The Ignition Zone Podcast

The hidden crisis: Multidimensional Poverty in South Africa with Dr Pali Lehohla

• Mmathebe • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Welcome to the Ignition Zone, where we ignite change with Dr Pali Lehohla, the former Statistician-General of South Africa. Discover the transformative potential of looking at poverty beyond income, embracing a multidimensional perspective championed by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. Journey with us through the complexities of poverty in Africa and learn from Dr. Lehohla's experiences with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. Dr. Lehohla emphasizes the crucial role of evidence-based interventions and systems thinking in addressing South Africa's inequality and unemployment issues.

Unearth the intricate ties between education, unemployment, and poverty in South Africa, where systemic inefficiencies perpetuate socioeconomic challenges. The conversation reveals stark disparities in educational attainment across racial groups and the cascading effects of economic inequality. A radical reimagining of achievement and strategic planning is urged, focusing on leveraging government grants as investable capital to create sustainable economic cycles, inspired by Keynesian economics. Witness the power of statistics in illuminating how unemployment amplifies poverty, necessitating a shift in poverty alleviation strategies.

Finally, engage with the vital dialogue on collaboration between government and business to meet developmental goals. We spotlight successful models from organizations like Applied Development Research Solutions and the University of Stellenbosch, showcasing the importance of systematic stakeholder engagement. This episode underscores the need for integrated policy approaches to foster social and economic development across Africa, focusing on education and family dynamics. Join us for this thought-provoking exploration of strategies to combat poverty and inequality, and stay tuned for future discussions that continue to challenge and inspire.

Watch on YouTube on: https://youtu.be/CHJlseTM3hM?si=YzK_RPOa0pESGTXp

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Ignition Zone, your go-to podcast, where we ignite ideas, spark transformation and fuel the journey to unlocking Africa's economic potential. I am your host, matebe Zobo, and I'm so excited to take you on this incredible adventure into the world of economic development, entrepreneurship and career growth. To the world of economic development, entrepreneurship and career growth, welcome to the Ignition Zone, the platform where we explore ideas that drive Africa's transformation. Today, we're tackling a critical issue poverty, one that affects many of Africans. South Africa, despite it being a middle-income country, has high poverty rates, worsened by inequality and unemployment. But poverty isn't just about income. It's multidimensional, requiring evidence-based interventions. Joining me is Dr Paddy Lohotla, former Statistician General of South Africa, who has dedicated his entire career to using data-driven approaches to measure and tackle poverty. Dr Badilo Hotla, thank you so much for honoring the invitation and welcome to the Ignition Zone podcast.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much, and thank you for venturing into this very provocative space, where advocacy is needed on a daily basis, especially given the challenges that we have, and bringing this to the attention of society and policymakers and all of us, because all of us are patriots and we are not doing this because it's llama for fame, but it's actually using our knowledge basis on what we have to do, and those approaches could be different, but at least agreeing on the facts themselves and characterizing them appropriately takes us to 90% of solving the problem.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and I think you're 100% correct, because that is really the goal of the podcast to provide actionable insights such that we are able to really align on what needs to be done. But let's start with your experience and study in multidimensional poverty. Many associate poverty with only income levels, but your work shows that it's far more complex, and so really the question for me is can you explain what multidimensional poverty is and how it differs from a traditional way of looking at it from an income perspective?

Speaker 2:

Well, the answer to that is a year explanation Time to be taken almost a year. In explaining it, let me be a bit cryptic and take you through a journey of what it is, how it evolved, how now we succeeded in making sure that multidimensional poverty became one of the indicators or at least one of the measures that had been accepted by the United Nations, sustainable Europe and Goals, and it is used as looking at Goal 1.2.2. And it was a rather long journey that took almost a decade to arrive at that being accepted. It preceded the UN SDGs and it took a lot of energy to put it through the Statistics Commission to a point where the Commission then accepted that as a measure. I had a little part to play there while I was Statistician General and after I left Statistics South Africa and being part of an associate at Oxford University and a person who was working with Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative chaired by Sab, the Al-Khir Foster Method that they developed to address the philosophical question and the practical question that Amartya Sen identified that poverty is multidimensional and he said people are battered in all kinds of ways in their lives. The way to go about this is to acknowledge that poverty is multidimensional and therefore a framework that is multidimensional and therefore a framework that is multidimensional is necessary to address this. So this is Amartya Sen's perspective, the Nobel laureate, and Sabine Alkir and James Foster came with tools and propagated to measure poverty multidimensionally, which includes income. So in South Africa we were approached by Al-Qaeda around 2010, and I had a full journey with them over the seven years that followed in my tenure as statistician general, from that time when I met them and I continue to be part of them now. That's about 14 years to try and deal and ensure that we understand that poverty is multidimensional. One of my wishes is that when the finance minister presents his budget, he doesn't only give us the GDP measures, the prospects and all that kind of thing, but he puts on the side, side by side, in the Red Book how much we will have reduced or addressed multidimensional poverty, because then we'll be addressing real issues.

