CHASM OF THE SLEEK CARS By NHLANGANISO DLADLA FRAME 1: Flashback to a choral song we sang some 40 years ago which went Abanye babeze ngezinyawo/ abanye babeze ngamathilamu/ abanye bebegibele ibhasi/ abanye beeezeee ngomanyolooozeeeeeeelaaaa! (some came on foot, others came on the tram, yet others took the bus, but some drove up in the sleekest of cars – umanyolozela). I was reminded of this song while musing at the contradiction between the touching camaraderie and general equal treatment of comrades, against the inequality of means on display at the recent ANC conference in the Eastern Cape. The same can be witnessed in many other instances where we congregate for some occasion of common human interest: the ever growing multitude who metaphorically foot it, against the consolidating of own-interest by all and any means for those with an ever growing array of umanyolozela. The moral chasm continues to grow and deepen as the rich and those who get by in middle-class comfort stretch their empathetic distance from the poor, desperate and homeless in our midst. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it cannot be that there is no alternative to this scheme of grossly unequal and undignifying arrangements. Frame 2: On a recent Aljazeera Head to Head programme, Lord Adair Turner, former head of the UK Financial Services Authority, grudgingly admits to growing a socio-economic inequality and other troubles predominantly driven by a financial sector that has imposed upon the world strange definitions of value and quietly redefined relations over time between key economic agents. Out of this we end up with the state – especially in the west, but dragging everyone else along – at the behest of the powerbrokers of the financial sector. Asked if those responsible for the excessive self-regulated greed of a global financial sector cited as chiefly responsible for the economic meltdown of 2008 should be brought to book, Turner responded that none of them had broken any “rules” against which there is legislated punishment. He admitted, though, they may have got carried away with minting money through means harmful to the economy and our greater well-being. When it was suggested that those responsible for the 2008 crash should, instead of continuing to run the show on state-driven rescue packages, step aside and let others lead the reconstruction effort, Turner baulked – it would be unwise to let go of people with the “technical skills” needed to fix the problem. Asked if the underlying dominant economic philosophy through which the impulses of the greedy and morally detached are legitimated should not be revisited, he committed to “liberal capitalism and the market economy”, and said there was no better alternative. But is this really the case? Frame 3: We shift to what Bob Marley had to say about the “technically skilled” and injustices against the poor: de Babylon system is the vampire, falling empire/ Suckin’ the blood of the sufferers/ Building church and university/ Deceiving the people continually/ Me say them graduatin’ thieves and murderers And so we read recently that an oligopoly of big construction firms swindled the state and others of monies conservatively estimated in the region of R47billion. For this they are fined R1.46-billion and allowed to walk away with a cool 97% of their loot. There is no indication that these companies are likely to be excluded from benefiting further from the R3.2-trillion of the government’s potential infrastructure spend up to 2020, or over R840-billion already approved over the medium term strategic framework. Like Turner’s argument for entrusting the future to those responsible for our economic crisis, perhaps the overriding sentiment will again be “they have the technical skills we need”. At any rate, the free market theoretical construct of “legitimate” transacting underlying these “technical skills” also allows, by the way, for a setting of so-called “exchange value” or price at any point. This supposedly “equilibrates” supply and demand, “peace” between buyer and seller, the only moral arbiter being a “justice” of libertarian whim. So maybe the R1.46-billion slap on the wrist can be shrugged off as a sop to those who take this matter of morality a bit too seriously. And so it is that with such seductive economics we will again likely walk into a future of massive government expenditure without any guarantees of tight mechanisms to check what has now manifested as a group tendency towards selfishness and deceit, an absence of scruple amongst a good number of people who signed up for an oligopoly that calculatingly ganged up against the rest of us and used their “technical skills” and sheer guile to “suck the blood of the sufferers”. Is there really no alternative? Of course there are [alternatives], and these will require that we work creatively across and through a number of institutional fronts and stakeholders – mainly the state, the community and institutions of research and innovation, education and training. In the industry dominated by the oligopolies in question, for example, let us for starters consider the option of the state pushing for an increased, and ever increasing representation of the historically excluded. This hopefully not through the standard BEE approach through which big business and pampered black acolytes have continued to milk the state. How about we begin, for instance, by moving the 3% of the returned construction oligopoly’s loot to the Department of Higher Education and Training and partners. Then use this to train and develop a number of community-embedded co-operatives, and other collective formations of emerging contractors, who will be deliberately positioned for a significant slice of the huge infrastructure budget. That R1.46-billion can buy a lot of training and some start-up tools to catalyse these contractors into participating in new builds as well as being contracted for maintenance of the infrastructure. Such investment in building capabilities can complement related progressive actions by sections of the state already serious about exploring alternatives to an economy currently set up to only work for a few. Such as the Tshwane Metro’s recent laudable decision to carve a slice of R1.1-billion in its procurement budget to benefit cooperatives. The idea of privileging cooperatives here is not driven by tender hearts and soft heads. Rather by calculations which show that, even within the capitalist frame, more players offer better prospects for economic growth and political and social stability than do a few. If proper and careful work is done around these initiatives, and if the due expertise is marshalled around nurturing and consolidating them over time, we might inch closer to a point where policy gets much more assertive and technically astute about privileging the many over the few with regards to the application of state resources in economic activity. The catalytic hand of the state in seeding enterprises biased towards collectives, or other less exploitative forms of participation in the economy, could also lead to this energy extending its influence to the private sector market. We might perhaps even begin to also see a growing assertive scholarship concerned with carefully revisiting theoretical constructs on value, on well-being, on development and on justice. So that a more dignifying and life-affirming future is constructed for us all, and generations to come – humans, and the ecological environment that sustains life. There are indeed other alternatives, and we need to work more seriously on building them. Nhlanganiso Dladla is senior fellow at the NMMU’s Centre for Integrated PostSchool Education and Training and coinitiator of the Ilima Community Economies Programme
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 09:12:45 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015