 Good afternoon and and welcome to this UNU wider webinar. My name is Rachel Gisselquist. I'm a senior research fellow here at UNU wider in Helsinki and I'm very pleased to serve as chair this afternoon. So we're joined today by Brian Levy and Alan Hirsch who will present on why good governance is not enough. Can South Africa meet the challenge of economic inclusion? And in their presentation they'll help us understand South Africa's path since the transition to democracy in 1994 as well as prospects for the future. What can be done to move South Africa onto a more inclusive trajectory? They build in their analysis on a really interesting framework that highlights the role of ideas and institutions alongside growth and inequality in these processes. And in doing so they they shed light both on the South African experience but also draw lessons and insights for other countries embarking on similar reform processes. So these are topics and themes that figure strongly in our work here at UNU wider including my own and we also at UNU wider have particular interests in these issues in the South African context as part of our SA Tide program in support of inclusive economic development in South Africa. And so we're all really looking forward to the the presentation and the discussion this afternoon. Our two speakers bring rich experience working on these topics and by way of very brief introduction Brian Levy teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies Johns Hopkins University and he was the founding academic director of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance University of Cape Town. From 1989 to 2012 he worked at the World Bank and he's published widely on the interactions among institutions political economy and development policy. Alan Hirsch is emeritus professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at UCT and founding director from 2011 to 2019. He's held a number of positions both in academia and in government and in from 2002 for instance he managed economic policy in the South African presidency representing represented the presidency of the G20 and was the co-chair of the G20 Development Working Group. He's currently among other positions of fellow at the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University. Without further ado I'll move on in a moment to the presentations. Our speakers will present for about 35 minutes and then we will open the floor for questions and I would invite you in the audience to please think about questions as they as they're presenting and do feel free to raise questions during the presentation by entering them in the chat box at the bottom of your screen and as time permits we'll get to as many of these questions as we can and I will also if if time permits unmute a few of you to ask the questions live. So without further ado let me turn over to our first speaker. Brian it's over to you. Thank you Rachel. Back in 1994 South Africa inspired us. It inspired us with its heroic struggle with its visionary leadership and its transition to constitutional democracy. Looking back with the lens of hindsight two background conditions that shaped that transition loomed especially large. The first comprises the country's remarkably strong formal institutions. If you look at this slide whether it's the rule of law, government effectiveness, control of corruption on all three of these South Africa's the measures of South African institutional quality resembled much more those of high income countries than the middle income country that it is. The second startling feature was the country's massive inequality. The extraordinarily large share of spending that went that made by the top 15 percent of the population and correspondingly the extraordinarily low share of spending that goes to the 40 percent bottom 40 percent of the population and these numbers are incredibly skewed even compared with Brazil in the early 2000s which was regarded at the time as the most unequal of the middle income countries. So what happens when strong institutions and massive inequalities collide? In this talk Ellen and I will offer our views which we draw from a paper that we co-authored together with two colleagues from the University of Cape Town, Vino, Naidu and Musa and Kele and we will as you can see proceed in four parts. Let me begin by laying out the framework of the presentation. So our framework has two key analytic building blocks. The first of these is an analysis of South Africa's political settlements to cut a long story short given the time that we have. I just want to make three overarching points about the slide. First the central role in the South Africa settlement of an idea. The idea that a society could move from zero sum or even negative sum conflict and actually cooperate and achieve gains for win-win. Second the this idea in a sense a better life for all is an idea that was crucial both for both for the deals among elites in the society and also it was key for the incorporation and hope among non-elites. Third the key theme of our talk as you'll see is that what we have in this deal are some are credible commitments but other parts of this deal are much more in the nature of aspirational. So this is the first aspect of the framework. The second analytic building block is a we take from Albert Hirschman's classic analysis from his Latin American experience of a country's changing tolerance for inequality. And I want to make four points about this Hirschman cycle. The first one is it's classic Hirschman. You begin with inclusive growth, imbalances build, these imbalances in turn can transform into anger and then you confront the challenge of renewal. The second feature implicit in Hirschman but central is that what drives