SOUTH AFRICA: A PATRONAGE SOCIETY OR AN OPPORTUNITY SOCIETY?
By Ryan Coetzee
In defining what they mean by a “developmental state”, both the President and the Minister of Finance have made reference to Amartya Sen’s book, Development as Freedom, but they both seem to ignore its central thrust, which is that individual freedom (defined as the capability to direct one’s own life) is both an end and a means of development.
“Greater freedom”, writes Sen, “enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the world, and these matters are central to the process of development.” Individuals are “agents”, he argues, and an agent is “someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well.”
In other words, development is meaningless unless it both depends on and generates self-directing individuals.
Development, understood in this way, can thus only be achieved in what the DA calls an “opportunity society” – a society in which the state empowers, facilitates and protects, while individuals determine how best to direct their own lives.
This approach is not a smoke-screen for a “minimalist” state, as the President once accused the DA of advocating. In an opportunity society the question is not whether the state plays a role in development – it does – but what the nature of that role is.
In a country like ours, which seeks to overcome a legacy of underdevelopment and discrimination, the state has a crucial role to play in ensuring access to skills development, the labour market, capital and basic healthcare; facilitating economic growth through the provision of infrastructure and a competition-friendly regulatory environment; and in protecting its citizens through the application of the rule of law.
A safety net for the most vulnerable in the form of various grants is also appropriate, as are creative initiatives to achieve broad-based black economic empowerment.
But what the state must not do is seek to achieve development through determining the choices and directing the lives of citizens, dispensing patronage to a greedy elite connected with the ruling party or simply relying on hand-outs to a powerless population and then boasting about a “social wage” as if it could ever compare to one you’ve earned yourself.
Post-apartheid South Africa has too many of the characteristics of a patronage society, and not enough of an opportunity society. The black elite is largely connected to the ANC, much of the black middle class has been created through the public service, and millions of poor black South Africans are dependent on state grants for a living.
In part this is a consequence of the ANC’s racial nationalism, because nationalist parties the world over have always viewed the state as an agency for dispensing patronage to their client base, and the ANC is no different.
But advocates of individual freedom in development now face a new foe, because the left, in the form of Cosatu, the SACP and their supporters, are now in the ascendancy in the ANC, and if Zuma were not available as a (rather improbable) champion of their cause, someone else would be found. As Cosatu’s Secretary-General made clear recently, under a Zuma presidency the outdated and intellectually impoverished economics of the Freedom Charter would guide government thinking.
Collectivists, whether racial nationalists or class warriors, are the enemies of development as freedom.
Meanwhile, three recent surveys show that the freedom of economic actors in our society is in steep decline.
The respected Economic Freedom of the World Report, which measures economies against five indicators, shows that between 2003 and 2004, South Africa dropped 16 places, from 37th to 53rd out of the 130 countries inc
| Posted on 4/6/2007
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