Sub-Saharan Africa’s food security has turned out better than feared

5 May 2021 - Wandile Sihlobo

Government support for farmers, higher rainfall and grain imports have helped sub-Saharan Africa stave off food insecurity - region isn't out of the woods yet.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, concern immediately arose that sub-Saharan Africa faced a potential worsening in food insecurity. The concerns were due to the anticipated slowdown in economic activity, job losses accompanied by loss of income, and a ban on grain exports by major exporting countries, including India, Russia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Sub-Saharan Africa is a net importer of food.

The bans, along with other pandemic-related disruptions to food supply chains, were expected to add to food security challenges in the region. The World Bank was among the first multilateral institutions to sound the alarm. The bank estimated that an additional 26 million people would fall into extreme poverty, defined as those living under US$1.90 per day, in 2020.

The slowdown in economic activity played out as expected, with sub-Saharan Africa’s economy contracting by 1.9% in 2020, according to International Monetary Fund estimates. The economic slowdown resulted in job losses.

The widespread job losses in the region subsequently led to a rise in food insecurity. This was most pronounced in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda and Malawi, the countries for which data is available.

More than a year since the onset of the pandemic, a great many uncertainties about the economic future of the region linger on. However, sub-Saharan Africa’s food security situation appears to have, thus far, turned out better than some of the more pessimistic expectations.

The increase in staple grain imports in various African countries, by both governments and private sector players, combined with slightly better domestic grain production conditions in some, such as Zambia, South Africa and Tanzania, to name a few, has slightly shielded the region.

Specific interventions

One positive development was that the G20 discouraged major grain-exporting countries from banning exports. Domestic evaluations of supplies by food-exporting countries also provided comfort for sufficient food supplies in the world market. As a result, India, Russia, Cambodia and Vietnam lifted the ban on exports, enabling a smooth flow of grain to the sub-Saharan Africa region.

Various governments also took action. This was primarily through increasing grain imports. The major importers have been Zimbabwe, Zambia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and Malawi. Some of these countries also rolled out farmer input support schemes to assist farmers ahead of the 2020/21 production season, which began in October 2020 for most countries. Only South Africa responded with direct income support to vulnerable households, but still household food insecurity rose.

Governments also supported farmers with inputs. This could pay off during the 2021 harvest. There remain concerns though that some of support might have been late in getting to some farmers because of corruption, poor farmer targeting and bureaucratic inefficiencies. This has been the experience with previous farm input subsidies programmes.

That said, another important positive development was that most of the African continent, specifically southern and eastern regions, received higher rainfall during the 2020-21 summer. This allowed for increased plantings and improved crop production conditions. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates already point to prospects of increased maize production in several southern and east Africa countries.

For example:

• Zambia’s 2020/21 maize production could reach 3.4 million tonnes (up 69% on 2019/20);

• Malawi’s maize harvest is estimated at 3.8 million tonnes (up 25% y/y),

• Mozambique’s maize crop is estimated at 2.1 million tonnes (up 8% y/y),

• Kenya’s maize harvest is forecast at 4.0 million tonnes (up 5% y/y).

• Tanzania’s maize harvest is estimated at 6.3 million tonnes (up 8% y/y).

There are also prospects of large maize and wheat harvests in Zimbabwe.

These numbers suggest a good harvest, not only for grains but also for other crops and improved livestock conditions in the southern and east Africa region.

These improved agricultural conditions cannot fully compensate for job losses. Nevertheless they might cushion households from severe and long-term food insecurity that the World Bank’s economists had feared the sub-Saharan Africa region would face from 2020. It is plausible that as the harvest begins from May 2021 in some African countries, rural households could be in a slightly better position than in 2020 in terms of staple grains availability.

The big question now is whether insights have been gained to make the agricultural sector more resilient in the future, and if the expected large harvest could be stored in good condition to last for longer or reach the market in good quality. A number of sub-Saharan African countries lag behind in this effort.

One idea that’s been around for decades revolves around strengthening rural economies through supporting agriculture and improving infrastructure to help link farmers to markets. Had efficient roads and storage infrastructure existed in many African countries, the windfall of expected large grains harvest would find a market place, and income from sales would improve household incomes.

From a policy perspective, I would argue that as various governments begin to craft and some implement the economic recovery strategies from the COVID-19 slump, the improvement in rural infrastructure should be prioritised. Such an approach would have long term economic and food security benefits.

Challenges ahead

Nevertheless, the sub-Saharan Africa region still faces major headwinds.

If the pandemic is prolonged it’s plausible that the fear of rising food insecurity could eventually be a reality, especially if the next summers are not as rainy as 2020-21.

In addition, the government-led input support to farmers for the 2021-22 planting season will be constrained by reduced fiscal space that most emerging market governments face. And there’s the lurking risk of increasing global bond yields which will make government bonds in developed countries offer more attractive returns for investors, resulting in money being sucked out of emerging and frontier markets.

Essentially, the rural areas of the sub-Saharan Africa region might experience an improvement in food availability in 2021 compared to 2020. However, this is temporary. It is at the mercy of weather conditions and government support going into 2022. Both are highly uncertain and largely not within each country’s control.

Perhaps, sub-Saharan African governments might want to ensure continued farmer input support again in the 2021-22 summer crop planting period.

Wandile Sihlobo, Visiting Research Fellow, Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Johannesburg is threatening to sideline informal waste pickers. Why it’s a bad idea

5 May 2021 - Melanie Samson

Waste reclaimers save South African municipalities up to R748 million a year in landfill space. Without them, the country's recycling economy would not exist.

Like all cities in the world, Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital, has a waste management problem. In 2018/19, more than 290 000 tonnes of waste was illegally dumped in neighbourhoods across the city. Illegal dumping will likely increase, as the four legal landfills will be full in less than three years.

Various efforts have been made over the years to try and manage the problems better.

A contentious, and politically sensitive issue in all of these efforts has been the role of waste reclaimers, the informal actors who earn a living by salvaging and selling recyclables.

Like their counterparts across the country, reclaimers in Johannesburg play a crucial role in waste management and recycling. According to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, reclaimers collect 80%-90% of all used packaging and paper that is recycled. They also save municipalities up to R748 million a year in landfill space. Without them, South Africa’s recycling economy would not exist, and Johannesburg’s landfills would have closed long ago.

Pikitup, the private company created by the City to provide municipal waste management services, only started promoting recycling just over a decade ago. Instead of partnering with the real recycling experts, reclaimers, Pikitup designs charity-style projects for them and gives the official recycling work to unemployed people with no experience in the sector and private companies.

In mid-2018, Pikitup started a separation at source pilot project that pays two private companies to collect recyclables separated from trash by residents in some suburbs.

Now the city wants “affluent” households to pay a new R50 monthly recycling levy to extend the pilot.

But evidence from my three-year research project shows that Pikitup’s pilot has failed to collect significant amounts of recyclables. It has also been far from cost-effective. And it has profoundly negative consequences for reclaimers.

Unintended consequences

There are approximately 8000 reclaimers in Johannesburg. Some have been collecting recyclables for more than 30 years and there are families with several generations of reclaimers.

Working with 13 post-graduate students, my research project interviewed and surveyed reclaimers, residents and officials to see how they were affected by Pikitup’s recycling programmes between 2016 and 2019.

We found that Pikitup’s pilot had a number of negative consequences.

As the contracted companies started collecting the same materials that reclaimers depended on, reclaimers struggled to access recyclables, which decreased their incomes. It also led to increased harassment as reclaimers were accused by residents and security of “stealing” Pikitup’s bags.