the cycle is ideas and this is true in two ways. First if you look at the top right of this slide the idea of hope turns to be key in as part of a virtuous spiral between hope strong institutions and accelerating growth as mutually reinforcing one another. But second as the quote at the left signals is that with disappointment hope can all too readily turn to anger as Hirschman puts it non-realization of the expectation of the hope will at some point result in my becoming furious. So those are the two analytic building blocks. South Africa between 1994 to quote the title of a book that Alan wrote was known as was the period of the season of hope and here you just see some of the gains. The gains were substantial absolute poverty with daily hunger declines sharply in the first 15 years. The provision of social services and infrastructure expands rapidly across society. A safety net is created through social grants and labor intensive public works accompanying this and this is all happening against the backdrop of accelerating growth as of the time of the transition South Africa's economy was dead in the water slowly but steadily growth accelerated never gets to East Asian rates but it does get up to 5% per annum in the 2004 to 2008 period but this is all happening against the backdrop of inequality and as per our framework unresolved distributional imbalances in South Africa create three sets of threats in particular which would undermine this virtuous spiral that I described earlier. So the first threat is this relative to other middle income countries South Africans were either rich or poor with very little in between this is measuring the third ventile relative to the seventh ventile 11th to 15th percentile relative to the 31st to the 35th and as you can see in this graph in South Africa more than the other middle income countries there is a distributional cliff the people are either affluent on the top side of that cliff or poor with very little in between. Second threat is the continued nature of the ethnic composition of the elites so in 1995 the elite was very skewed unsurprisingly towards white South African 71% of the top 10% of the population were white but this persists to a strikingly troubling degree into 2010 so the white population is less than 10% of the total population but it does account still for 56% of the most affluent 10% indeed about 70% of white South Africans are in that top 10% that's the second threat. The third threat is ideational more than any place on earth into the 1980s South Africa was a place in which white supremacy was was dominant white supremacy and privilege was the law of the land into the 1980s and as we've learned and as the 2015 protests that are depicted in this slide remind us vividly even after all kinds of profession professions of non-racialism internalized privilege can live on in the symbols of a society and in the hearts and minds of its citizens and Alan and I were both at the University of Cape Town during this period and I think we both saw this as a salutary challenge to entrenched white privilege but considering all three of these threats it immediately becomes evident and we highlight the vulnerable parts of it in the slide it immediately becomes evident that indeed the many of the commitments associated with the political settlement were aspirational and they were aspirational commitments that could come unglued and they could come unglued in two different ways they could come unglued via despair or they could come unglued via ethno-populism so let me say just a little bit about these and then I will turn over to Alan so first let me talk about ethno-populism the work by Sharon Mukand and Danny Rodrick I think is particularly powerful here it highlights how the ideational political entrepreneurs can work to manipulate worldviews and manipulate identities in order to try to drive voting in a direction which may even be inconsistent with economic interests that a classic example of this actually is the quote that we have here at South Africa's economic freedom fighters the notion of white monopoly capital there's a worldview there is the source of poverty and there's also an identity dimension associated with us and so where ethno-populism can lead us it can lead us to declines in GDP to major declines for established elite to some decline for almost everybody else and to large gains for new ethno-populists and to see what happened that's the one scenario the second scenario is the possibility of slow steady decay no hope no investment no cooperation and they rise in individual opportunism to see how this plays out in practice let me now turn over to Alan thanks Brian um so oh yeah so we're now going to look at what happens as a result of um the failure really to address the issues of inequality and the and the and the declining confidence that results from that what we can see here is that we're comparing South Africa's GDP growth rate with other middle income countries and other upper middle income countries um if you look take a longer view then this you can see that South Africa maintains a fairly constant relationship to those other um those other comparators but in the period since 2008 there's been a widening gap between them and that's the critical thing in this apart from the fact that you can see an overall decline in GDP in the rate of GDP growth to a point where it's generally been um below the population growth rate so it's been negative per capita GDP for the last six years until this year um an unemployment for for um 16 to 24 year olds was extremely high um youth in general unemployment rate is extremely high unemployment for older members of workforce was also high not as high but that's partly due to their withdrawal