Speaker 2:

And in the multidimensional schema for South Africa, we have four dimensions. The one is employment, which is a measure of economic activity, which is employment. We have social indicators such as access to water, access to sanitation, access to electricity, and all that under the dimension of social dimension. And then we have a health dimension, which looks at mortality. The main indicator there is children dying under the age of five in the household and the last measure is education. The dimensions are four in the South African case and these dimensions are statistically measured by incidence of existence of those conditions, such as a child dying under five years in the household, children of school-going age not being in school in the household and unemployment, of course, the number of people that are unemployed in the household.

Speaker 2:

They have cut-off points and then when you put these dimensions together, you really get some interesting magic. One of the things that we did in Stetson, sa, was to ask society what are the priorities? Very interestingly, the priorities came up and, of course, if it was during ESCOM time, escom would have come highest, electricity, that is, they came, as you know unemployment, high electricity tariffs, water there was a third one, and then education came as number 15. Wow, now, when you have a society which looks at education as priority number 15, politicians, when they go and campaign, they're not going to campaign on education, they are campaigning on these other things that are important hygiene issues that are important but account for very little when we have to address national challenges.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

And that's where the disconnect is. The political economy is unconnected with society, but society's articulation and conduct, in the way they create priorities, unless it's put through a systems thinking, we'll always miss the seriousness, the nuggets will go for symptoms instead of the real cause. Only when you do the scientific work of analysis of multidimensional forward you realize that unemployment, yes, it stops, but education is second. Unlike the popular view of a survey that says education is number 15, the analysis shows that education is number two. So that disconnect of perceived needs and felt needs is dissected and then presented in its real impact in the multidimensional forward. I think we could take it off and then I'll bring the screen up so that you can see what I'm talking about, because otherwise, if you don't see these things in graphical form, they don't make it.

Speaker 1:

Please feel free to share that. And I think, for me, one of the key things that still actually is a conundrum for me is that all of these things are wicked problems like solving education, solving health. These are all difficult things to do and I'm just wondering you know whether South Africa, and actually Africa as a whole, is geared up in terms of prioritization? So, firstly, to the point, you spoke about education being number 15, but also in terms of what exactly are the steps that should be taken to deal with these different elements of multidimensional poverty.

Speaker 2:

Indeed, it is very important to delve deeper into the analysis because otherwise it will become a bit flippant. In dealing with these things we will never really get to the main things that have to be attended to. There was 1953 in the South African parliament asked the dead the parliament by saying what is the use of teaching a child mathematics? They can't use it in practice. I think hardly anyone knows about this question because anchored in it are our fortunes in South Africa today and if we do not go back to that question and see the steps that were taken as a deliberate process, if we don't become deliberate in our actions to address that, we will be doomed as we are now and of course, for the whole continent, because colonialism was basically about this issue that Fairwood articulated so well with apartheid. Now, with Monique Chaffee who asked what is our purpose and you know there are many policy missteps that we have in the country Nick Shafik says what do we owe each other? And talks about this matter of what we owe each other.

Speaker 2:

And you can see here education is the biggest spend for people who are 6 to 21. The biggest spend here is education Because they spend on health and spend on health, as you see there, and then spend on welfare this age. But the bulk of it is education and in South Africa we spend quite a bit of budget on education. Almost 90% of our budget goes to this thing and the idea is that after that education you can actually go work and then start earning and then, of course, those earnings that you get create the basis for tax and the taxation looks at welfare and the like, and then, when you are at my age, you go on pension and then you receive that spend in terms of pensions. Now the question is whether in South Africa, we follow this trajectory carefully. Probably we are pouring money into a bottomless pit here in education because it doesn't yield to working. Yes, but even for those who work, the two-part system is inconsistent with this design, because if we have to withdraw pension money while we are working because we are under stress, then the wicked problem is not understood.

