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Date : 17/11/2005
Source: Minister of Finance
Title: Manuel: City of Angels Awards Dinner


Speech by Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, MP, at the City of Angels Awards Dinner, Cape Town

From time to time history presents a generation with opportunities for intensive learning, and, I imagine, that history requires of us to internalise these lessons and effect corrections to our practice.

In this regard, 2005 has given us great learning opportunities, sufficient to beg us, as decision-makers, to take corrective steps.

I would like to share three events of 2005 and the lessons learnt and together we must return to evaluate whether the corrective steps will have the desired effect.

Firstly, there was Hurricane Katrina. Who could forget the immensity of the storm, the lack of preparedness by the world’s most powerful government, the submersion of New Orleans, the scale of the human tragedy – with lives lost and property destroyed? Moreover, who could forget the shock of exposure to the underclass in the United States of America (USA), an underclass gripped by poverty and alienation, in an environment where there was sufficient evidence of racism for all to accept that the social problems in the USA are much, much deeper than previously imagined by most? This prompted Wynton Marsalis, the celebrated jazz trumpeter who was born in New Orleans, to write of the tragedy:

“Let’s use the resurrection of the city to reacquaint the country with the gift of New Orleans: a multicultural community invigorated by the arts. Forget about tolerance. What about embracing? This tragedy implores us to re-examine the soul of America. Our democracy from its very beginning has been challenged by the shackles of slavery. The parade of black folks across our TV screens asking, as if ghosts, ‘Have you seen my father, mother, sister, brother?’ reconnects us all to the still unfulfilled goals of the Reconstruction era. We always back away from fixing our nation’s racial problems. Not fixing the city’s levees before Katrina struck will now cost untold billions. Not resolving the nation’s issues of race and class has and will cost much, much more.”

The second lesson I would like to share with you is the death of some young Africans in September when they sought to enter Europe by the only land route through the Spanish bits of Morocco called Ceuta and Melilla. Eight young men died when they stormed a razor-wire fence at Melilla whilst trying to get into Europe. The journeys of so many to that point are so frequently epic. A not uncommon story would be similar to that told by Boubacar Balde, 24, who left his home country, Guinea Bissau, in March 2004. He traversed Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Algeria to reach Morocco, and managed to scale the fence at Melilla in September 2005. In answer to why he acted thus Boubacar explains, “In my country I earned no money and couldn’t get a decent job. If I get to Europe, I can earn money for my parents, who don’t work, so they can buy a nice house and a little car.”

President Mbeki, commenting on this experience writes, “The African immigrants of the 21st century AD seek to enter the Iberian Peninsula and Europe not as conquerors, intent to serve as a civilizing force. Rather, they scramble to emigrate from Africa to work as underlings in a modern Europe that putatively offers them the possibility to earn the meagre wherewithal provided by a low wage, which would determine whether they live or die.”

Do we ever pause to consider the human condition that so drives people like Boubacar and so many others – that determination that overcomes the fear of losing life and limb in the simple quest to earn a living? More importantly, can we relate to people like Boubacar in a way that recognizes that quest and does not see them as a threat to the jobs of our children and neighbours, even when they arrive in Cape Town?

The third and freshest lesson I want to draw to your attention is the uprising that has spread through France over the past few weeks, an uprising that has spread like a veld-fire through banlieues of 300 French towns before leaping across the border into Belgium and Germany. In most instances the riots, car-burnings and street battles are being waged by the second- or even third-generation descendants of immigrants of North- or West- African origin.

There is this profound statement on this matter: "In the deprived suburbs, a kind of soft terror rules. When too many young people see nothing ahead but unemployment after they leave school, they end up rebelling. For a time the state can struggle to impose order, and rely on welfare benefits to avoid worse. But how long can this last?”

We all agree that these words offer wise counsel. They were spoken by Jacques Chirac in January 1995 whilst he was campaigning for the French Presidency. He has been President of the Republic since May 1995. Why did his government not act on what they knew a decade ago?

All three these stories return to those words of Wynton Marsalis, “not resolving the nation’s issues of race and class has and will cost us so much more.”

Who is listening to this haunting voice? Who cares? Who should act?

