POLITICIANS PUMMELLED: SA’s path to ‘no future’ — former statistician-general Lehohla slams ‘performative’ politics

In a powerful rebuke of the South African government’s policies since 1994, the former long-term statistician-general and firebrand speaker, Dr Pali Lehohla, warned that democracy is fragmenting, placing the country on a path to “no future”.

With former president Kgalema Motlanthe and Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana sitting alongside him on stage, he presented 17 years’ worth of damning evidence from four censuses undertaken during his tenure until 2017 as the head of Statistics South Africa, at the annual Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation’s Inclusive Growth Forum on Friday, 31 October.

In 100 years, of which almost a third have been under ANC rule, said Lehohla, only 13.7% of black people have managed to reach the “top quintile [of economic prosperity]”, as opposed to 73% of white people.

“This is utterly unjust,” Lehohla said. “If we have to pivot 100 years into 1,000 years... blacks will be [in the same position]. Your policies are not going to change this picture.”

This year’s event, an annual lekgotla held in the Drakensberg by former first lady Gugu Motlanthe, drew more than 300 political leaders, foreign representatives and business and media at a consequential moment, with municipal elections next week expected to further erode the ANC’s influence in the country.

“The ANC will poll 36% nationally in the local government elections,” Lehohla said. “This is the power of the tools that I built, using the power that the ANC gave me as statistician-general to assemble this information.

“We have to put [this data Stats SA has assembled] in the hands of villagers, away from politicians, so that we can change [the situation we are in]. Otherwise, this performative circus [of] you politicians is going to turn us as directorate [into] currency, as well as merchandise, because you are mercantile politicians.

“We need a different framework to move forward.”

‘A syphon ... a hole in the ground’

Lehohla was responding to Godongwana’s earlier speech praising mining as “South Africa’s endowment” and highlighting the government’s continued reliance on the extractive sector for desperately needed revenue, while admitting that the country is falling behind.

“A friend of mine gave me some numbers, which gave me my worry that, in 2024, Australia and Canada, with the same mineral endowment, spent R40-billion in exploration. As South Africa we spent two billion,” Godongwana said. “Vast difference.

“The environment in which we operate is not of our choosing,” he said, emphasising that the State Capture project under former president Jacob Zuma caused the destruction of institutions, the sum effect and bailouts of which have left the country with a R575-billion deficit.

Lehohla ripped into Godongwana and what he perceived as his hand-wringing over the government’s impotence to fix past issues in justifying its continued reliance on mining, providing a scenario all too familiar in South African rural areas.

A woman subsidises the man who works in the mines of Thabazimbi, because “he is paid like a boy”, said Lehohla. “So [a massacre like] Marikana happens as a consequence of that, and under those circumstances, that place will always be a dormitory, and that place will always be a siphon. A hole in the ground.

“You [also] cannot solve the problem of gender-based violence in this country when women’s power and labour is extracted in wages.”

This syphon called the mine has robbed this country of R5.1-trillion over the past 30 years, said Lehohla. “I calculated it. To do what? To carry those minerals from those places down to the ocean and export them and their value out of this country.

“Together with financial services, a high-value, high-performing, net-export sector in South Africa, that exported value reaches R14-trillion.

“We are speeding up the extraction. We are also speeding up the digging of the minerals in order to [take them] to the ocean, and we think that the economy will grow.

“It will not” said Lehohla.

Invoking the political teachings of the visionary 18th-century Bakoena chief Morena Mohlomi, adviser to Moshoeshoe, the first king of Lesotho, Lehohla warned that if he “put the mirror before us before the election, all you politicians are going to fail [Mohlomi’s] test of knowing yourself; knowing those you lead; guaranteeing intergenerational value; creating new instruments of power and leading stakeholders to productive ends”.

“I can bet you that, because you have failed it already. We wouldn’t be in this position if we had success.” DM