from the workforce um so it's a technical outcome there were several attempts to transform society into a society which was built on um a inclusion both of the of the poor and of the elites um the the poor as as um Brian has mentioned and may pick up later um the the social grant program in South Africa has been more extensive than in most other developing countries and by necessity it has to have been um and there've been attempts to improve services for the poor but among elites um there were several attempts to incorporate elites effectively as well and one of them was the corpus strategy of the national economic development and labor council which was which is a a council which with statutory force um was one of the first laws of the new government um which brings labor business government and other members of the community together but in fact it's really a a meeting place of big labor and big business and it has failed to be um an effective um foundation for a long-term social compact unfortunately up to this point um whether it can be reconstituted in that form because it did seem to be succeeding in the Mandela years um but after that it it it it um it failed and it became what what a one economist called this rambunctious tussle between elites for the surplus or for the rents um another attempt has been black economic empowerment we haven't spelled it out here but it's black economic empowerment um this started really as um the white business class is very powerful um very oligopolistic um business class um making approaches um black business people and drawing them into into business that kind of echoed what happened in the 1940s and 1950s even the 1960s when the dominant english-speaking um uh capitalists drew in africanas into the broader capitalist community very successfully in that case less successfully in this case um but there were various steps along the way a b e commission um sectoral charters there was a b e scorecard that tried to broaden the forms of economic empowerment beyond simply um transferring ownership of large companies to a few uh to a few connected um members of the black elite but in the end it was relatively easy for opponents of government within the anc and outside of the anc to accuse the government of cronyism because of the way that b e worked out in practice um another attempt and relatively successful for a long time to to create a uh more equality in amongst in the middle class among black and white people was to draw um more black people into the into the public sector um and i would say that for the first 15 years or so it was a it was a pretty successful um process of drawing people who um who wouldn't necessarily otherwise have been drawn into the organizations because of the organizational culture and various other reasons and you had a very significant transformation both in gender terms and in racial terms um but when we moved into a more populist period um black um black economic empowerment um the transformation of the public sector became a vehicle for the distribution of patronage and um and this and also the fact that appointments were made in the public sector for the wrong reasons using transformation as as a mask for um for basically engineering relationships in the public sector to favor certain certain people in the well basically the politicians and their allies in in the in the public sector um led to a deterioration a significant deterioration in the quality of much of the public service um although you know Brian will show later that it's not still not bad by developing countryside it's not as certainly not as good as it used to be it's probably felt most strongly in some municipalities in middle-sized towns the so how did we get to this point the ANC as Brian has already said was a was a was a is a broad tent it was formed um as a as an african nationalist organization um what could be called a sort of petty bourgeois nationalist movement except that it also had some traditional um leader support as well um it broadened in mass resistance campaigns in the 1950s and 60s which were modeled on Gandhi's strategies in India um drew in trade unions um and black business constituencies were always a part of the ANC um although not all black business people were part of the ANC um so it's it's been a very broad tent and it's it's it's it's symbolized in some of the some of the policies and the strategies of the organized of the government reflecting the the needs of the organization um what happened as a result of um the fact that the the processes of incorporation both of the elite and um an improvement in the condition of the per to a significant extent because unemployment didn't ever get below 21 or 22 percent it's now over 30 percent again um was this rampant the sense of rampant unfairness um this this uh even though as you saw in Brian's present first presentation the economy was improving and jobs were actually being created it wasn't fast enough and inequality wasn't being reduced fast enough and a lot of support came behind the populist leadership within the ANC um President Zuma and um this led to a significant shift in the orientation of government after the um Polokwani um conference in 2007 um what happened with the populist takeover was essentially that um what uh the the the the transformation economic transformation became a and the challenge of great equality became to some extent um a cover for um capture of the organization um by some of the political leadership and particularly by um private people in the private sector who who were taking advantage of the vulnerability of this of this populist government and you had for example in the uh state-owned enterprises you had a uh predatory governance um you had