Speaker 2:

The wicked problem is not about the immediacy of consumption needs. The immediate problem is creating intergenerational value, and the pensions create that intergenerational value. And are we deploying those pensions properly? Is the question Now going straight into a multidimensional property? And, of course, the design for actually understanding this is the vectors, and there are three vectors here that are goods, abilities and vectors of achieved functions.

Speaker 2:

The question is do we understand what achievement is is? Do we understand what achievement is? If we understood achievement, we wouldn't go into a two-part system, because it cannot lead to this achieved function, because you are robbing the future, the current and the future of the future. Yeah, and that's the wicked problem. If we don't deploy analytical tools, we will never deal with the problems because they are multi-dimensional. So this is where the faults are in our planning systems, and you don't see anything that resembles an adequate address to these problems. This survey now I told you about the priorities. This survey now I told you about the priorities. And then, of course, south Africa, ranking number one reliable water, employment and cost of electricity. You can see it's mapped at lower levels of geography. You can see where these pressures are.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they're rank one, I mean it's rank two and rank three and it's at the lowest level of geography. And there you come time. It sounds like it also is not fundamentally being prioritized in terms of what actually goes into education.

Speaker 2:

We have characterized it correctly that we are going through the motions. You know, and when you deal with wicked problems you don't go through the motions. You have to be very radical in analyzing the information and having foresight on what does achievement mean and what are the things that have to go into that thing that we call achievement. And then we shift quick into inputs. Right, and when this president rises tomorrow on the state of the nation, he'll be talking about inputs. So will he be his finance minister. They'll be talking about inputs. And those inputs are not even this vector of goods and services. It's not characterization, not at all. Neither is it defining the capabilities, which is vectors of potential functions and absolutely empty in terms of impact. And this is where the wicked problems are not addressed. And every day when we wake up, a decade passes. We haven't as well addressed those wicked problems. So this is where the problem is.

Speaker 2:

So let me go to our multidimensional poverty measures. But this is what it takes to come to understand. So when I ran through those graphs, I was trying to come to this point where, given that we said poverty is number 15, analysis and subjecting that to an analysis gives you this kind of ranking In 2001, unemployment was 33% as a driver of poverty, as a multi as a driver of poverty. It's a multidimensional driver of poverty. You saw the rankings it was water and then unemployment was second. But you can see the significance of the analysis showing you the reality. And then in 2011, it was 40% as a driver of poverty, and then in 2016, it was 52%. When you take this period here, this 33% to 40%, it happened over a period of 10 years, but when you take 2011 to 2016, it grew by 12 percentage points in a period of five years.

Speaker 1:

Sure.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, increased by 12 percentage points in half the time. That's acceleration.

Speaker 1:

What this simply means is whatever we're doing to address unemployment is not working.

Speaker 2:

In order to address poverty. It's not working.

Speaker 1:

Right, okay.

Speaker 2:

Yes, of course, an intermediate is unemployment, but the ultimate is dealing with poverty. Right, but the ultimate is dealing with poverty. And unless the red book on this state of the nation, or at least finance, reflects this multidimensional poverty measures, it will never be acted upon, because then we are focusing on debt to GDP ratio and all those things that economists and national GDP not GDP and I'm happy that we are talking about beyond GDP GDP as a measure of well-being is far off and corrupted by our own perception of what our purpose is. Number two here is years of schooling, education 16 percentage points in 2001, 14 percentage points in 2011, and 11 percentage points by 2016. Obviously, we can see that there is some level of impact on the number of years of schooling, but when you combine these two things, they become very toxic. It's even worse when you start looking at these poverty drivers for people who are 15 to 24. In the heart of it, 35% of these young people is the highest. For them, that is not being educated is the highest. It's not unemployment, it's the highest, it's education. And when you look at it as 35 plus 15, that's 50. To have the drivers of poverty for younger people is education, and when you look at it as 35 plus 15, that's 50. To have the drivers of poverty for younger people is education, not even English Now. So when we understand that conundrum, then we can respond to it differently. That, at the core, it's not education, is privilege number 15, the core for younger people, providing the necessary skills for livelihoods is the main driver of their multidimensional poverty. It's not sanitation, it's not. Of course, we are worried about the sewerage, but the absence of the skill and the art to understand is really what is necessary for us, and your podcast is very important for this.

