Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - May 30, 2003
While this proposal to pay every household a basic income of R100 a month has support in the broad ranks of the African National Congress, it has not caught the imagination of President Thabo Mbeki and for this reason is unlikely to fly as the cornerstone of a social security system.
Why such intractable opposition from the Union Buildings even though reams of research show the humane and economic sense of the measure? The image of able African men and women queuing monthly for a handout offends the Mbeki imagination of what country and continent could look like.
His mission is essentially that of African self-reliance, of dignity and of equality (not only between races in South Africa but between Africa and the rest of the globe) and ultimately of magnitude. It is the image contained in the International Marketing Council's advertisement of South Africa released this week on to local and international screens: Mbeki, looming large from a majestic mountain range, his happy and prosperous citizens featured as backdrop.
It is the antithesis of the prototype image of Africa: a visage of fly-swaddled and hungry children, desperate shanty towns and, since the early Nineties, the Armageddon-like photographs of people wasting away with Aids.
These offend Mbeki and his Africa projects (both the New Partnership for Africa's Development and the African Union), which are premised on notions of partnership, not patronage; of trade and aid; of African ability, not disability.
There is nothing to argue about concerning this, but where it becomes a problem is that Mbeki's view of African dignity is one which has distorted his approach to Aids and now to social assurance. It is why the grant is being quietly filed under nice-ideas-that-will-never-happen. "As far as I'm aware, BIG is no longer on the agenda," said the government spokesman Joel Nethshitenzhe this week. As far as civil society is aware, it is still on the agenda. On June 9 and 10, Parliament will hold public hearings into the "commission of inquiry into a comprehensive social security system for South Africa", evidence that the Taylor Report (as it is known because it was drawn up by Vivian Taylor) is not off the agenda. It is also evidence also of a dissonance in the ANC on social security.
The BIG coalition, a forceful front led by the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the Black Sash, the South African Council of Churches and others, campaigns for better social security and for the implementation of the income grant, which is a central plank of the Taylor report.
This coalition is looking to the hearings and to next week's Growth and Development Summit to re-open the discussion on BIG, a campaign rivalled only by the Treatment Action Campaign's lobby for drug treatment as a great unifier of the left. Politically, it is a hot potato, especially because of the broad support the grant enjoys in the party. Last year's ANC national policy conference in September and its national conference in Stellenbosch in December fudged BIG, big time. While the left in the party believe discussion will still be held, the centre has decided, if Netshitenzhe's statement is anything to go by.
The government has argued in the past that the BIG would be difficult to implement, although its advocates point out that if the grant is universal, it reduces the risk of corruption and red tape. It is clawed back through a tax, a fiscal measure that Finance Minister Trevor Manuel is wary of.
"We don't really talk about the Taylor report," says Netshitenzhe, "except as broad philosophy." The government has its own programme of social assistance, he says, adding that "as many people as possible should come out of dependency through measures that increase growth".
The short-term social plan's based on food parcels for three months; agricultural starter packs (to encourage subsistence farming) and an R11-billion conditional grant to pay for the phasing-in of the extension of the child support grant to include children aged from eight to 14 years old. It is also premised on growth and employment.
The government's reticence on comprehensive social security for adults is odd in a party that defined itself as social democratic last year and even more odd given that unemployment has become structural while over 22-million people live on less than R144 a month.
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