basically a reappointment of entire boards of state-owned enterprises I was asked to leave a a board or actually two boards of state-owned enterprises in 2011 along with many many other people as we were replaced by people who were more compliant and appointed the right chief executives and made the right decisions about tenders in terms of the the requirements of the of the um political leadership and their allies in the public sector and those allies were global allies as well as national um we also had a um significant changes in in in key organizations particularly in the in the um criminal justice system the national prosecution authority was disemboweled effectively the South African Revenue Service as well to allow for all kinds of practices to take place the courts and parliament um were not completely undermined and the fact that the courts weren't and the independent media and the public protector who is a status a statutory person um the um a statutory position um in terms of the constitution was uh was able to defend um the the constitution and that which is her in this case her job but unfortunately she was replaced in the middle of the Zuma era by by another public protector investigative journalists um and even academics doing a lot of investigation to support the journalists and various other people um challenged uh challenged the system but in some cases um the populace were successful in taking over major uh um journalistic organizations which had very widespread um readership or listenership or or audience um so what what you do have um is a significant decay in the quality of governance as I mentioned earlier um it's decayed uh say from 1996 to to to 2017 very significantly um although it's still above levels um in brazil um not necessarily well and similar to levels in in mexico what is striking in in these numbers is the is the slight improvement in the governance numbers that happened after the takeover of sororoma pausa in um in 2018 effectively as president now the question is why why did um how was was was roma pausa able to take over well firstly I've talked about the resistance in civil society and some of the political society but within the ANC why why was there a vote for reform a movement away from from um the zuma government there were two factions effectively that supported uh roma pausa there was one group that actually wanted reform and a return to the um much better quality of governance that had happened in previous governments um and there was a group that feared the loss of power and um that group that feared the loss of power you know wasn't concerned about what the politics or the policies of the of the government were there any were concerned about access to um government in order to have access to patronage um patronage power um so if we look at what at the at the factions within the ANC there's a group that supported the populace and the effective state capture um there was a group that supported reform and those who um were were only concerned about power and the most power and then and that leader who was most likely to help them to win elections um held the balance of power effectively and roma pausa was just 2017 so that he could become president the next year now we ended up in a in a in a serious crisis in south africa what what are the um what are the responses well you know as brian has has indicated um we we have to have a response to the to the kind of inequality both in terms of the inequality among the elites and the inequality um between the the the rich and the poor which is still a massive inequality um so what we what we weren't able to do beyond the initial transformation beyond the transformation of the public sector and some very significant changes in gender composition in the private sector and the public sector particularly initially it didn't go very far so if you look at the numbers the number of of black people in senior management in the private sector goes up and then it stabilizes in the 20 percent kind of area 20 to 20 20 to 30 percent area and it doesn't go higher it seems to just reach a kind of a plateau um so there's there's not a sense both amongst managers amongst the poor and amongst the um and amongst a private sector entrepreneurs themselves that there's a real opportunity for them to uh to to move upwards in society there's a there's a sense of desperation there's a sense that something has has to change um so how do so how do we accelerate upward mobility um well there has to be improved governance and that may be happening to some extent now but very slowly um and then we have to focus on the letters of opportunity in the economy we have to make sure that more people are employed in labor intensive um activities and we have to focus on the on the supply side make sure that more people are able to take advantage of a growing economy effectively um now i'm sorry i've always uh set my time a little bit so i'm going to go very quickly through the last few slides um there's there's a lot of debate at the moment in south africa perhaps the one good thing about the crisis that south africa is in the moment a crisis of low growth and um and a lack of confidence in the way forward is that there's a very widespread debate um the response in terms of reform from the national treasury has been mainly structural reforms that don't cost too much um modernizing network industries everybody would agree with that um lowering barriers uh increasing competition prioritizing labor intensive industries um implementing competitiveness oriented activities harnessing regional growth and so on but that's not enough for um a radical group which includes um a wide range from um business to um NGOs to trade unions and so on who feel that