Speaker 2:

I want to move to another screen. Yes, please, because the statistician general has just released an important report, has just released an important report, and this report talks to the same issues characterizing it even better, and yesterday I was addressing the inaugural lecture of the BPI. That is, of course, a middle-class group that says, well, we will fight in order to make South Africa better, and the middle class is important Because we are an impoverished middle class, as the data of the statistician general will show. The statistician general has just released the census of 2022, as well as the income and expenditure survey of 2022. This then will update to those years, because then we'll bring that data together and then we'll generate multidimensional poverty, which is good in that it goes to very small areas lower than municipalities.

Speaker 2:

In the municipality you can say this is the multidimensional poverty manifestation in this municipality. As far as data is concerned, evidence is concerned in South Africa. There's no shortage of data in South Africa to inform the planning systems, but in both cases we don't execute to solve them. So the ineptness that is facing us faces us in all other ways.

Speaker 1:

I'm not sure where the wheels actually come off right. So it seems like we've got this measure. So we are clear there's stuff we need to do in education. There's stuff we need to do in education. There's stuff we need to do around energy and all the social indicators and health.

Speaker 1:

But when you look at our healthcare system right now, for example, our public healthcare system, it's an absolute crisis. I just recently lost a loved one from simply, things that could have been avoided, and my story is not the only one. But where do the wheels come off in terms of us addressing these fundamental things? I mean, you know there are big things that I think the country is pursuing, like bringing investment into the country and you know all the stuff that you spoke about but where do the wheels come off in terms of addressing simple public health care system, things like kids not dropping out from school and also giving them the right education? Why is it that the rest of the world can really address things like education and we are just simply struggling? Where do the wheels actually come off?

Speaker 2:

I think the report of the statistician general will be a very interesting one that he released on the 28th of February. I think that is very, very telling. I have not seen something that comes with such clarity that only the ignorant will ignore. I will share the other screen. See, these are panels of different population groups. There's a black, african, yeah, the colored, the Indian and the white.

Speaker 2:

Where we should focus on is the purple and the blue, because that's the proportion of people who proceed to go into tertiary education. It technically calls post-med education as a group. You can see where Blacks are, and they're 80% of the population. Here are Indians. They're 2% of the population and here are whites they're about 8% of the population. This 10% is the one that is most successful in terms of creating intergenerational value, because they have moved with an almost higher percentage, above 60% up to 80%, at least when you look at the age group 20. 80% of those who get to 20 years of age will proceed into higher education. Now, when you have that kind of success, this is what age percent means Most blacks at age 20, that thing there is not age percent. It's far less than age percent. That purple and that thing is less than 12 percent. Amongst Indians it's 80 percent, it's more than 80. And amongst whites it's 80. So that tells you the progression.

Speaker 1:

So, when we think about just the multidimensional factors that you showed us in terms of number of years of schooling and education, it matters that actually it's not just in schooling, as in foundation phase schooling, it matters that it's really also about tertiary education and getting higher order skills.

Speaker 2:

That progression is so essential. This is where it counts that this part, this raw material, has to come into tertiary material. That, then, will enable the functions. We can't define what those functionings are. Right, it is in the systems. And I'll go back to what I wanted to talk about, about the report of the statistician general and the report of the statistician general. And the report of the statistician general is important in several ways. I mean, I started with the Fairwood issue, which is that legacy, and we can see the manifestation of that, the success of execution of that concern in all walks of life. Yeah, the system.

Speaker 2:

Yes, in 1953, eldred asked that question in Parliament. This group here, the Indians, the Colours and the Blacks were sitting together here. The Whites were already 90%, they had grade 3 and they went on to do grade 10. But when that statement was made in Parliament, it was a defining moment, and that defining moment is captured by the Indians and we can see how they actually changed the trend. What we need to do is to ask the question why did the Indians behave the way they did? How did they do it? And the Statistician General Report that he released this year 2025, on the 28th of January, shows what that which the Indians did created intergenerational wealth, and we have to confront what they did so that we can understand what we need to do, what they did so that we can understand what we need to do Now. If we are so shallow in the definition of functions and understanding poverty, it's impossible to address these wicked problems. As you said, we are dealing with wicked problems. They are very wicked.