The pilot also made life harder for reclaimers in other ways. They had to start sleeping in suburban parks to get to the materials before the private recycling trucks arrived, as otherwise there would be nothing to collect and their children would go hungry.

Poor track record

Pikitup’s approach to recycling has a poor track record.

In 2018/2019, the most recent year for which Pikitup has released complete data, Pikitup planned to collect 50 000 tonnesof recyclables. It then lowered the goal to 32 550 tonnes, but still missed this new target by about 6500 tonnes.

In the first 12 months of Pikitup’s separation at source pilot – which the levy is set to expand – an internal Pikitup presentation reported that Pikitup diverted only 27 277 tonnes of recyclables.

This is only a fraction of what reclaimers divert in a year. Data from a “resident-reclaimer” recycling pilot project led by the African Reclaimers Organisation in two Johannesburg suburbs shows that participating reclaimers collect an average of 128.18 kgs per day. If the City’s approximately 8000 reclaimers salvage similar amounts, they need a mere 27 days to divert as many tonnes of recyclables as Pikitup did in the first year of the City’s pilot.

While the companies in Pikitup’s pilot only collect bags of separated materials, reclaimers in the African Reclaimers Organisation pilot do the same, but also continue to salvage recyclables from rubbish bins. They do this because many residents still throw away recyclables. As a result, reclaimers provide a more effective service, because they ensure that recyclables that residents put in the trash don’t end up at landfills. And they do it for free.

Pikitup’s pilot has a number of inbuilt inefficiencies. For example, Pikitup pays the private contractors between approximately R20 – R25 per household per month to collect separated recyclables. The companies are paid even if a household does not put out a bag of recyclables or a reclaimer collects the bag. The reclaimer is not paid anything.

As Pikitup expands its pilot, the private companies will get the cleanest materials. More reclaimers will lose access to bins, and the recyclables in those bins will end up at landfills.

This is not just bad for reclaimers. It is bad for the environment as landfills will fill up faster and more virgin materials will be used to produce new products. While the companies use trucks to collect recyclables, reclaimers’ trolleys are a low carbon alternative.

A more sensible approach

It makes more sense to pay reclaimers to collect recyclables as is done in cities in Colombia, India, and Brazil. The African Reclaimers Organisation pilot has shown that reclaimers can provide an efficient, effective, low-carbon service that positively transforms relationships between residents and reclaimers.

Prior to the pandemic, reclaimers in this pilot were paid a service fee based on the kilograms of recyclables collected.

More than 2,400 residents have signed the African Reclaimers Organisation’s petition that calls on the municipality to stop the R50 levy and create a reclaimer-based recycling system through consultation with reclaimers.

It is time the city recognised reclaimers’ central role in Johannesburg’s recycling economy and work with reclaimers to build on what exists to create a recycling system appropriate for the South African context. Expanding African Reclaimers Organisation’s pilot would be a great way to start.

Melanie Samson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How the pandemic is hurting university students’ mental health

5 May 2021 - Emmanuel Ojo, Annie Burger, Anthony J Onwuegbuzie, Bryan Jason Bergsteedt, Samantha Adams and Talitha Crowley

Ultimately, these studies will help us to make sense of how the pandemic is reshaping higher education.

Institutions of higher education worldwide are undergoing unprecedented change because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Universities and colleges have been forced to switch to online teaching and learning. Many were unprepared for this move to what is termed emergency remote teaching and learning.

It is now just more than a year on from many countries’ initial lockdowns. Many universities have adopted some form of hybrid learning approach. They are attempting to combine face-to-face and online instruction into a single, seamless experience. This situation is likely to remain the status quo for some time, especially in the Global South. That is because, although a variety of vaccines are available around the world, distribution and actual vaccination has been slow in poorer countries – and particularly on the African continent.

This has serious implications for higher education. For many students, the university campus isn’t just where they go to learn. It also provides a space for relationships that helps them to form important networks and alliances that evolve and extend beyond their university education.

We wanted to know how students have coped and are negotiating the current challenges. So, we conducted research soon after the pandemic started that explored how teaching and learning had been affected. This initial publication focused on one of South Africa’s research-intensive universities. It revealed that students had struggled to manage online learning remotely.

A network of global researchers from multiple disciplines and universities (including five institutions in South Africa) is now replicating this study. Their aim is to understand better the situation elsewhere in Africa as well as in Europe, South America, the Caribbean and North America. Ultimately, these studies will help us to make sense of how the pandemic is reshaping higher education.

The initial study confirmed the need to prioritise university students’ welfare. We found that undergraduates, full-time students, and female students were especially vulnerable at home while learning online due to the pandemic. Given South Africa’s gender-based violence crisis, stay-at-home learning has exposed many young women students to challenging and dangerous situations.

The global pandemic has created more uncertainty about the future, including higher education and the world of work. This uncertainty emerged in our research as fundamentally affecting mental health. South African universities have to support students’ transition through this uncertainty. That includes the difficulties stemming from lack of social cohesion — including peer-to-peer relationships on campus — that are afflicting students.

Seven key themes

For our study, a total of 1,932 university students completed an online questionnaire over a period of six weeks. A mix of undergraduate and postgraduate, and international students also were involved.

The questionnaires yielded demographic data. They also examined students’ perceptions of readiness and motivation for online teaching, learning and assessment; student engagement; and their attitudes towards COVID-19 and its impact on higher education. Open-ended items also were included. These asked the students to reflect on the disruption caused by the pandemic.

Seven themes emerged from the data. These represented challenges that hindered students’ ability successfully to learn online during the COVID-19 era. The themes were:

• Internet connection
• Mental health
• Personal challenges/ability
• Time management
• Being easily distracted
• Family members making studying difficult
• The interaction between lecturers and students

We found that undergraduate and full-time students were approximately twice and four times, respectively, more likely than were postgraduate and part-time students to indicate problems associated with mental health. Those aged between 18 and 24 were approximately 1.75 times more likely than students older than 24 to present problems associated with mental health.

The findings also reveal a gender dimension to mental health in our study. Specifically, female students were 1.83 times more likely than male students to indicate problems associated with mental health. These problems included stress, anxiety and depression.

Students expressed challenges with time management, distraction and problems associated with family members. These were situated in the notion of self-directed learning and self-management. These notions entail discipline, personal commitment, motivation and so on. Researchers have argued that self-directed learning is important to success. Students struggled with the lack of physical support from their peers and lecturers. They said they were unable to stay motivated and focused by themselves within the remote learning space.

Internet connectivity emerged strongly as a theme. This indicates how great the digital divide is between South Africa’s urban and rural areas. Older students were more likely than were their younger peers to experience connectivity issues. This supports the argument that younger university students are more likely to be digital natives than older students. International students, many of them back at home in other African countries because of the pandemic, struggled the most with connectivity. The university provided data bundles to local students so they could access streamed lectures.

Overall, the results under this theme showed a lack of internet connectivity in rural areas, in general, and particularly in South Africa’s poorest provinces. A large relationship emerged between the poverty ranking of provinces across South Africa and the degree to which students reported experiencing internet connectivity challenges.

Long-term strategy

A country like South Africa cannot afford to ignore the impact of the pandemic on higher education, especially on students’ health and well-being. South Africa’s comparative and competitive edge is locked in the youth, especially university students. They are a critical mass in “building the capability of the state to play a developmental, transformative role” according to the National Development Plan 2030.