there should be much more in the way of social transfers and they also believe that many of them believe that a canzian injection in the economy would simulate growth even though the current debt rate is is pretty high the the debt to GDP ratio is around 71 percent and and is going up although this year has been slightly better than before um everybody believes that yeah i'm not going to go into all the other details i think i think the key thing is to to point out that there's a there's a tassel really between conservatives and radicals at the moment over whether it's whether increasing debt um and supporting more social transfers is a way of both incorporating the poor and stimulating growth or if it's going to reduce confidence because South Africa has traditionally been incredibly dependent on um indirect foreign investment in in government bonds and in portfolios and that confidence has been lost and uh the conservatives are worried that that confidence won't be regained if the debt gets higher um clearly what has to happen is that um well you know i think we try to suggest some not in the not so much in in the paper but um the suggestion now would be that there has to be some sort of important inclusion of the poor but there may be an inclusion of the poor through the extension of the covid relief social relief of the stress grant which is targeted the unemployed who don't receive any other social grants um and that a range of other initiatives should be put forward to um to support both economic growth and inclusion effectively um a combination of stability mechanisms and and inclusion mechanisms um the nc suffered setbacks at yesterday's municipal election but i think most particularly governance suffered a setback in that the the participation the voter participation rate has fallen from about 63 percent to about 47 percent very serious shift i think in south africa um does the president president from a pausa have time to to implement the kind of reforms that he's trying to implement at the moment or is he running out of time is the fact that the ANC support has also fallen in these current elections going to mean that rumble pausa doesn't get enough uh it doesn't get a second term if he continues with what has been a very incrementalist approach to reform the right kind of reforms but very slow um should he act now or should he continue with his careful movement forward in the hope of getting a second term or being able to control the appointment of the next ANC leader i'll hand back to brian thank you avan so let me just pull up my screen again so um as i laid out in the first part of this talk meeting the challenge of this turnaround and of inclusive development is not only about good policies it also needs to be complemented by an ideational renewal so in this last part of the presentation i'm going to build on the earlier analysis and an alan's comments in three ways first i'm going to unbundle this notion of an ideational renewal by the type of ideas second i will focus on who the ideas influence distinguishing following the logic of the political settlement analysis between established economic elites private firms and their willingness to invest emerging elites and their willingness to cooperate for shared national purpose and non-elites and how one might renew confidence in the possibility of upward mobility and i will do all of that by looking at how policies and ideas might interact with one another so with ideas on the first of these the role of ideas it was actually john minot canes who underscored the centrality of ideas specifically of expectations of the future in shaping private investment as he put it new fears and hopes will can without warning take charge of human conduct and daddy says the key driver of private investment and so what in south africa are the major influences on ideas of what the future might hold so on this it's actually francis focuyama who signals to us the central role of legitimacy of perceived fairness in shaping expectations so question arises our fairness and legitimacy addressed in a good enough way by the reforms being just considered and described by alan and then third by ideas it's actually game theory that signals the crucial difference that cooperation can make in shaping outcomes zero some negative some versus gains from cooperation took two examples here the classic example of the prisoner's dilemma the example of the game of battle where you can have two good outcomes if you can't agree you only get a zero sum outcome and with this one underscore how how in a sense hopefully these interact expectations and the idea of cooperation hopeful expectations length and time horizons that enhances incentives to cooperate and longer time horizons plus the enhanced incentive to cooperate high um in that strengthens leaders ability to make and implement difficult decisions so bringing together the ideas and the actors gives us these four elements private firms and their expectations non-elites in their expectations enhanced willingness to cooperate across elites and strengthened decision-making authority on the part of political leadership now here's a sense of how this can become a virtuous spiral look at these three examples first which are straightforward how a positive expectations shift amongst non-elites a positive expectations shift on the private sector and accelerate growth can be mutually reinforcing that's the top line there then the vertical line between a growing economy and elite incentives to cooperate rapid growth creates more opportunity enhanced willingness to cooperate strengthens expectations then there's the bottom horizontal line between the elite willingness to cooperate and the decision-making of leadership which