trade-offs;
- The willingness to prioritise and the need for careful sequencing; and
- Clarity on responsibility in each area.
What excites me about Carnegie lll process is that the work being done here resonates very strongly with our work in the NPC. This means that we have a unique opportunity to great synergies, to work together, to join forces.
One of the fundamental questions that we should always retain at the back of our minds is how change happens in society. As a still-young democracy, we have the privilege of sharing ownership of the truly empowering Constitution. I occasionally hear people ascribing the tardiness of transformation to the Constitution; respectfully I submit that they are wrong. The Constitution empowers and enables, but beyond that actual change requires human actions. So, for transformation it is important that we recognise the value of our Constitution as presenting the values that bind and enable us.
A second aspect of change that we sometimes appear to aimlessly debate is the place of policy. Policy should guide and provide a framework for evaluating the progress of actions by people. Policy documents do not suddenly assume the ability to walk, talk and act – they only guide. In guiding it is also important that we recognise how different policy elements intersect and mutually reinforce. Too often the economic policy discussion ends with slogans about macro-economics, and all this does is to warn the listener that we have not matured sufficiently to understand that transformation is only possible in an environment of stability created by sound macro-economic policies and that change comes from advancing the implementation of rational, progressive social- and micro-economic policies.
A third aspect of transformation is about who is responsible. The short answer may be that it is and remains the exclusive domain of government. Again, we will counter that this is patently untrue. Whilst government should never be allowed to devolve its responsibility, the process is actually a bit more complex. The Commission is of the view that transformation occurs when a number of agencies interact. The first, and perhaps the most important of these is an active citizenry – a nation whose conscience is vested in the ordinary women and men who comprise and who act in their own and in the national interest – they cannot outsource this responsibility to government. The second agency is leadership – focused, determined and manifest. When we speak of leadership, we counter the notion of the “big man”. Our model of leadership is one that involves tens of thousands of active citizens who take initiative, in the common interest. The third agency is an effective government. This needs to be a clear objective at local, provincial and national levels. An effective government is responsive to the needs of its people, in its listening, policy priorities and allocation of resources. Without the close interaction of these three agencies, no transformation is possible.
After handing over the plan to the President in Parliament just under three weeks ago, we are now intensely focused on steering the plan through to implementation.
I must remind us all that the Commission does not have direct implementation powers. Policy implementation is essentially the responsibility of government. As the Commission we have avoided taking on these responsibilities. Instead, the Commission focused on the links between various policy domains, paying particular attention to the need for seamless execution – regardless of how the Constitution crafts the concurrent powers.
The Commission also identified two other areas that we believe will give the plan legs. These are:
1) Identifying aspects of policy that lend themselves to broad participation in implementation.
2) And secondly, experimentation. Our broad approach is that, in policy areas where solutions are elusive, we must be willing to experiment, or to learn by doing.
I believe that if we pursue these two tracks we will be able to work in close collaboration with Carnegie lll. And by joining forces, I believe we can achieve a great deal and make significant progress.
The work at the NPC has inspired me, and made me a great proponent of “learning by doing”. Fortunately, UCT is the South African host of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). We have seen the value of the methodology of Randomised Evaluation for policy impact. I know that there are policy purists among us who are unsure of the value of randomised evaluations. But I think they can play a critical role in helping us break out of policy deadlocks and help us find a way out of policy cul-de-sacs we’ve driven down. Every single paper submitted to Carnegie lll identifies at least one such problem. We in the NPC did our fair share of identifying the critical challenges that we face as a country. What we need is a methodology that allows us to break the logjams.
But three steps are necessary if we want to go this route:
Firstly, we must be careful about identifying which policies lend themselves to impact evaluation. Not all do, and I have some ideas on which ones could. I have no doubt that you too would have identified areas. We must choose carefully.
Secondly, we must build sufficient capacity to ensure we are effective and efficient in what we do
And lastly, we must build the feedback loops so that we can indeed learn from our successes and our failures.
If we are considered about how we go about implementing this methodology, I believe we can bring about significant changes. As we sit here today, each one of us is painfully aware that many of our policies and a great many of our interventions fail the people who need them the most. This cannot continue.
I have been very persuaded by the strength of the arguments of Esther Duflowho speaks of the three ‘I’s of development, or more precisely the impediments to development. These are ideology, ignorance and inertia (and not the iPhone, iPad and iPod). I want to take a bit of licence with her 3 ‘I’s. Ideology frequently manifests in development as that irritating tendency to know the answer before the question is even posed. This produces an intellectual laziness that starves any enquiry of being able to advance. The result is that practitioners merely attempt to transpose experiences from elsewhere without examining the difference in conditions. Ignorance has two sides – on the one hand ordinary citizens are disempowered because they do not know what their entitlements are, and on the other, there are those public servants who feel that they do not actually need to equip or motivate themselves to tackle the issues of poverty head-on. Frequently, nobody bothers to check whether they apply themselves or not. The poor outcomes of education for the majority speak volumes about the prevalence of this kind of ignorance. Inertia flows automatically from a situation in which the accountability chain is broken. We must fix these three ‘I’s, and focus on one other ‘I’, namely ‘implementation’. We also have to wrap all of this in our learning and in what we find in yet another ‘I’ - ‘ifumana’, the discovery.
