Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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determine social and economic policy. The formal political representatives<br />
and institutions would maintain and advance free<strong>do</strong>m not only<br />
by empowering those who lack power (which requires effective ‘service<br />
delivery’), but also enabling a polity in which the representatives of all<br />
groups are given equal access to those that rule, in particular to those<br />
that determine macro-economic policy.<br />
This is very far from the case in South Africa. At least one third<br />
of the population is either unemployed or no longer economically<br />
active (either as a consequence of illness, age and disability or because<br />
they are discouraged workers). The number of South African’s unemployed<br />
stands at 4.3 million, or a formal unemployment rate of 25.3%;<br />
the number of economically inactive workers stands at a staggering<br />
14.35 million (with actively discouraged work-seekers comprising just<br />
under 2 million of this total); so even if we only consider the actively<br />
discouraged work-seekers and the formally unemployed, we have a<br />
real unemployment rate of approximately 37% of the population. [36] If<br />
this percentage is combined with that proportion of the population<br />
that is involved in menial and underpaid jobs (quintiles two and three,<br />
see footnote below), most of whose representatives give them little or<br />
no meaningful means of criticising macro-economic decision-making<br />
since they fall under a set of trade unions whose umbrella body is in a<br />
ruling alliance with the ANC, and if we assume that the unemployed<br />
household heads occupy the lowest quintile, on a conservative estimate<br />
a staggering figure of 77% of South Africa’s population has little<br />
or no meaningful representation. [37] This large group is a relatively<br />
homogeneous group – in the apartheid era categorizations that are<br />
145<br />
FREEDOM, POWER AND<br />
REPRESENTATION<br />
Lawrence Hamilton<br />
36<br />
‘Labour Force Survey 2009’ in Statistics South Africa Quarterly Labour Force Survey<br />
Quarter 2, 2010 at http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0211/P02112ndQuarter2010.<br />
pdf .<br />
37<br />
There are five quintiles of household head income. The three lower quintiles include all<br />
those with an income of R30 000 ($4000) per annum or less; 72.5% of the ‘black’ population,<br />
44% of the ‘coloured’ population, 15% of the ‘indian’ population and 3% of the ‘white’<br />
population are situated within these lowest three quintiles, so given the demographics<br />
of South Africa the lower three quintiles comprise 55% of the population earning a<br />
monetary income. The figure of 77% is reached by adding together the real proportion<br />
of the population that is unemployed (37%) and the percentage of the population that is<br />
employed but occupy quintiles two and three (40%). Statistics South Africa .2009. Income<br />
and expenditure of households 2005/2006. http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0100/<br />
P01002005.pdf .