are again mutually reinforcing from these two more effects follow directly they're namely that hope among non-elites strengthens leadership authority and strengthens leadership feels hope that's the blue vertical line and how stronger strength and decision-making authority on political leadership um strengthens expectations now that might sound abstract but in fact if you reflect in it you will see that it is precisely this shift in expectations that fuel South Africa's recovery in the 1990s and in the early 2000s and we also saw its opposite in the mid and latter 2010s how a shift in negative expectations can fuel the reversal and the downward spiral which brings us to the key question as of November 2021 which is to what extent can the can policies initiate and sustain a renewed virtuous spiral and as you see here I list four sets of policies and I will talk about each of them in terms briefly first the kinds of policies that Ellen described pro-growth policies and policies to foster upward mobility the this it seems to me is the South Africa's immediate challenge the current discourse is focused on the details of these economic policies but the kinds of policies under consideration will do little in the short term to shift expectations and without the shift in expectations the stagnation will remain so that's the first fundamental challenge how to do better than that so there is a seemingly good solution the seemingly good solution is um strengthen and improve governance but the dilemma is that's easy to say but actually achieving gains in the short to run allen flag that the process has been slow is been difficult and challenging now I have some ideas a central part of my own work actually and how one can achieve more rapid gains now is not the time to go into them to the tail otherwise noticing that again I think it's a new kind of citizen engagement civil society's way mode of engaging organized labor established elites government which one which prioritizes win-win possibilities looking for those mutual gains um is I would argue the key to shifting expectations and making a difference on governance in the short term but that's not where South Africa is at this time and this brings me to the fourth and last of the policy areas which is what we focus more centrally on growth compatible fairness and legitimacy these potentially can have a large impact they may have large potential to shift expectations but by the lines are in brown in the slide they also have the potential to backfire one can easily imagine a set of policies that target fairness and legitimacy that don't that produce a sense of panic and continued and accelerated capital flight so the question is how to get the gains from a focus on um fairness and legitimacy while limiting the risks another critical question another one where there's limited time I just want to make three points in relation to this the first one is we want to ask ourselves what are ways of pressing for redress that are also growth compatible now um there are a number of different ways to do this like some here in my view one that has enormous potential that I haven't seen explored much is if you like thinking about the integration between the third and the fourth one here the poverty alleviating income support grant can have can and already has to some extent happened rapidly the question is might one transition that into an area which has emerged in a number of different societies and perhaps South Africa can be on the frontier of pushing it further some version of linking that kind of grant to what we just um Atkinson has described as a and the Atkinson as a capital endowment paid to all that adulthood perhaps linked to the investment in human and physical capital so there are there are ideas here in my view the agenda that's pursuing these ideas remains rather narrow so that's my but then my third point that I want to make you often hear South Africans say is South Africa over text and I think there are two parts to the answer one part of the answer is if there's a deep and widespread perception that public finance is badly used it's very difficult to achieve the legitimacy of taxation but the other part of the answer is in a highly unequal country even if the aggregate moderate rates of tax are aggregate rates of tax are moderate they will look as if a disproportionate share of tax falls in the elites because that's because a disproportionate share of wealth and income is in the elites and if we actually look at South Africa's patterns of taxation relative to some others in some key areas it is not out of line of many many countries so there so these are the options and I want to summarize like this um we know where South Africa is stuck South Africa has been stuck it's been caught in the stagnation that followed from the downward spiral in my view the agenda of policies that are now on the table are insufficiently bold to actually turn around that downward spiral we potentially can see a way out but getting there will take more boldness than either South Africa's technocratic discourse or its non-populist political discourse has so far been able to muster and so we will end there and we look forward to any reflections that you might have thank you fantastic thank you both um it's really a rich presentation and it sparks a lot there's a lot of food for thought and also for action there so it sparks a lot of thoughts for me but I I know that there are some really rich questions here in the chat so I won't abuse my position as chair and I'm going to actually ask one of the first person who posed a question here at Ventino Banjoa to unmute and and ask his question live hi everyone hi Rachel hi am I old enough we can hear you okay thank you my name is