South African universities, working with the Department of Higher Education and Training and other national government departments, must create and resource a long-term strategy to support the well-being of university students as they transition through this pandemic. One example is that of the Wellbeing at Oxford programme at Oxford University in England. Online mental health services, as provided in Canadian universities, must become an integral and sustained intervention in South African universities going forward.

Emmanuel Ojo, Senior Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand; Annie Burger, PhD student, Stellenbosch University; Anthony J Onwuegbuzie, Senior Research Associate, University of Cambridge; Bryan Jason Bergsteedt, Lecturer (Clinical Anatomy), Stellenbosch University; Samantha Adams, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Psychology, Stellenbosch University, and Talitha Crowley, Senior lecturer at the Department of Nursing and Midwifery, Stellenbosch University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hearing loss is a neglected hazard for miners in South Africa

7 May 2021 - Nomfundo Moroe

Noise-induced hearing loss is an occupational health hazard. It remains a prevalent condition in the South African mining industry.

South Africa’s mining industry has long been an important part of the country’s economy.

In 2020 alone, despite COVID-19, mining contributed R361.6 billion (almost 20 billion US dollars) towards South Africa’s gross domestic product, a share of over 8%. The industry employs 451,000 people.

But despite its value and the regulations in place to protect workers, it has been criticised for a poor record of health and safety.

The South African constitution guarantees workers’ right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or wellbeing. Employers must provide a reasonably practicable working environment that is safe and without risk to the health of employees.

The mining sector has been accused of neglecting the fundamental rights of most mineworkers. It has failed to implement adequate occupational health and safety regulations on a number of fronts, including monitoring new occupational diseases and injuries.

The country’s miners face a number of hazards. These include fatalities, silicosis (a lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust in gold mines) and occupational noise-induced hearing loss.

Hearing conservation programmes were introduced nationwide in 2003 by the Mine Health and Safety Council, an organisation comprising labour, the state and employers. But in 2013 the industry conceded that these were not having the desired impact of reducing the new cases of occupational noise induced hearing loss.

As a response to this admission, we conducted a study to understand how these programmes were being implemented in the industry and to identify areas for improvement.

We found a number of gaps in these programmes. There were no clearly defined action plans. We also found flaws in the formulation of hearing conservation programmes. Intervention programmes need to include occupational audiologists. Furthermore, the mining industry needs to be accessible for research purposes.

Noise-induced hearing loss

The Leon Commission in 1995 was the first inquiry into occupational health and safety in South Africa’s mining industry for more than 30 years. Eventually, in 2003, hearing conservation programmes were rolled out throughout the industry.

The programmes targeted two key areas. The first stated no employee’s hearing should deteriorate by more than 10% from the baseline by December 2008. The second was to ensure that, by December 2013, the total noise emitted by all equipment would not be higher than a sound pressure level of 110 dB(A).

Hearing conservation programmes are complex and need an integrated approach. These programmes require a range of actions to be taken. For example employers must monitor the workers’ noise exposure levels. And employees’ hearing must be monitored over time.

At the summit to review the milestones in 2013, the chairperson of the Mining Council admitted that the industry was not making the desired progress with noise-induced hearing loss.

The issue of occupational noise-induced hearing loss is prominent in the mining industry. But there is a lack of information on the extent of hearing loss – this is part of the problem.

Occupational noise-induced hearing loss is not life-threatening. But it has long-lasting health, psychosocial and economic effects.

Our research investigated the management of occupational noise-induced hearing loss in the South African mining industry from policy formulation to implementation, monitoring and evaluation. We interviewed members of the Mine Health and Safety Council and analysed regulations and policies on the management of occupational noise-induced hearing loss since 1994.

There was a lack of comprehensive studies addressing all the pillars of hearing conservation programmes. Some stakeholders were excluded from the formulation and implementation of these programmes. We also identified gaps in the role of occupational audiologists in the mining sector.

In addition, we faced restrictions when trying to gain access to the mining industry for research purposes. At the core of the problem was the fact that hearing conservation programmes are complex interventions. They have multiple pillars. These include periodic noise exposure measurement and monitoring, engineering controls as well as personal hearing protection. Hearing conservation programmes are also influenced by the behaviour of various actors such as mine management and mineworkers. Additionally, there are few studies focusing on understanding the processes followed in the implementation of hearing conservation programmes.

Our original review of hearing conservation programmes was published in 2018. But more recent research I’ve done shows that the problems persist. Hearing conservation programmes are fragmented. For example, workers were not adequately trained on using hearing protection devices.

Way forward

Currently, hearing conservation programmes are not successful and this may not change unless contextually relevant changes are adopted.

These changes include embracing innovative and evidence-based advances in hearing conservation programmes. Objective stakeholders such as audiologists must be allowed to evaluate the cost versus the benefit of implementing hearing conservation programmes.

Existing programmes need realistic reviews to understand what works, for whom, and under what circumstances. This is key to evaluating the status of these programmes.

Nomfundo Moroe, Lecturer at the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nocturnal dinosaurs: Night vision and superb hearing suggest moonlight predator

7 May 2021 - Lars Schmitz, Jonah Choiniere and Roger Benson

By looking at the eye bones and ear canals of extinct dinosaurs, researchers show that a small ancient predator likely had senses good as a modern barn owl.

Today, barn owls, bats, leopards and many other animals rely on their keen senses to live and hunt under the dim light of stars. These nighttime specialists avoid the competition of daylight hours, hunting their prey under the cloak of darkness, often using a combination of night vision and acute hearing.

But was there nightlife 100 million years ago? In a world without owls or leopards, were dinosaurs working the night shift? If so, what senses did they use to find food and avoid predators in the darkness? To better understand the senses of the dinosaur ancestors of birds, our team of paleontologists and paleobiologists scoured research papers and museum collections looking for fossils that preserved delicate eye and ear structures. And we found some.

Using scans of fossilized dinosaur skulls, in a paper published in the journal Science on May 6, 2021, we describe the most convincing evidence to date for nocturnal dinosaurs. Two fossil species – Haplocheirus sollers and Shuvuuia deserti – likely had extremely good night vision. But our work also shows that S. deserti also had incredibly sensitive hearing similar to modern-day owls. This is the first time these two traits have been found in the same fossil, suggesting that this small, desert-dwelling dinosaur that lived in ancient Mongolia was probably a specialized night-hunter of insects and small mammals.

Looking to theropods

By studying fossilized eye bones, one of us, Lars Schmitz, had previously found that some small predatory dinosaurs may have hunted at night. Most of these potentially nocturnal hunters were theropods, the group of three-toed dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds. But to date, fossils for only 12 theropod species included the eye structures that can tell paleontologists about night vision.

Our team identified four more species of theropods with clues for their sense of vision – for a total of 16. We then looked for fossils that preserve the structures of the inner ear and found 17 species. Excitingly, for four species, we were able to get measurements for both eyes and ears.

Eye bones built for night vision

Scleral ossicles are thin, rectangular bone plates that form a ring-like structure surrounding the pupils of lizards as well as birds and their ancestors – dinosaurs. Scleral rings define the largest possible size of an animal’s pupil and can tell you how well that animal can see at night. The larger the pupil compared to the size of the eye, the better a dinosaur could see in the dark.

Since the individual bony ossicles of these rings fell apart after these animals died more than 60 million years ago, our team made scans of the fossils and then digitally reconstructed the eyes. Of all the theropods we examined, H. sollers and S. deserti had some of the proportionally largest pupils.