One of the central features of the many, deep social problems highlighted by the stories told is the fact of youth unemployment. In France, the level of unemployment for under 25’s is 21.7% and for the children of immigrants, it is very much higher. As in Germany, where youth unemployment is 13.8%, but double that for the young offspring of Turkish immigrant families. In Italy, youth unemployment is way above 20%.

All of these countries have social welfare benefits, that are costly and the cause of huge deficits, but they exist. They are a tax on future generations, but they exist. As President Chirac said, that the country could “rely on welfare benefits to avoid worse”. Welfare benefits have not solved the problem – sometimes it serves to lengthen the fuse and sometimes makes no difference.

These examples present themselves as a wonderful prism to see ourselves refracted through. So what are the challenges of Cape Town, this rather peculiar African city? Are we at risk? Who cares? Who listens? Who acts?

Are we seizing history’s gift to us? More particularly, are we prepared to internalise the lessons and effect the corrections to our own world and our own sphere of influence?

If there are two cities that Capetonians have always wanted Cape Town to be when she grows up, it would be New Orleans and Paris.

New Orleans, the Big Easy, the soul kitchen, the multicultural melting pot has always been much admired. Now we understand a bit better that beneath the cool exterior was masked an underbelly of deep poverty and racism. We have now learnt that black people were isolated to the swampy low-lying areas like the Lower Ninth Ward. They were obviously at greatest risk of being flooded and Black people were disproportionately affected because they were least able to escape the path of the hurricane. Is Cape Town anything like New Orleans?

Paris, the City of Lights, Home of the Bastille and the Paris Commune, the centre of romance and of intellectual discourse, of Sartre and De Beauvoir, and the 1968 uprising. Yet, a stone’s throw from the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne lay banlieues such as Clichy-sous-Bois and Evry and Corbeil that have erupted over the past few weeks. Is this the same delusion we suffer from when we hope that the beauty of Table Mountain and the cruel memory of Robben Island will distract attention from Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha, Manenberg and Nyanga?

What do we see? Who cares? Who listens? Who acts?

It is very necessary that we know the underbelly of Cape Town, the Western Cape and South Africa to ensure that WE can act and that we act both correctly and timeously.

Let us just look at a few of the socio-economic indicators in the Province, and since 80% of the provincial population lives in the city, it is fair to accept the statistics between the city and province as reasonable proxies for each other.

In 2003, just over 38 000 young people in the province wrote matric, and of the total, just over 33 000 or 87% passed. Of the number who passed, 27.1% obtained university endorsement. Of the total number who wrote, 4 268 (11%) passed with mathematics on the higher grade and 3 937 (10%) passed. So we start with a small number of school-leavers (11%) who can be trained in higher level skills universities. I observe that there are some 80 schools in the province that have more than 1 400 learners and that 57% of these are in the Metropole East and the Metropole North. Would anybody present hazard a guess at how many learners from those two Metropoles are included in the 4 000 passes with mathematics on the higher grade? Let me help you here – of the mathematics higher grade passes, there are 220 African, 853 Coloured and 201 Indian learners, and that presumably even includes those who attended former “Model C” schools. So how many learners passed mathematics on the higher grade at Cape Flats schools? Why has it become so easy to limit the opportunities of learners by de-emphasising the importance of mathematics and science? Surely this must be repaired through extra-effort in the schooling system all the way from pre-school to matric.

Who cares? Who is listening? Who acts?

Let me also draw attention to a second set of indicators – employment. The national unemployment rate is 26.5%, but for young people, under the age of 25 it is 52% and for those between 25 and 34 it is 31%. In the Western Cape the unemployment rate amongst the youth aged 16 to 25 stands at 49%.

It is not as though jobs are not being created – between 2000 and 2003, 194 000 new jobs were created, at a rate higher than the national average – but the number of young people joining the labour market by far exceeds the older people leaving it, hence the build-up of unemployed youth. Let me add a gentle reminder, that unlike France, Germany or many other countries, we do not have a system of welfare benefits for the unemployed who have never worked. The fact of unemployment at such horrendously high levels is obviously the biggest risk facing both the Province and the city.