at Ventino Banjoa I'm a PhD fellow here at McKellar University thank you our presenters for this very interesting presentation my question emerges from the first half of the presentation concerning ethno populism and my question really is how should we make sense of ethno populism um I get a sense that in a way ethno populism speaks to the fragmented nature of the struggle towards social economic inclusion so I ask our presenters whether or not this really speaks to an incomplete political project which really means more work needs to be done on the political yeah thank you thank you so much thanks Brian or Alan please go ahead yeah let me say a little bit around that the first critical point is to distinguish between the legitimate challenge to internalize notions of white privilege and the opportunistic character of ethno populism if no populism and we see it in many different countries is and can be an opportunistic tactic on the part of certain elites to use and leverage cleaverages in the society for gains that are rather narrow so I want to make that distinction um a society that is both has large racial cleavages and that is massively unequal with that inequality linked to those racial cleavages is of course vulnerable to that kind of ethno populism and I do want to say that one of the pleasant surprises to me of the municipal elections that have just been held is that the strongest ethno populists did not do very well it's a remarkable feature of South Africa that notwithstanding that perhaps more than anywhere else from the world those two cleaverages lend themselves to ethno populism it has not taken hold but I do want to say um um adventurer I agree with your basic point fundamentally in the early 1990s the promise of a better life for all and the political transformation seemed to be enough to inspire hope that story has had itself by date that story is done and in a sense if this underlying ethno populist um hazard is to genuinely be addressed absolutely it needs a deeper political project and that's what in different ways Alan and I I think tried to point to in the last part of the presentation so thank you can I can I just um add a point you know reflecting on the the part of the question about the the political struggle and you know Mahmoud Mardani's recently bought out a book called neither settler nor native where he carries forward some of some of his arguments um and he's he's looking at the the question of how do you move beyond racial identity between between how do you move beyond the definitions of insider outsider settler um colonized and so on and you know in his view and he lived in South Africa during some of that period he's the Ugandan um political philosopher who's I think now at Columbia University um he he felt that the the the political struggles in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s which we described what I described earlier looking at the trade unions looking at the united democratic front looking at the student movement which I didn't mention there was a there's a real um a movement in a way to a certain extent beyond race uh Mahmoud Mardani calls it the South Africa moment and then that became um enshrined in the form of the the negotiations that took place before the transit during the transition and and the constitution itself um uh and and and there was this notion you know in the 1990s of a rainbow nation um where where identity wasn't as important as a common as a common um commitment to a better life for all um I think that you know Brown and I have discussed this briefly I think that there's a lot of there's a really interesting argument in what what Mardani says I think one of the reasons that the ethnic populace have not spread as widely as before is that there is some you know a remnant of the South Africa moment that has an impact on the way people think in society today which gives me some optimism about the possibility of moving forward thank you um so time always goes so fast so we have about 10 more minutes and we have um we have a set of really interesting questions here from Bobby Jacobs and I'm going to ask him to unmute if he can um and to please he's posed a number of questions but if he could please um just raise one key question for our speakers he's pushing back a bit uh about um the the recommendations in terms of economic policy so if if I could just ask him to ask to pose his his one main question uh thank you madam chair yes hello sorry no problem thank you madam chair and thank you to the speakers for a really interesting topic um and so I guess I think the question that I would like um to be answered the most given South Africa's history is the issue around what is the alternative economic policy so you guys focus a lot around um the political stuff and the governance stuff but given the experience in the US around inequality and the fact that traditional economic policies do not does not address inequality um so when you start out in a country like South Africa with high rates of inequality the traditional economic approach was never going to address or close that inequality gap and is there room for an alternative economic theory or economic ideas like for example the circular economy or doughnut economics and given the current climate crisis is pursuing growth which is what South Africa needs to create jobs and to address a series of of social problems at what cost do we continue to pursue growth and where does addressing South Africa's climate needs balance with the economic policy for growth thank you thank you so Alan or Brian please go ahead um let me start off um you know Bobby you're absolutely right um you know I'm not sure if it's a if it's a I think that the that the economic policies um haven't