I’d like to share a few examples of policy areas in which we believe experimentation could work.
Firstly, the proposals on “An integrated and inclusive rural economy” (Chapter 6) lend themselves to transforming the sector rapidly – provided that we experiment and construct the “learning loops”. The objective is to provide rural communities with opportunities to participate in the economic, social and political life. We recognise that there is a government target to redistribute 30% of agricultural land, and accept the nuanced proposals in the Green Paper on Land Reform. The plan does not attempt to interfere with these targets or objectives. However, we must also recognise the tardiness in reform caused by greed and market distortions are legion.
Our proposed model seeks to speed up reform to black beneficiaries without these market distortions; enable sustainable production by ensuring that skills precede actual transfer; establish monitoring institutions to protect land markets from opportunism; bring land transfer targets in line with fiscal and economic realities and offer the organised agriculture bodies an opportunity to participate in the reform process. The plan is focused on returning land into economic use and not merely transferring ownership without support. The big innovation is to focus the reform proposals at district level.
Similarly, the proposals on agricultural participation include an appreciation of the need to ensure adequate services such as education, healthcare and public transport. The proposal deals at some length with job creation opportunities by sub-sector and a range of support services to make agrarian reform a reality, and talks through the tools necessary to construct trade-offs. This entire body of work has “attacking poverty” written large and bright over it. None of it will be possible without a focus on the empowerment of communities. Yes, please assist in reclaiming the word “empowerment”, as a major bonus.
A second set of proposals that are ripe for experimentation and learning are contained in the chapter on “Transforming human settlement and the national space economy”. The diagnostic overview released in June last year identified the pervasive spatial challenges as one of the reasons for trapping and marginalising the poor. Many of the proposals address deficiencies in government very directly, especially because the responsibility for addressing the spatial challenges spans the three spheres of government. There is a call for addressing poverty through very significant institutional reform and realignment at one level. These institutional reforms, however, include a focus on facilitating the participation of communities differently. There is a recognition that the legislation governing local government, the Municipal Structures Act and Municipal Systems Act, in particular, lays the basis for strong participation by communities. However, in reality the feedback loops remain open and lead to enormous frustrations that frequently explode in angry protests. Amongst the proposals is the re-energising and empowerment of communities. The arguments include the fact that a shift in power can transform the accountability chain, as a means to tackling poverty.
The third set of examples relate to the proposals contained in the chapter that deals with education, training and innovation. From the perspective of the Commission, this is the sine qua non chapter for dealing with a full-on assault on both poverty and inequality. Using the proposals being made by the Department of Basic Education as the basis, the proposals in respect of schools are focused on improving the quality of teaching, school management, school accountability, changing the support from district offices and the involvement of parents, and a different focus on (non-tenderised) infrastructure delivery. The NPCs proposals deal not only with schools but also with early childhood development as well as the FET system, skills development and higher education. Obviously, these proposals are not designed for sequential implementation. The key issue though is to drive an all-in effort at school education. The strength of the proposals about education transformation is that it lends itself so aptly to transformation by district – in part because the character of particular districts is similar and the learning is easily transferrable to adjacent districts. Amongst the metrics to measure improvements in education are obviously those of pass rates - both at Grade 12 and the Annual National Assessment results in Grades 3, 6 and 9. What is often less obvious however is that, by facilitating parental involvement right from the start, the benefits that accrue are numerous because the value of that organisation and engagement will be shown to be immeasurably positive.
I have addressed three areas where the Plan makes proposals that deal with the overarching objectives of the Commission of eliminating poverty and reducing inequality. This should be seen as reflective of the many other proposals in the Plan.
I believe that the real strength of both our endeavours – the NPC’s and Carnegie lll, will be in our ability to tie together in a mosaic of actions for transformation. As H F Verwoerd sat with his handbook for the implementation of apartheid so future decision-makers must be able to sit with the “handbook” developed from Carnegie III to right those wrongs and to give effect to the promise of our wonderful Constitution. However the Constitution will remain but a reminder and a promise unless there is action – so we hope that the style of interaction in your research will empower the tens of thousands of latent leaders to act in their own and in national interest. If you succeed in unleashing the energies to activate citizens, you would have succeeded in strengthening democracy in South Africa. We are looking for more than excellent papers with lengthy bibliographies, we ask for the empowerment of our people.
Let us get to work.