S. deserti‘s pupil made up more than half of its eye, very similar to night-vision specialists that live today like geckos and nightjars. Our team then compared the fossils to 55 living species of lizards and 367 species of birds with known day or night activity patterns. According to the statistical analyses our team performed, there is a very high chance – higher than 90% – that H. sollers and S. deserti were nocturnal.

But those were not the only two theropods our team looked at. Our analysis also found a few other likely nighttime specialists – such as Megapnosaurus kayentakatae – as well as daylight specialists like Almas ukhaa. But we also found some species – like Velociraptor mongoliensis – with eyesight seemingly adapted for medium light levels. This might suggest that they hunted around dawn or dusk.

Incredible ears of a dinosaur

In today’s nocturnal animals, hearing can be as important as keen eyesight. To figure out how well these extinct dinosaurs could hear, we scanned the skulls of 17 fossil theropods to decipher the structure of their inner ears and then compared our scans to the ears of modern animals.

All vertebrates have a tube-like canal called the cochlea deep in their inner ear. Studies of living mammals and birds show that the longer this canal, the wider the range of frequencies an animal can hear and the better they can hear very faint sounds.

Our scans showed that S. deserti had an extremely elongated inner ear canal for its size – also similar to that of the living barn owl and proportionally much longer than all of the other 88 living bird species we analyzed for comparison. Based on our measurements, among dinosaurs, we found that predators had generally better hearing than herbivores. Several predators – including V. mongoliensis – also had moderately elongated inner ears, but none rivaled S. deserti’s.

The life of a nocturnal dinosaur

By studying the sensory abilities of dinosaurs, paleontologists like us not only are learning what species roamed the night, but can also begin to infer how these dinosaurs lived and shared resources.

S. deserti had extreme night vision and sensitive hearing, and this little dinosaur probably used its incredible senses to hunt prey at night. It could likely hear and follow rustling from a distance before visually detecting its prey and digging it up from the ground with its short single-clawed arms. In the dry, desert-like habitats of millions of years ago, it might have been an evolutionary advantage to be active in the cooler temperatures of the night.

But according to our analysis, S. deserti wasn’t the only dinosaur active at night. Other dinosaurs like V. mongoliensis and the plant-eating Protoceratops mongoliensis both lived in the same habitat and had some level of night vision.

Paleontologists currently do not know the full suite of animals that shared S. deserti’s extreme nocturnal lifestyle in the ancient deserts of Mongolia – it is rare to find fossils with the right bones intact that allow paleontologists to investigate their senses. However, the presence of a specialized night forager highlights that much like today, some dinosaurs avoided the dangers and competition of daylight hours and roamed under the stars.

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Lars Schmitz, Associate Professor of Biology, Scripps College; Jonah Choiniere, Senior Researcher in Dinosaur Palaentology, University of the Witwatersrand, and Roger Benson, Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Oxford. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The biggest issue in world press freedom is attacks on women journalists

11 May 2021 - Glenda Daniels

The online attacks on women journalists are bound to populist politics, disinformation and intersectional discrimination, says Unesco.

The report, The Chilling: Global Trends in Online Violence against Women Journalists, and themed “Information as a Public Good”, is ground-breaking because of its size and scope. It records 73% of the women surveyed as having experienced online violence (including death and rape threats). Twenty percent of women journalists said they withdrew from social media interaction because of the threats and vilification from being called “witch”, “hag”, “whore”, “bitch”, and “presstitute” (“press” plus “prostitute”).

A team of 23 international researchers from 16 countries, led by Julie Posetti (global research director), Nabeelah Shabbir, Diana Maynard, Kalina Bontcheva and Nermine Aboulez wrote the 94-page report. (Disclosure: I led the Africa region research and the full book on the international study will be published in June 2021.)

The study has been the largest of its kind,  deploying a global survey with 901 participants from 125 countries; 173 long-form interviews, two big-data cases assessing 2.5 million Facebook and Twitter posts. One case study is of Maria Ressa, Rappler Philippines editor, who won the Unesco/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. The other was of Carole Cadwalladr (The Guardian, UK), whose investigative work exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal that led to the biggest fines in history being imposed on the social-media tech giant.

The attacks on Ressa followed her investigations into state-linked disinformation networks. She once recorded more than 90 hate messages in an hour on Facebook. She’s been called “fucking ugly bitch”, “whore”, “dog”, among other, even worse names. Some of the key findings include:

“The role of political extremism (in particular far-right extremism), nationalism and populism: misogyny is weaponized in the global tilt towards populism, and women journalists are clear targets, particularly those reporting on far-right extremist networks;

“The platforms as vectors of online violence: social media platforms are seen as the major enablers for online violence against women journalists but cast as (largely) failed responders to the problem;

“Political actors as attackers: politicians and party political party officials/donors are implicated as major instigators and amplifiers of online violence against women journalists.”

Access to data and social media results in less freedom for women journalists because of the online abuse, especially of those whose stories have impact.

The most frequently used platforms for the vilifications were found to be Facebook (77% of the time), Twitter (74%), followed by WhatsApp, YouTube and Instagram. Social media platforms are criticised because they don’t respond adequately to the cyberbullying. They don’t pull down the hatred quickly enough. The report found the violence does not remain online. It spills over into real life. It has intersections with race – black, indigenous and Jewish women were the most targeted.

More than a third (37%) of survey respondents identified political actors as top culprits.

Extremely worrying is that only 25% of respondents reported online violence incidents to their employer. Whereas 10% of the reporters received no response, 9% were told to “grow a thicker skin” or “toughen up”. What an indictment on media companies, and employers! In SA, investigative journalist Pauli van Wyk, who covered the VBS corruption, says in the report that if it wasn’t for the support of Branko Brkic, founder and editor-in-chief of Daily Maverick, she would not be a journalist today. DM Associate Editor Ferial Haffajee’s story of racist vilification is also in the report: “Go back to India; this is not your country,” she was told.

Misogyny intersects with other forms of discrimination: women journalists who are also disadvantaged by racism, homophobia (e.g. Ressa’s sexuality was questioned), religious bigotry (anti-Jewish comments) and other forms of bigotry (anti-Chinese comments).

Among white women journalists, 64% said that they had experienced online violence. The figure for black women journalists was 81%.

The report says: “Online violence against women journalists is designed to: belittle, humiliate, and shame; induce fear, silence, and retreat; discredit them professionally, undermining accountability journalism and trust in facts; and chill their active participation [along with that of their sources, colleagues and audiences] in public debate. This amounts to an attack on democratic deliberation and media freedom, encompassing the public’s right to access information, and it cannot afford to be normalised or tolerated as an inevitable aspect of online discourse, nor contemporary audience-engaged journalism.”

World Press Freedom Day was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993, following a recommendation adopted at the 26th session of Unesco’s general conference in 1991 (known as the Windhoek Declaration). Consistent with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it called for an independent, pluralistic, and free press as an essential part of the development and maintenance of democracy.

The theme of this year’s World Press Freedom Day underlines the importance of verified and reliable information, especially in the era of social media misinformation during the time of Covid-19. It illuminates the “essential role of free and professional journalists in producing and disseminating this information, by tackling misinformation and other harmful content”, says Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of Unesco.

The report found media employers are doing little about the problem and recommends that individual states could ensure laws are in place to protect women journalists.

• Social media companies need to be made more accountable;
• Political parties should desist from the attacks;
• Civil society could raise awareness of the scourge;
• Investment in research on trolling is needed; and
• Ensure online safety is holistic (integrating psychological, digital security, editorial, and legal responses).