been successful obviously in in addressing inequality both within the elite and um between the elite and the poor um and the and the the working poor and the and the and the many unemployed um and you know we we do suggest um a number of strategies um that need to be adopted in relation to that um they include you know more better targeted social transfers um better targeted economic development strategies to create jobs because the I mean any any any analysis you look at um the the biggest cause of inequality in South Africa is unemployment so jobs have to be created now whether those jobs can be created without um without a very high rate of economic growth that is environmentally damaging is a is a very critical question and you know it's very exciting that today um an announcement was made um by the by the presidency about a deal in which South Africa has committed to meeting the 2030 climate change targets in terms of emission reduction which is a massive thing before South Africa which is heavily dependent on coal for electrical power and for the transformation of many of its minerals um and that that deal relates to various forms of finance that are are being offered by four developed countries to support a just transition in South Africa on paper it's extremely exciting and it does offer the possibility of a a form of economic growth that isn't going to undermine our climate targets I just just to add um I think Alan and I very much agree that the question of inclusion and ideas around redress and need at this time to be taken on more centrally we both very much agree that there is both necessity and opportunity around green growth green green economy I think both of us would also argue strongly that oh that in a sense there is no feasible narrative in South Africa that can address poverty address inequality and agree and address redress without also accelerated green growth so the question is can can can one move from these I mean South these South Africans are good at zero sum dichotomies you either think it should be equitable or you think there should be growth can you break through that and say what are the opportunities that's why we use the sprays of growth compatible redress and absolutely I think green growth compatible redress is an opportunity but a version of getting to a viable sustainable long run thriving future without growth I think neither I don't know I think that that's plausible thanks um so we're almost at time and I wanted to just raise one final quick question and offer you the chance to give some closing remarks around the um what what do you think about the implications of your work for other contexts and other countries it was one of the things I found very rich in your report is is using the experience of South Africa to inform thinking about other countries and I wonder if you have any final remarks on that and also any any closing remarks in our last few minutes let me say something to that and then I'll leave the very final comments to Alan um so what I find helpful in terms of lessons for other countries South Africa puts incredibly front and center the relationship between inequality and the emergence of toxic populism that topic is there I'm actually involved in some comparative work right now which is the United States world through a South African lens and I think putting the South African story there makes it necessary in a way that Americans don't always do to come to grips with those that set of interactions so I think it is key I think what is remarkable about South Africa and I it's just as Alan said it's an amazing source of optimism in respect to that country is that by comparison with other settings when the provocation and the history to take those racial cleavages alongside the inequality cleavages and turn that into a toxic downward spiral of populism is so large it's quite remarkable and the source of optimism that that in fact has not happened so I think putting inequality front and center center South Africa could lead and I wish that the policy discourse in South Africa took that more seriously even with its various grants but also the sense of one doesn't have to despair this can turn so I'll end there um thanks Rachel for this opportunity to present the paper I don't really have a lot I don't have anything to add to to what Brian said except to say that um you know the paper that we did published through the Carnegie Endowment is available um if people want to want to follow up and and and see some of the details of the arguments which are much more in-depth I saw online for example there was a discussion about the the public sector and the expansion of the managerial class within the public sector in the Zuma era we we examine that those sort of issues very very carefully um and we're trying to present this in a kind of balanced way but we are at a very critical moment in our society and I think the president and others in the elite must be weighing the questions very heavily at the moment um what are the implications of this this dramatic drop in confidence in the in the government that's partly that's partly a result of our failure to um combat COVID as quickly and effectively as we should have and partly a result of many years of economic stagnation thanks Rachel and thank you to everybody else for your participation thank you so much Brian and Alan this has been really fascinating presentation and um also really really rich set of questions and responses um so thank you very much I encourage our audience to read the the paper um which I think is on on the Carnegie website um and um I think we need to bring the seminar the webinar to a close now we're at time but thank you very much uh for the for for your participation today