Erasibo

This is the presentation delivered by Prof Haroon Bhorat at Parliament earlier this month (should have put it up earlier), he and his collegeaues used the 1995 and 2005 Income and Expenditure Survey reports to give an overview of inequality and poverty over the past ten years in South Africa.

Their research shows that:

• Inequality in South Africa increased in the period 1995-2005.
• Absolute levels of inequality remained high and race as well as gender was still critically associated with poverty.
• Income inequality was rising and was very high by international standards and income inequality between African and white people were driving the overall inequality.
• Since 1995 a disproportionate share of economic growth has gone to the top of the income band and social transfer programmes were a key source of rising incomes at the bottom end of the income band.
• South Africa was entrenching its reputation as a very unequal society.
• Social grant transfer programmes were a key source of rising incomes at the bottom end of the income band
• The international trend showed a declining share of national income across a number of countries.

The question raised by Minister Ebrahim Patel (Minister for Economic Development) was whether the country was seeing market outcomes based on economic activities over the last couple of years, regarding rising inequality, with state interventions that partially mitigated the effect on inequality.

This study when compared against the rest of the data coming out of government’s review of its performance shows us the magnitude of the challenge still facing the country.

Last night the Riverlea community took to the streets protesting poor service delivery by local government. Riverlea is the latest community to vent its frustrations angrily about poor municipal service delivery.

Since the new national government administration has come in there has been a lot of change taking place in the local government space. A lot of reviewing, rethinking and restructuring has taken place.

The current Director General Elroy Africa delivered the presentation above yesterday at the Local Government Indaba. Its a frank, harsh presentation outlining the problem areas in local government, it’s great to see this type of presentation and suggestions it contains.

However I still think there is one thing missing what is the model that we are hoping to building local government into? Setting targets around which services should be delivered and improving the execution ability is good but without knowing what the game plan is, we could be spending a lot additional time and money to arrive at a similar state later, because everyone busies themselves with being busy.