If media freedom is threatened, our democracy suffers. What good is “information for the public good” if women, who constitute the majority in the world, are not a central part of journalism?

Glenda Daniels is an Associate Professor at Media Studies, Wits University. This article was first published in Daily Maverick.

Former minister’s memoir is a candid critique of South Africa’s political economy

18 May 2021 - Mills Soko

Rob Davies is critical of economic policy. He reserves particular criticism for its macroeconomic policy framework introduced in 1996.

A new book by Rob Davies, a former South African Trade and Industry Minister, provides a candid and detailed insider’s account of the evolution of the country’s post-apartheid political economy.

He makes it clear from the outset that this is a memoir and not an autobiography. But, as one reads on, it becomes obvious that it is impossible to separate his personal experiences from the momentous events that have shaped democratic South Africa.

The book’s fourteen chapters cover topics as varied as the apartheid context, the southern African region, Mozambican socialism plus economic policy in the transition to democracy and in the first democratic administration led by President Nelson Mandela. It also covers the importance of the governing African National Congress’s (ANC’s) eventful 52nd national conference in 2007. It looks at trade policy challenges, too, as well as politics and economics in the era of President Cyril Ramaphosa.

The early years and ideology

Early in the book the reader is introduced to the intellectual ideas that moulded Davies’s ideological worldview. His doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex, Britain, examined the relationship between capital, the state and white labour in South Africa.

Under the tutelage of exiled South African Marxist scholar Harold Wolpe, he became a member of a coterie of theorists and scholars. Mostly of Marxist orientation, they were concerned with analysing the relationship between capitalism and apartheid.

Davies’s 11 years in exile in Mozambique, where he worked as a researcher alongside Ruth First, an anti-apartheid activist and academic, at Eduardo Mondlane University, gave him direct exposure to Mozambique’s history and socialist model. It also deepened his understanding of the southern African region. He writes frankly about the failures of Mozambican socialism, while highlighting its achievements.

Critiquing the post-apartheid economy

The book focuses mostly on economic issues. This is not surprising, given the author’s long history of dealing with economic matters. He recounts in detail the political and social changes that took place in South Africa following the 1994 elections that ended apartheid.

He is critical of economic policy during the first ANC administration. He reserves particular criticism for its macroeconomic policy framework introduced in 1996, the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR).

It was developed “without prior consultation” with any of the ANC’s alliance partners – the South African Communist Party and labour federation Cosatu. Davies bemoans that GEAR led to the controversial scrapping of the Reconstruction and Development Programme. The radical economic programme was designed to redistribute income, wealth and economic power and, at the same time, stimulate rapid economic growth.

These are valid concerns. Others include the point that GEAR failed to meet its job creation targets. It did not yield desired levels of foreign investment either. But his analysis lacks a nuanced appreciation of the national context. This includes the fact that when GEAR was unveiled, the country was mired in a debilitating currency crisis, amid dwindling international confidence. And he doesn’t say whether the policy accomplished anything.

Davies thinks that the debate that pitted the supporters of GEAR against its detractors could be described as “macroeconomic fundamentalism”. The proponents emphasised the need for macroeconomic discipline. Critics argued in favour of an expansionist neo-Keynesian economic approach.

What was missing from the debate was

any profound engagement with the constraints being imposed by the structural characteristics of the productive economy, the changes that were taking place in it and the kind of transformations that were therefore necessary at this level to move to a qualitatively different new growth path capable of addressing the triple challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality.

An opportunity lost

Davies argues that the ANC’s 52nd conference, and the subsequent ascent of Jacob Zuma to the highest political office, represented an opportunity for the radical transformation of the economy.

The focus was on active trade and industrial policies. These included the adoption of strategies for beneficiation (adding value to mineral resources) and localisation (designating that a certain portion of goods be bought locally for government’s infrastructure programmes). The policies were touted as being central to the structural transformation in the productive base of the economy. They were to be joined by an effective land reform programme.

A “developmental trade policy”, set out in several iterations of the Industrial Policy Action Plan, would alter the structure of the economy, enabling a shift to higher value-added production. It is not evident whether these economic objectives were achieved.

Davies outlines some policy successes. These include significant investments in the automotive, pharmaceutical and agro-processing sectors. Others include retention of thousands of jobs in clothing and textiles. There were also notable advances in metals fabrication industries.

Even so, it is questionable whether these industrial policies succeeded substantially to stem the tide of deindustrialisation that has hobbled the post-apartheid economy.

Davies seems to concede this reality when he states that

we had not yet remotely reached the stage of having sufficient impact decisively to create conditions for a new, productive, sector-driven inclusive growth path.

Trade diplomat

As a public servant he was not only hardworking but had an impressive command of policy and technical detail. This is laid bare when he discusses trade policy challenges. His good understanding of the global political economy, coupled with his mastery of policy detail, made him an effective trade diplomat.

His vast knowledge, sharp insights and extensive experience stood him in good stead. He led South Africa’s charge in dealing with intractable problems within the World Trade Organisation and renegotiating the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act with the US. He also led in negotiating Economic Partnership Agreements with the EU and engaged with counterparts in the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) grouping.

His concerns about what stalled progress within the Southern African Customs Union between South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Eswatini deserve serious attention.

Like his colleagues within the South African Communist Party and Cosatu, Davies was initially hopeful that the Zuma administration (May 2009 to February 2018) would usher in a new era of economic and social progress. He is disappointed with what it turned out to be.

He points out that in spite of some advances, including those in the area of HIV/AIDS policy, the

Zuma presidency ended up being an extremely destructive demobilisation of state capacity through rampant looting.

Davies cannot delink himself from the historical events in which he took part. As his earlier cringeworthy interview with the BBC’s Stephen Sackur showed, he missed a chance to speak out more forcefully against economic mismanagement and state capture.

Book’s significance

Overall, this is a thoughtful, well-researched and informative book. It is a substantive, and in some respects original, contribution to the post-apartheid political economy literature.

The writing style is somewhat turgid but this is eased by the fascinating anecdotes. The book will serve as a valuable resource to everyone who is interested in South Africa’s contemporary political economy.

Mills Soko, Professor: International Business & Strategy, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SA must ban sugary drinks sales in schools. Self regulation is failing

18 May 2021 - Agnes Erzse, Karen Hofman and Nicola Christofides

A ban on sugary drinks sale and advertisements in schools is likely to hold more promise in improving the diets of children and help prevent obesity.

In 2017, Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa voluntarily announced that it would stop supplying sugary beverages to primary school outlets. The company also pledged to remove all branding and advertising from schools. The announcement took the form of a letter noting that that Coca-Cola Beverages wanted to play “an active role in addressing rising obesity rates in South Africa, especially among children”.

Childhood obesity is a serious and growing problem is South Africa. More than 13% of children are either obese or overweight. The consumption of liquid sugar is particularly harmful because it is absorbed so quickly into the bloodstream. Not surprisingly, sugary drinks and their marketing has been linked to obesity especially among children. Just a single sugary beverage per day increases that child’s chance of overweight by 55%. Similarly, once they become an overweight teen, there is a 70% chance they will not be able to lose the weight.

The food environment in schools plays a significant role in increasing access to sugary drinks. Children spend a lot of time in school during their developmentally important periods. Among others, the types of food and beverages children are exposed to at school influence their eating patterns and food preferences.

This is a concern for South Africans as children are exposed to aggressive marketing and unhealthy foods and beverages at schools. Of particular concern is learners’ excessive sugary drinks consumption. An average grade 4 learner (10-year-old) has around one to two sugary drinks per day, with each soft drink containing up to nine teaspoons of sugar.