Speaker 2:

Now, this graph here that you are seeing shows the progression of people into different levels of education, from primary to secondary to higher. Look at the proportion of whites that have higher education. Look at the proportion of blacks. This green inner circle is this is a proportion of whites. This is a proportion of blacks. This is 80% of whites. This is a proportion of blacks. This is 80% of the population here. This is less than 10% of the population In 80% of the population. We don't have this kind of design here, which looks more like South Korea. So this is the problem Now, given that problem. When we go forward into tertiary education, these graphs are telling if it's going up that problem. When we go forward into tertiary education, these graphs are telling If it is going up that way, you know it's success. If it is going down this way, you know it's success and this is as of 2015. I did an analysis of the census of the statisticians in general In 2022, you can see where whites are going, where Indians are going and where blacks and colors are going.

Speaker 1:

So the majority of the population actually remains without tertiary education.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. And now the problem with that is this in the evidence and the evidence talks to the policy, not missteps. But you know, at times you really say, well, tresna's policy missteps Sure. The report of the statistician general says that South Africans spent three trillion rands a year. That's the amount of buying power that South Africans have. Three trillion, that's the amount of buying power that South Africans have. When I was at primary school, the teacher, teacher, teacher used to say that the money of government is big, is this size? Now I'm looking at what are the reinforcing practices that reinforce the wooden ladders Right? For the first time, in 2006, the buying power of Africans black Africans was 41%. That of whites was 45%.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

They had 8% of the population. This is 80% of the population. They had more buying power than the blacks. That is the aggregate, not the capital. That bag, the aggregate, not per capita, that bag, those two bags were almost like. For the first time, blacks have surpassed the buying power of whites 62%. So it is 1.8 trillion. Let's go and see where this money is spent. It is 3 trillion. You see, the distribution of spending areas is all the countries of Africa Large shops, medium and small shops, markets, street outlets, specialized shops, private service providers and public and semi-public service providers.

Speaker 2:

1.8 trillion is spent substantively in large shops, your chain stores. Who owns that? It's just spent in these medium shops, these specialized shops, in private service providers and then, of course, in public or semi-public service providers. And here we are beginning to privatize. You know we are beginning to privatize this space here. So in that privatized space there is 11%. Public and private sector. Private service providers are mainly white. All these are mainly white. This is where blacks are working. This is 1.28 in the markets and the street outlets where we fight before it.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

This is where our fights are, and they catch the news. Our fight is not with these large corporates that are owned by white.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

And that's where the 1.8 trillion goes. That buying power is now 62% Additional established concentration, so it is just a conveyor belt. Now this conveyor belt, theodore said in that year, is how the real growth in annual consumption has been. It's been declining for the middle class, particularly those who are tertiary education 13% decline, 19%, 29% drop. So the middle class is an impoverished. One percent drop.

Speaker 2:

So the middle class is an impoverished one. Why? Because it plays no role in these large outlets, in this medium and small, in these private service providers. It is confined here. So there's no, it's a problem. You can have the buying power, but if you don't control the value chains, this is the reality of your corrosion of the buying power. In 2006 and 2023, it declined by 29%. So the middle class is being impoverished. It's not a middle class, not a typical middle class, because it owns nothing. Being impoverished. It's not a middle class, not a typical middle class, because it owns nothing. Consumption expenditure by these groups that are supposed to see growth has been declining from 2006 to 2020. And it is declining in those groups. That means there isn't anything that is investable. They are not growing in the expenditure, they are declining. They are up to here in debt.

Speaker 1:

And that causes another cycle. So you basically get trapped in that cycle.

Speaker 2:

This is the discussion that the country has to have with that income and expenditure report of the statistician. Understand that the situation is more perilous than we ever estimate how?

Speaker 1:

is it possible that only households headed by those with no schooling and primary education experienced any real positive growth in terms of consumption expenditure? What is driving that? It's grants.

Speaker 2:

Right Grants and they have been grown. What is driving that, it's grants, right Grants, and they have been grown. Now here you've got to step back and look at economics and think, apply, put on an economic head, and there you have to think about Keynes, maynard Keynes, and in that space, when you think about Maynard Keynes, you say, given the posture that we want to take on grants, we actually have to be a lot more bold in converting those grants into investable capital, right, and then creating a cycle. That's what Keynes said to Roosevelt and that's how they started the Marshall Plan after World War I, where they created the money that became investment. We have the same bag of money. We can create it to be investing and people can still get grants, but those grants have to go through a loop of investment and then they can use the grants to buy products of those investments. Right, that's an interesting thought.

