Violence sprouts from broken plans

As a teenager watching the unfolding of the reconstruction and development programme (RDP), I asked myself just how making townships bigger could be a panacea for one of the biggest structural flaws in the economy — the distance between the townships and centres of work.

It made no sense when I considered the transport costs the ordinary person faces to get to Sandton, for example. Some 70% of South Africans still use taxis as a daily mode of transport.

In later years, I’d grow to understand the protection of property values and other legal hurdles the state faced in building homes for South Africans closer to their places of work. There have been a few successful projects in the years since. I’ve always been a fan of Cosmo City, west of Johannesburg, a private-public partnership that, for all its problems, is a project to be proud of.

The Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki administration later abandoned RDP, one of the pillars of the ANC’s 1994 election campaign, which, at the time, was enthusiastically endorsed by the party and its alliance partners. The economic restructuring plans that followed tore at the fabric of the party, and the divisions were expertly exploited by opportunists within the party who used them as a sort of magic carpet ride to greater power.

But back to those townships that grew larger as the state built RDP homes. For the most part, job opportunities in those areas remained as few and far between as before. Those who had the means to do so left for leafier suburbs closer to their places of work.

Instead of factories or other labourintensive

industries moving into townships, it was big retail. It made business sense for grocers such as Shoprite to grow their presence there with the continued mass urbanisation from our hinterlands. It’s a market they simply couldn’t ignore.

Property players, now drowning in debt because of their mad scramble for a piece of the retail pie, built malls from Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape to Edendale in KwaZulu-Natal.

While some might trumpet the job opportunities offered by these new retail nodes, they aren’t enough to make a significant dent in unemployment. For the most part, they rely on casual labour. Pick n Pay might now be hailed as a turnaround success story, but a large part of that change in fortunes has been through job cuts that began almost a decade ago, years before the arrival of British CEO Richard Brasher.

My concern with the rapid and rather aggressive play for market share by our large retail chains with their deep pockets has been the impact on small-scale merchants, who were sourcing their goods from the warehouse chains.

The aggressive move into township economies might have resulted in cheaper goods and might even have saved people from higher inflation because they were no longer at the mercy of these merchants, who were in turn also being ripped off.

Now there was the option of catching a taxi to that big mall a few kilometres away. These architectural eyesores sucked in the few rands that were left in the community.

The malls weren’t sourcing many locally produced goods. As we know, SA has been deindustrialising because of its inability — along with that of almost every other nation — to compete with the global factory that China has been for most of the past 30 years.

While empowerment ensured the transfer of some wealth to black investors, it’s a policy that for the most part retailers have ignored or on which they have simply ticked the bare minimum of boxes.

In their minds, retail wasn’t reliant on government business. However, the state, through its social welfare programme, supports more than 17-million people. Where do they spend that money?

We’ve been exposed to some terrible economic planning, and it goes back to land legislation passed more than a century ago and apartheid laws a few decades later, and through the unintended consequences of the many plans for SA post-1994.

Amid this, we have a flood of migrants trying to make a living without the support of our government or their own.

Those of them who are merchants have priced their goods at levels so low that the Shoprites won’t try to match them, operating on margins so narrow that few average South African families would try to survive on them.

In this frustrating low-growth economic environment, immigrants are the easiest targets to blame for everything, from taking jobs to violence and crime.

Policymakers sounding more like Donald Trump or one of the right-wing European politicians are once again allowed to ignore the deeper questions.

Immigrants are the easiest to blame for everything, from taking jobs to crime