Obesity prevention efforts are clearly needed in schools. But what should these efforts entail? Our new research shows that voluntary actions by industry are not part of the recipe.

The aim of our research was to see what drinks were available at schools after Coca-Cola’s announcement. Our audit showed that the company’s brands remained available in most of the schools. Our study highlights that ceding regulation to industry is risky; government regulations and legislation are needed.

Tuck shop audit

We studied the food environment across 105 public primary schools in South Africa’s Gauteng province. Schools were located in both affluent and in poorer areas. This allowed us to see if there were any differences in outcomes based on the socioeconomic status of the school. Fieldworkers visited tuck shops and other food outlets on school premises. They spoke to school staff to find out what was being sold to the children through the school stores or tuck shops.

In general, food consumed at schools can constitute up to 20%–30% of learners’ total daily caloric intake. This is either through the government school meal programmes in poorer areas, from the school tuck shops or learners’ lunch boxes brought from home.

Our study showed that two years after Coca-Cola Beverages pledge, carbonated sugary drinks were available in 54% of primary school tuck shops. These drinks were more available in fee-paying schools (86%) than no-fee schools (21%). When researchers looked at the availability of alternative low-calorie products, they found that none of the school tuck shops sold only low-calorie drinks.

Decision makers explained that schools faced challenges such as financing general school maintenance and staff salaries. They felt like they had to make a trade-off between revenue generation and the healthfulness of the products they sold in the tuck shops. We found that Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa is not the sole distributor to school tuck shops. Therefore, even when Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa would not supply sugary beverages, schools stocked their tuck shops through general commercial wholesalers.

When it came to advertising, only some schools reported that the company had done what was promised in the pledge, to remove all branding and advertising from schools. But this was the exception rather than the norm. Nearly one-third (31%) of schools had Coca-Cola branding or advertising on school premises. Much of the branding are billboards with the name of the school. Respondents reported that branding, in particular branded fridges, remained unchanged.

Less than half of the school decision makers interviewed in the study were aware of the pledge. This suggests that they either did not recall the letter or had not seen it. The study also revealed that there was easy access to unhealthy products outside school premises through informal food vendors and nearby stores.

Recommendations

Despite the common reliance on self-regulatory measures by commercial food entities there is no evidence to support either their effectiveness or safety, according to policy expert Professor Rob Moodie and colleagues.

A ban on sugary drinks sales and advertising is likely to hold more promise than voluntary actions in improving the diets of school-going children and contribute to obesity prevention efforts among children. There is promising evidence from other developing countries, like Chile, where a ban on unhealthy foods and beverages resulted in substantial reduction in sales of such products in schools.

Change must also happen in the wider school community, in line with our constitutional basis in the best interests of the child.

Students, school staff, parents, and tuck shop owners all play a significant role in creating a healthier food environment at schools. Making a change at the tuck shop might feel risky but small changes such as banning sugary drinks are an excellent start. This already happening across the globe.

Lastly, it is important that these changes are communicated with the wider school community. The health benefits of the changes should be explained, emphasising the positive impact on students’ nutrition, well-being and school performance. Learners should be able to question what they can buy at school tuck shops or are served for lunch. Every school child in South Africa is entitled to an easy and healthy dietary choice on a daily basis.

Agnes Erzse, Researcher, SAMRC/Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science- PRICELESS SA, University of the Witwatersrand; Karen Hofman, Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand, and Nicola Christofides, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SA sets out to protect cast and crew involved in nudity and sex scenes

18 May 2021 - Fiona Ramsay

Spurred by the #MeToo movement, South Africa's is the latest film and TV industry to introduce intimacy protocols to guide how intimate scenes.

A new set of guidelines for handling intimate scenes in film and television shoots was recently released in South Africa. Similar to those adopted in other countries, the protocols were compiled in consultation with the country’s major bodies for industry workers and producers. They provide guidance on how to make cast and crew safe, especially from sexual harassment and assault. Performer and academic Fiona Ramsay asked Kate Lush, a co-creator of the new protocols, why they matter.

Why are the protocols needed?

Historically, actors and students actors were groomed to believe that if they didn’t say yes to whatever the director or lecturer asked, someone else would; this was a side to the industry they’d just have to accept. Actors were rarely asked to interrogate their personal boundaries or comfort levels. As a result sexual harassment, bullying and coercion were rife in all areas of the entertainment industry and throughout academic institutions.

When I talk to people about what my role as an intimacy coordinator actually involves, the first question is usually, ‘What did people do before?’. It seems astonishing to think that there was no clear methodology attached to scenes that had intimate content. Directors often didn’t know how to talk about or direct these scenes. Actors were repeatedly told to just work it out for themselves or improvise. Often they were made to rehearse and perform kisses, simulated sex and nudity in front of entire casts and crews. Needless to say, this often created scenes that didn’t serve the story or left actors feeling embarrassed, ashamed or violated.

So, around the world, various production companies and unions have adopted similar guidelines. This was spurred by the revelations of sexual abuse by Hollywood producers that led to the #MeToo movement.

What do the protocols propose?

Since the beginning of 2020, the South African film industry has been in conversation with Intimacy Practitioners South Africa to create protocols that outline what best practice looks like. (Intimacy Practitioners SA follows similar organisations in the US and UK. It was set up to advocate for and support intimacy coordinators and cast and crew working on intimate scenes on sets in South Africa.)

By following the protocols, producers and directors are encouraged to look at intimate content in a professional way. The protocols outline what considerations need to be put in place from pre-production, during production and into post-production. They talk about consent and agreements that must be put in place. About the right environment to hold auditions and what is the safest way to navigate scenes with intimacy, kissing, nudity and simulated sex.

They’re also framed with an anti-sexual harassment ethos that should be embedded into the culture of each set and a link to a code of good practice.

Actors, for example, are required always to work with a third person, to discuss the story and character arcs as a way of keeping the personal and professional in perspective. Actors are encouraged to have autonomy over their bodies. Equally they provide guidelines that encourage creativity and resourcefulness; they invite discussion and collaboration.

The protocols also highlight the scenes that present significant risk to the cast and encourage the use of an intimacy coordinator. This person would work with the directors, showrunners, producers and writers to facilitate their vision, while communicating the comfort levels and personal boundaries of the actors.

Is #MeToo part of the historical impetus?

The #MeToo movement was initiated in 2006 by the sexual harassment survivor and activist Tarana Burke. It was during the same year that the movement director Tonia Sena, co-founder of Intimacy Directors International (now Intimacy Directors and Coordinators), wrote her Master of Fine Arts in theatre pedagogy thesis, Intimate Encounters; Staging Intimacy and Sensuality. It was in response to the work she was undertaking while assisting on the choreography of intimate content in student dance productions.

But it wasn’t until #MeToo in 2017 that producers began to realise that they needed to do something proactive to keep their actors safe and to reduce the risk of litigation and bad press.

It was during 2017/18 that the intimacy coordinators Alicia Rodis (US) and Ita O'Brien (UK) were invited on to set, employed specifically as intimacy coordinators, for the HBO show The Deuce and the Netflix show Sex Education.

Here, in South Africa, also in 2017, the organisation Sisters Working in Film and Television conducted and published a survey on sexual discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual assault and violence in the South African film and TV industry. They followed this by creating the #ThatsNotOK campaign.

The protocols can’t be policed, though?