Speaker 2:

What you see here of the 1.8 trillion is driven by grants. But those grants, that money, goes back to these large shops that are white and that's where you see a conundrum of Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. Here we see, profit is good. You go in as a private sector to get profit, but you have almost a Keynesian kind of investment or Keynesian kind of delivery going into a bottomless pit of Milton Friedman where this money is harvested by profiteers. So we have a serious conundrum in our policy space.

Speaker 1:

There are two things that come to mind here. For me, the first one is, then, the role of entrepreneurship, because then that becomes almost the obvious, the next thing that we talk about, because we're saying, basically, even the income we have, we're not spending it in the right places. So you know what does that mean for entrepreneurship and Black-owned businesses. As a way of breaking that cycle, is it a viable option? Have we done it properly, or is there an area to improve there?

Speaker 2:

You see, if we don't map this thing through systems design and design thinking and that map I showed of functions, we are not going to get this right. And that pushes us straight into policy. As government thought through this policy that is pseudo-Kinesia but deeply steeped in Milton Friedman's profit fundamentalism. So we have provided a niche in our space that sucks everything about everything that public service is trying to do and it goes straight into private sector. That public service is trying to do and it goes straight into private sector. So even when the blacks have massive and higher than white buying power, that buying power goes straight into white society. So whether the government of national unity is conceived around addressing racialized capitalism or just endorsing it and I will argue the latter, that it is endorsing it the evidence is very clear. So what is happening there? You see, the top 10%, which enjoys 50% of the income, consists of 73% of whites. That is, 73% of white people are part of the top 10% which enjoys 50% of the income 40% of Indians, 20% of coloreds and 13% of blacks. Here is where this, but let me take a little here and show that in this period males actually got progress, progressed better in the country. But here it's also base effects. This growth is just because they were coming from a low base. But there's also something else. Yes, but there's something else Despite coming from a low base, here you see completion of degrees by female compared to males.

Speaker 2:

You can see the big gap in 1996. You can see that gap closing by 2001. And that gap, actually women coming above in 2011 and total taking over by 2022. And that gives you how the income distribution has occurred amongst them over this period of time. This is what has happened in this period of time. This is what is happening in the system. So we have a serious problem that is very, very fictitious and absolutely hilarious, to say the least. But certainly women have actually that is what has caused created this training of progress. But at the aggregate level, you can see, between 2006,. Actually, things have been going worse under, but even more worse here, where you see the household consumption expenditure. Here, where you see the household consumption expenditure, despite blacks having risen to 62% of the trillions, but actually there's been this serious decline between 2011 to 2023. And they're burdened with debt and everything. The question is are the policies addressing this?

Speaker 1:

My answer they are not and just to help us close this session, you alluded to um the education outcomes of indians improving over time and saying what is it that they did, and my question would be are there any other social factors we should be thinking about, like role modeling, mentorship? Are there any sort of factors that influence that sort of outcome from an education perspective in general?

Speaker 2:

Among blacks, the upper quintile is only 13%. Among whites, the upper quintile is only 3%. This is what made Indians what they are. They are having a 4.6% upper finger. They are, they are having a 4.6% upper finger. Their reaction to Route 1953 has made them achieve this. That's how they address the education and that's what Africans have to try and do.

Speaker 1:

Assuming that all have access to the same sort of education system, at least at a public perspective. What is it about that site? Did they choose to do more mathematics, or did they choose to do more science? What is it that they did differently?

Speaker 2:

The environment at home was supportive, not in yet. With migratory labor there's no supportive environment for blacks in education and the defining thing in there is that 62% of fathers say they are married, against that 1% of mothers. That statistic must sink in the minds of this country. The wives have two husbands.

Speaker 1:

Two husbands, and how does that work?

Speaker 2:

Well, that's the thing that now we have to go into and say here's a statistic that is startling. What does it mean in real life for the mothers and for women who are 15 to 49 years? They will have an average of four years in stable relations, whereas for males it will be 15 years. But those relations are serious. Now, if we don't look at the data that emerges out of that environment and transpose it in relation to it, we have hardly scratched the surface.