A large chunk of the answer to unemployment lies in upgrading the available skills – none of this will happen without that huge investment in maths and science education, without which investment opportunities will remain in those sectors that have far lower prospects of dynamic growth.

An enormous concern that we should discuss in the context of labour absorption is the fact that school dropout rates are as horrendously high as a mere 45% to 52% of those who enrol at Grade 1 reaching Grade 12.

Who cares? Who is listening? Does the French experience of unemployed youth talk to us? Who acts?

A third telling set of indicators is the causes of death. Homicide, (in case we’ve forgotten, that’s the killing of one person by another) is the top cause of death in Cape Town (10.6% of all deaths) – that is 70 per 100 000. The highest rates are in Nyanga (133) and Khayelitsha (120) and the lowest rates in Blaauwberg (33) and the South Peninsula (35). AIDS related deaths features third on the list of causes of death and affects more women than men. Road accidents are the ninth cause of death – again the highest rates are in Nyanga and Khayelitsha and the lowest in Blaauwberg and the South Peninsula (7 times greater risk in Nyanga than in the South Peninsula).

The truth about health care is that large chunks of disease can be prevented by attending to a range of ‘other’ issues, including services like water and sanitation and a huge investment in education, to try and alter the conduct of people. Who cares? Who is listening? How will we drive the changes?

The fourth telling indictment is in the crime statistics. In general terms, more affluent areas will have more property related crime, while poor, disadvantaged areas experience more serious violent crime. The police service areas that are treated as priority areas as they have higher crime levels over a period are – Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Kuils River, Nyanga, Gugulethu, and Phillippi. Homicide rates are significantly higher than the national average, burglaries are twice the national average and child abuse almost thrice the national average (just yesterday it was reported that 23 victims of child abuse were admitted to the Red Cross hospital in the past week alone). None of this is surprising – the links between crime and poverty are circular – poverty leads to crime and crime then leads to further poverty. The linkages between inequality reduction, poverty reduction and growth are central to dealing with the extent and nature of crime.

The trends in this city are so glaringly strong. As Paris has its burning banlieues and New Orleans has its Lower Ninth Ward and Cancer Alley, so Cape Town has a measurable underclass that resides primarily in the East Metropole. We must be aware of the phenomenon, its location and its dimensions – because we care, we listen and we want to act.

But, to act correctly, to ensure that we ingest the gifts of history’s lessons, we must pause and ask a few questions about the nature of the society we want to bequeath to future generations.

In a recently published article, Joel Netshitenzhe, head of GCIS wrote: “Any civilisation contains within itself the possibility of its own sustenance and advancement, as well as the seeds of its own destruction.” And then, in a critique of what he observes taking place in South Africa presently he writes: “We confine our intellectual horizons to maintaining the configurations of a capitalism inherited from the robber-baron culture of the erstwhile colonial masters.”

How do we develop the value system associated with basic humanness – values such as community, as plough-back, as ubuntu, as vuk’zenzele? How do we, as a society, bypass this crass materialism that wants to suggest that the only measure of our contribution is the cost of our possessions? How do we construct those deep partnerships that bring the poor into action about matters that affect their daily lives, where such action is deliberate and not dependent on protest?

But, who are the agents of change? Who will act as our collective conscience? Who will ensure that we do repeat the errors that history begs us to avoid? Who indeed?

Let me, in conclusion, share with you snippets of the many wonderful stories of the Angels who work to make a difference:
* I find them in the Bambanani campaign that has measurably reduced violent crime,
* I see them in groups of people, who plough back into the depressed areas in the Eastern Metropole whence they come,
* I know them from their tireless work in preschool education,
* I experienced them as the teachers, who still see teaching as a vocation and commit to saving young people,
* I have marvelled at the individuals who commit their time as sports administrators in depressed communities.

There is a long, long list of wonderful people who see, who hear, who feel and who respond.

Tonight we want to applaud their dedication, their love and their example. Tonight we want to express the collective appreciation of all of us who are too small, too selfish or supposedly too busy to be like them. And we want to ask those very special, determined individuals and groups not to lose patience with us, to keep the hope alive and to lead us into battle against catastrophe.

Thank you
Issued by: Minister of Finance
17 November 2005
   

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