By working with the whole industry we’re hoping that their use will be organic. There is not a single voice instructing their use, there are many voices encouraging their use.

Some might argue this muzzles creative work

We have to assume that everyone always wants to do their best work. We have to also assume that producers want sets that are productive and respectful environments in which to work. Using the protocols, especially when in conjunction with an intimacy coordinator, brings professionalism and clarity to a process that has been historically muddy.

The guidelines never look to censor the work of any production, but to ask questions of the directors and the actors as to the story they’re trying to tell in each intimate moment. They support story explorations and can offer creative solutions. Challenging stories do need to be told, but when pushing the envelope of what has been, or is deemed, to be acceptable, film makers need to take responsibility for their productions and the people working on them.

Fiona Ramsay, Performing Arts lecturer in Performance and Voice and PhD candidate, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The link between inequality and power

18 May 2021 - Imraan Valodia

How power is distributed in SA and how those with power think about wealth and income.

In the second part of our New Frame, New Economy forum on inequality, Imraan Valodia advocates for understanding how power is distributed in South Africa and how those with power think about wealth and income.

Inequality in South Africa is about more than what people earn. It is about more, even, than the distribution of resources. Ultimately, inequality is about power.

My objective here, then, is to complement Murray Liebbrandt’s perceptive article by adding some points on measurement, and providing some caution about the limitations of focusing too much on data and ignoring the broader power issues.

As highlighted by Leibbrandt, South Africa has the worst inequality in the world. But there are a few issues worth clarifying about the measurement of inequality.

It should be made clear, for instance, that South Africa’s levels of inequality are the highest of all countries that have data on inequality. There are a number of countries that probably have higher levels of inequality – think Angola or the Democratic Republic of Congo – but whose inequality data do not exist, or are too poor to be considered reliable.

Wealth is the real home of inequality

A more pressing clarification relates to the relationship between what people earn and what they own. Much of South Africa’s reported data rely on income. But while income does give us a good understanding of inequality, there are at least two good reasons why it tells only a part of the story.

Income shows how peoples’ total wealth changes from one year to the next. What it doesn’t show is a true picture of their stock of wealth. To better understand the extent of inequality, we should really be looking at how much wealth – total assets less their liabilities – individuals in our society own.

People with high levels of income use all sorts of ways to hide their income, and the wealthy seldom report the true extent of their income in surveys. It is a little more difficult, however, for the wealthy to hide large houses, expensive cars, investments and other forms of conspicuous consumption. Of course, revelations like the Panama Papers show that the wealthy are able to hide their wealth, too. But the point here is that it is more difficult to hide wealth than it is to hide income.

Understanding the distribution of wealth in South Africa would give us a more complete, accurate and nuanced understanding of inequality.

The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies has done excellent research that highlights South Africa’s wealth inequality. Some key findings are worth highlighting. The wealthiest 10% of the population owns 85% of all household wealth, for instance, while the wealthiest 0.1% own 25% of it. Even further up the scale, the wealthiest 3 500 people – 0.01% of the adult population – own 15% of all household wealth in South Africa. And while the average net wealth of the top 1% is nearly R18 million, the liabilities of the bottom 50% exceed their assets. So, the most impoverished half of the population has a net worth of negative R16 000.

The denial of human possibilities

The pattern of wealth inequality in South Africa is more extreme than most other societies, and it has not changed since the country’s democratic transition. This is no basis for a sustainable society.

But the nature and effect of inequality goes much further than resource inequality.

Inequality is, in essence, a maldistribution of power. It is about the conditions in a society that allow one group – whether based on race, gender, economic resources, age or sexual preferences – to dominate over another. It is, to use the words of Swedish sociologist Goran Therborn, “a violation of human dignity: it is a denial of the possibility for everyone’s capabilities to develop”.

To deal with inequality, then, we must also look beyond the data and understand how power is distributed in our society. And we must interrogate the thinking promoted by those with power.

Globally, powerful interest groups in economics and other disciplines promote the idea that free markets, deregulation and the dominance of the private sector over the public sector are in the best interests of all. This thinking has shaped how our economies operate and who gets to benefit from economic activity. Together with technological changes that have concentrated economic power and benefitted individuals with high levels of skill, these ideas and processes have skewed the benefits of economic growth and generated higher and higher levels of income and wealth for those, with enormous power, at the top.

These global trends have had particularly pernicious effects in South Africa where, as Leibbrandt highlights, our history of dispossession and apartheid created an already highly unequal society.

Despite significant fiscal transfers and policies such as minimum wages aimed at increasing the income of those at the bottom end of the distribution, the country’s patterns of inequality have remained persistent. Even policies such as black economic empowerment have disproportionately benefitted a small elite.

Three reasons to defeat inequality...

Changing South Africa’s inequality is important for many reasons. But I want to highlight three.

First, as Leibbrandt shows, inequality begets inequality. The current patterns of inequality in South Africa are only further perpetuating inequality. As he shows, for all the talk of individual abilities, a child born to parents in one of South Africa’s most impoverished homes has a 95% chance of being similarly impoverished as an adult.

In other words, the current structure of inequality is being perpetuated across generations. The future of a South African child is almost entirely dependent, notwithstanding abilities, on whether he or she is born to rich or impoverished parents.

Second, inequality is a structural constraint to a better society for all. As Leibbrandt points out, it is a trap that is hampering us as a society.

And third, none of this constitutes the basis for a sustainable society. We might paper over the cracks for some years through fiscal transfers, as we have done until this point. But sooner or later, this level and pattern of inequality will mean that South Africa will fracture beyond remedy. 

...and four ways it might be defeated

So, what needs to be done? Leibbrandt highlights the needs for better policy coordination across economic and social policy. I agree. But I would add the following.

First, in most other societies, education is a key driver of social mobility. Sadly, and despite the fact that South Africa spends a significant amount of its national resources on education, we achieve extremely poor outcomes. We simply have to improve the quality and efficacy of the education system.

Second, unemployment is a key driver of income inequality. Any future economic growth must generate more employment and better income for low-paid workers. And here the solutions have to be more global. Technological development can and should be harnessed to create employment and improve social services, rather than generate massive incomes for a select few at the expense of most of society.

Third, policy should not normally aim to improve the welfare of one group at the expense of another. However, unless we address the exceptionally high levels of income and wealth that are concentrated in a few hands, everyone, including the wealthy, stands to lose. South Africa’s already precarious tax system is more fragile than ever since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

So, we should be cautious about interfering with a tax system. But unless we want to consider ill-advised policies like legislating for maximum pay, the tax system should be used to disincentivise excessively high incomes among the highest earners. Higher levels of taxation and policies such as a wealth tax have to be seriously considered.

Fourth, policies that democratise investment decisions in companies and result in a more egalitarian distribution of the benefits of growth must be considered. In this regard, it is pleasing to see that policy makers are taking seriously policies such as employee share ownership and worker representation on company boards.

As I have already highlighted, inequality is, at its heart, an issue of power. Many in our society lack access to power. Without it, the resources needed for a good life remain out of reach. Others wield too much power. They use it to defend their privilege and reproduce inequality. There are a number of policy levers available to policy makers to address this. Competition policies to address the concentration of economic power, for example.

But in the end, South Africa’s struggle against inequality will depend on whether various interests in our society can cohere to address this maldistribution of power. To quote American economist Darrick Hamilton, “dramatic inequality is at least as much a problem of politics as it is of economics. It is time to go beyond the false narrative that attributes inequality to individual deficits, while largely ignoring the advantages of wealth.”

