Close to half of all South Africans, 45.2%, believe they have the educational resources they need available, according to the findings of the 2015 South African Reconciliation Barometer (Sarb) survey released on Tuesday by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS).  

The Sarb survey is the only annual South African public opinion survey of its kind that measures public opinion on national reconciliation.

It was conducted amongst a nationally representative sample of South Africans during August and September 2015, exploring their perceptions of South Africans’ access to resources and advantage and disadvantage looking specifically at education, finances and geographical separation that prohibit the achievement of one’s goals.

IJR policy and analysis head Jan Hofmeyr said IJR was founded after the Truth and Reconciliation period in South Africa in the mid 90s to promote platforms and focus groups in an effort to engage on national cohesion and group reconciliation.

“Extensive focus groups asked people what they regarded as reconciliation which revealed they answered in an ambivalent way. This shows that in the first survey we didn’t pay attention to questions of economic justice,” said Hofmeyr.  

He said new survey questions were introduced in 2013, which resulted in the developed of a new survey, with Hofmeyr mentioning that the resulting Afrobarometer is conducted every two years. 

Amongst the interesting findings of the Sarb survey is that 43.6% of South Africans feel they have access to the financial resources they need while 43.9% believe they have access to the groups of people, or social capital, they need. 

The survey also reveals the perceptions of unemployed respondents who are not looking for a job show that they feel excluded on multiple fronts, with 68% of respondents from this category disagreeing that they are able to easily get to where they need to be in order to achieve their goals.

IJR project leader Elnari Potgieter said the survey focused on four questions that addressed inequality and why it matters, various ways to look at inequality, social mobility and perceptions of access or advantage. 

She said it was interesting that 58.7% of respondents from the higher Living Standards Measures (LSM) categories agreed that they believed they had access to the financial resources required to achieve their goals, which compared 42.7% for the middle LSM categories and 35.7% for the lower LSM categories.

However, she further stated that it was worrying that the number of unemployed people not looking for a job was relatively high.

KAS resident representative Dr Holger Dix said his organization supported the work done by IJR because it was extremely important for a democratic country like South Africa to know the facts.

“I have an impression that government was informed about the data so that it would know whether the country was progressing or not. South Africa is a democratic country but many people are not happy about unemployment,” he highlighted. 

Full report is available at www.ijr.org.za