Moin zusammen.
TAU South Africa Bulletin \"Who are the workers and who are the drones?\"Date Posted: Tuesday 01-Jul-2008
June 30, 2008
WHO ARETHE WORKERS AND WHO ARE THE DRONES?
The editor of an agricultural magazine recently remarked that spin doctoring seemed to be more important to the South African government than “doing any real work”. These remarks reflect a wound which has festered since Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation came into being – people who work hard are getting the short end of the stick, while the drones and the parasites and the inefficient are being paid more, are taking unto themselves more of the shrinking economic pie, at the same time killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
This situation harks back to the concept of wealth creation, the absolute starting point of any successful nation. If a country’s citizens cannot create wealth, then their only recourse is to distribute what wealth there is until nothing is left. This would appear to be the reasoning – if that is the word - behind the government’s land redistribution policy. Combined with the colossal inefficiency, corruption and sloth so prevalent within the civil service, grabbing productive land is a natural progression for those who cannot produce.
This mentality is barely understood throughout the world, even though post-independent Africa is a glaring illustration of this mindset. African Predicament by Erich Leistner, ex head of the Africa Institute and an acknowledged expert on African social and cultural backgrounds, puts this cast of mind succinctly. “The foremost reason for Africa’s predicament is the powerful hold of traditional worldviews, values and practices on thinking and doing”, he says. “South Africans need to understand the forces obstructing Africa’s development because they affect our own future”.
True and wise words. Why is it, we ask, that the most fertile soils in our country – along the Eastern sector, home to the Zulus and the Xhosas – are unproductive, while the less fecund parts of our very dry and drought-prone country produce most of our food? The answer is that the people who occupy those areas are poles apart in mindset, cultural mores and attitudes to forward planning, individual achievement and the work ethic.
Leistner’s book reveals why Africa is at the bottom of all the piles, locked into its cultural practices and, in most instances, unable to make the mental leap to thinking and values which are at the root of successful nations – individualism, scientific enquiry, trial and error, hard work and the corollary to success, failure.
“Africa cannot attain the economic progress it desires unless it reconsiders and modifies the worldview that had its origin in primordial times and was well-suited to the needs of a pre-industrial civilization and subsistence economy” declares Leistner. He quotes numerous African scholars who share this view. “Traditional society is organized for subsistence, and while nature freely provided this society with all of its needs, the notion of wealth being created through human endeavour was foreign to it”.
Traditional thinking regarded the total amount of wealth as given and unalterable. It therefore could not visualize wealth being created by combining human skills and ingenuity with natural resources. In this view, wealth could only be redistributed, not increased. “Failure to understand that wealth can be created without taking from others explains the misconception (in Africa) that nationalization or “indigenisation” of privately-owned assets can enhance well being all round”, writes Leistner.
Thus traditional thinking does not know or understand man-made resources, only natural resources – land, trees, water - and these belong to everyone. The thought that these resources could become private property is foreign to traditionalists. This attitude is manifest in South Africa’s townships where residents consider it preposterous that they should be expected to pay for electricity, water and even for land. It also exists in traditional rural societies where land belongs to the community, administered by a chief.
Thus traditional society was not concerned with protecting and improving natural resources, notably the soil. Land in Africa is not primarily an economic resource. Traditionally, says Leistner, “it has a deep and emotional meaning”.
Thus we have the problem with land in South Africa, and we have seen how Zimbabwe has been returned to primitive ruin as politicians pander to “the people” by giving them land. In South Africa, two cultures collide on the land question. Clearly, the South African government, for all its pretensions at modernity and up-to-the-minute democracy, is still mired in a mindset that has absolutely no place in a food-scarce world. It is a dangerous point we have now reached.
Individual freehold tenure is generally seen as the bedrock of first world economic progress. The concept is sacrosanct in the Western world and indeed in all progressive and developing economies. But Africa continues to remain behind everyone else, especially with regard to food production, because the cultural mindset has yet to move into the 21st century while Asia, the Indian sub-continent and most of the rest of the world has adapted to the demands of a profit-driven economy.
The European work ethic which transformed South Africa from a wasteland into a first world state is proving difficult to superimpose on the country’s third world sector by “the transfer of skills”, a phrase so amply punted by the government. While a skill such as driving a car or working a computer can be taught, an intuitive and resourceful mindset is non-transferable. Hence our insistence that the commercial farming sector in South Africa be left alone to provide sustenance for 45 million people because the mindset as well as the skills are unique, and hard to replace. These are the people who are doing “the real work”.
But within the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs (DLA), who is actually doing “real work”? An example: more than 22 000 land owners have claims against their land, but are not aware of this fact! TAU SA says it is scandalous that the DLA could not even go public with these claims in the ten-year period since the closing date for filing land claims. This is the ultimate in gross maladministration and inefficiency. In other words, DLA is not doing its work.
In addition, many farmers who have “sold” their land to the government have had to wait for years for payment, if they receive payment at all. Together with the government’s BEE policy of political ideology over competence and merit, the work being performed is further diminished. The corruption and maladministration scandal at the Land Bank is but one example. In recent Agricultural Research Council advertisements for highly technical and specialized posts, the DLA states it is an “equal opportunity employer”. This is government speak for blacks need only apply. Thus the ability of the DLA to “do its work” is further hobbled because of a policy that makes no sense in any progressive country.
The Standard Bank Review (First Quarter 2008) states that the agriculture sector is “without doubt the cornerstone of the South African economy”. Commercial farmers are the producers, while the DLA is not working to support this sector. On the contrary, this government department goes out of its way to frustrate this sector and to promote a policy of transferring productive farms to people who, according to the Standard Bank, don’t want to farm. The Bank quotes the Centre for Development and Enterprise’s figures: only 9% of blacks who are not farmers have aspirations to farm, while only 15% of farm workers want to farm for their own account.
The West last year donated $1,2 billion to help Africa’s 400 million small farmers. Adjusted for inflation, that is about the same amount donated annually more than 30 years ago, according to World Bank figures. It seems the mindset throughout Africa hasn’t changed. Food output per person in Africa has fallen for the past 30 years, despite these donations, and agricultural productivity is a quarter of the world’s average, according to the United Nations. Time magazine says that there is “chronically low farmer productivity” in the world’s poorest countries, many of which are in Africa. The emphasis is on the word chronic – the status quo remains, and the mind set doesn’t change.
Thus the motivation for the redistribution of these farms is the transfer of land, not farms. The government is therefore no more advanced than Zimbabwe or any other African basket case because its motivations fit the pattern of the primordial - land is the key, not what it produces. The fact that the government’s redistribution has resulted in loss of production seems not to be of concern to the government – land is the key, land is the vote getter and food production, even in the face of the worst food crisis for centuries, seems not to be an issue.
Those who are concerned about bread on the table for every South African should defend the agricultural status quo with everything at their disposal – if South Africa’s remaining commercial farmers are sacrificed on the altar of ideology and a backward mindset, then we are all losers.
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Gruß, Michael