Speaker 2:

And then if you look at the policy and the fees must fall and you look at the lackluster response of government, they've hardly appreciated the magnitude and depth at two levels and undermining two important outcomes or impacts. The first impact of a lackluster response to fitness undermines nation-building, where you start saying let's pay for the poor and leave the rich Pay for everybody, because the national agenda of nation-building is primary, it's more supreme and we don't have any spaces in this country where we commune as society. It's only at university where you have a critical mass of people in a different composition in their race. But when you start dividing them by saying pay for the poor and pay for the rich, the Afrikaners will create their own universities and the national agenda, the national agenda of building a nation, is gone out of the window. The negative of that is polarization, where the Afrikaners will go and build their own universities and do what the Indians did as community of practice when the good said was the use of teaching bandwitch and mathematics.

Speaker 1:

You know I'm going to go back to the issue of education and then we're going to close. So when we think of the Department of Basic Education and the studies that they do, obviously there is a big. There are some sort of psychosocial elements that they take into account, you know. Hence, we've got things like feeding schemes in schools and so on. Feeding schemes in schools and so on. The question is, in terms of building homes and building families, is there anything they could actually even do about that, or does it come back to things like spatial planning, like addressing those sort of things from the past? Or is it really to allow citizens to just govern themselves and hope that they turn out as good citizens?

Speaker 2:

When policy is numbed the statistic I've just talked about, and it's numb the response is poor, it's hopeless. The combined income of the parents is said to be the determinant of whether you will be paid for or you will be supported or not.

Speaker 1:

When you get to university.

Speaker 2:

Yes. And then when you look at that statistic of 60% of fathers the father to that child and 30% of the mother to that child say they are married, have you understood the implication of joint income?

Speaker 1:

There's no joint income. There's no joint income and then what happens?

Speaker 2:

what happens? What happens is what happens is that you put that woman and the child at the mercy of this man, and gender-based violence will never end. So unless you actually digest these numbers and understand them well, you will have this rabbit hole where you try to behave like a Keynesian, yet you are steeped in Milton Friedman's Margaret Fitt, fundamentally. And when you do both those and you think they will add up and average out, you are in cloud cookware. You are lost, and that's where the government is. It's lost.

Speaker 1:

Well, I think there's a lot more to do. I think, if I summarize our conversation, two things. The first one is priority. If we just think of where education was prioritized at number 15, as opposed to the crises that we're going through. For sure, load shedding is a crisis Water and I think maybe that is the problem going through. For sure, load shedding is a crisis water and I think maybe that is the problem. We've been in crisis mode for such a long time that the actual fundamental stuff we're not really paying attention to. And when we think about education on its own as a driver of multidimensional poverty requires multiple analyses. You know, from a social perspective and essentially how even kids go through that education system, all the way from foundation phase, all the way to tertiary. So it sounds like there's a lot more that we should be thinking about from a government policy perspective, but also creating an environment for people to come in, private players to come in and be able to support the execution of the relevant interventions.

Speaker 2:

The problem with private players is that they design at the moment, their leeches, and I have another slide that talks to 2020, where the private players came and said government, here are our targets, and government snapped them. They snapped them on two reasons. One, the government doesn't have tools of integration and they couldn't deal with that set of things. Second, the private sector was not very honest, because if it was honest, it would have insisted rather than now nitpick. What they say are the immediate low hanginghanging fruit deal with ESCOM, deal with that. When they do that, they're forgetting about targets, and I think Zondo Mark II is on the horizon, because that's a recipe for Zondo II.

Speaker 2:

However, if government had actually accepted business and said let's sit down and focus on the targets, many people have done modestly, including the one that I work for, adrs, applied Development Research Solutions, including the University of Stellenbosch, that used the same model. Professor Muleko and Tavis Muleko and Max Welling actually provided a pathway in which government can engage with all stakeholders, including the private sector, in a systematic way in order to achieve the targets that business was talking about. That study preceded the coming in of business and it shows that the targets that business was talking to are the targets that we project are possible. And without a pathway which is where I started around functions you don't define that, you'll be lost and your eyes will be attracted this way and attracted that way, and then it will become harsh and it is harsh.

Speaker 1:

Dr Buddy, thank you so much for your time and thank you to all our listeners for tuning into this episode. I look forward to so many more of these conversations because I feel like we've just scratched the surface, so please expect another invitation, dr Paddy.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much, thank you, thank you very much you.