Professor Imraan Valodia is the Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, and Head of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies. This article was first published in New Frame.

Five ways to measure the effects of COVID-19 on women

24 May 2021 - Odile Mackett

Women have been affected by the pandemic more than men in many ways. Policies should reflect this.

Social issues and crises tend to affect women more severely than men. This is why terms like “gender mainstreaming policies”, “gender-responsive interventions” and “gender-based budgeting” have become more popular in public policy discussions in recent years.

The case has been made for the need to include gender in every analysis of social policy. But many of the toolkits which have been designed to do so have come up short. This is for a variety of reasons. Some of these shortcomings include a singular focus on women rather than relations between men and women; a focus on policy outcomes without a change in policy processes; and the inclusion of aspirational gender equality goals rather than goals for practical implementation.

But a framework developed by retired economics professor Marilyn Power offers a practical solution. Her framework can be used to evaluate the effects an event is likely to have on women. It can be applied to policies too. It draws together common aspects applied in gender studies and includes accounting for caring and domestic labour, considering human well-being, human agency, making ethical judgements, and undertaking an intersectional analysis.

I have used Power’s framework to examine the impact of COVID-19 on South African women. My research found that many of the challenges women experienced had been made worse by the pandemic. This was mainly as a result of the slowdown in economic activity and the restrictions on movement. These made women particularly vulnerable to physical abuse, a loss of income, and a decline in mental and emotional well-being, among others.

How women were affected

Household circumstances: The framework states that household circumstances should be considered in addition to individual circumstances. Household circumstances are vital when studying women because they tend to be the primary caregivers in the home, the number of female-headed households has grown, and they perform the bulk of domestic or household labour.

The importance of looking at both household and individual circumstances becomes clear when one looks at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The closure of schools and early childhood development centres meant that women experienced an increase in their domestic responsibilities. Evidence shows that far more women than men reported increased time spent on childcare during the first few months of the hard lockdown.

Human well-being and agency: The pandemic affected both the well-being and agency of women.

Human well-being has been defined as “what people are able to be and do”. Amartya Sen, an award-winning economist, has recommended the use of five instrumental freedoms to measure well-being. These list aspects which define an individual’s relationship to their communities or the state. They include political freedoms, economic freedoms, social freedoms, transparency guarantees and protective security.

These freedoms include, for instance, having enough assets, the right to live a life of dignity, and the peace of mind which goes with feeling safe in one’s community.

Agency, on the other hand, has been defined by political analyst and feminist Lois McNay as “the capacity of a person (or other living and material entities) to intervene in the world in a manner that is deemed … to be independent or relatively autonomous”. Thus, the more freedoms individuals are guaranteed in society, the more their human agency will be enhanced.

During the pandemic women were more likely to lose their jobs than men. This loss had a major impact on women’s economic freedoms as well as their social freedoms.

Making ethical judgements: Ethical judgements in the framework relate to traditional economic assumptions which predicate that economic analyses or policies are value and judgement free. Others have argued, however, that policies and interventions which do not explicitly deal with value judgements only serve to mask “implicit assumptions about race, class and gender”, even if unintentionally.

It is thus important to engage with value judgements to make clear what implicit assumptions underlie public policy decision making.

One example of this was the South African government’s social security response to the pandemic, which included the Social Relief of Distress grant. This grant was only made available to unemployed individuals who didn’t get any other grant or qualify for Unemployment Insurance Fund benefits. The conditions under which the unemployed could apply for this grant were stringent – and still emphasised the need to work.

The stringent conditions meant that many vulnerable individuals were excluded. These included those who might already be receiving existing grants or received remittances from family members, but who might still be living in poverty. A large percentage of these would be women.

Intersectional analysis: This requires thinking about other social identities which define women beyond just their gender, such as race, sexual orientation and class, among others. These additional social identities privilege and disadvantage women in varying ways.

Black women, for instance, would be more severely affected by the social ills which have accompanied this pandemic than any other group of women in South Africa. Separating women by race in policy analysis would thus provide useful information which would not be otherwise observed had women been studied as a homogeneous group. Similar arguments could be made for further segmenting groups according to their social identities.

Next steps

Women make up half of the South African population. It’s therefore important to consider how decisions and policies affect them. Failing to undertake a gendered analysis doesn’t equate to men and women being treated equally. Rather that women are likely to be implicitly negatively biased.

Odile Mackett, Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The fine legal line between legitimate protest and criminality

24 May 2021 - Stanley Malematja

A protest which results in a shutdown and interference with the rights of others may delegitimise the cause and allow the government to escape accountability.

The government is in the second phase of the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out and citizens above the age of 60 have started receiving their jabs. In Mangaung in the Free State, seniors could not be vaccinated because of a shutdown over service delivery which resulted in the blockage of 15 roads. 

The community has tried to engage the municipality on issues of service delivery, but to no avail — hence the shutdown. A shutdown involves the blocking of roads with bricks, rocks, debris and burning tyres, regrettably negatively affecting those who are not part of the protest. 

I do not suggest that shutdowns are by definition unlawful protest actions, because an unlawful protest is one that has been prohibited in terms of the provisions of section 5 of the Regulation of Gatherings Act. Rather, the question is whether shutdowns are afforded the protection under section 17 of the Constitution which guarantees and protects the right to protest in a manner that is peaceful and unarmed.

This is a vital question, because when participants of a shutdown are arrested, they are often charged with the criminal offence of public violence, resulting from road blockages. We have seen this, for example, in the case of Ndela & Others v The State where 29 women were charged with public violence after they requested and caused a truck driver to block a road with his truck during a service delivery protest.  

The high court in Ndela & Others v The State found that any use of non-violent “force” or any protest action that “invades the rights of others” is capable, in principle, of constituting public violence. The Supreme Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the high court. The Socio-Economic Rights Institute (Seri) appealed to the Constitutional Court, but unfortunately the apex court dismissed Seri’s appeal application, thus confirming that a non-violent protest which affects the rights of others may lead to charges of public violence. Put differently, a “non-violent” road blockage during a protest is sufficient for a charge of public violence to be sustained. 

In the case of Fourways Mall (Pty) Ltd v South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers’ Union, the court found that the provisions of section 17 of the Constitution do not protect protest actions in which protesters intimidate the general public and interfere “with the rights of other tenants of a shopping mall”. 

A shutdown as a form of protest inevitably interferes with the rights of people. Unfortunately, a mere blockage of roads by protesters may result in the protest losing the protection of the Constitution through a charge of, and conviction for, public violence.  

Although a shutdown may be effective in getting the attention of those who are in power, a charge of public violence may easily be laid against protesters.

Often, a shutdown is a matter of last resort by desperate and disgruntled protesters, especially in relation to service delivery protests. A protest which results in a shutdown and the interference with the rights of other people may, unfortunately, delegitimise the cause and allow the government to escape accountability for failure to provide basic services. This is because the government responds by arresting the protesters in the name of protecting the rights of other people, especially those who are not part of the protest. 

Instead of receiving basic services, protesters receive criminal records for public violence. Although criminal conduct must be punished, it is concerning that fighting for a fundamental human right can attract criminal sanctions. It must be noted that the legitimacy of the cause of the protest is not a justification for the offence of public violence, even though such an offence may result from a mere road blockage as a method of seeking accountability. Once other people’s rights are interfered with, the legitimacy of the cause of the protest plays an insignificant role in the criminal justice system, especially in terms of arrest and conviction.

Municipalities are at the forefront of ensuring access to basic services. A number of municipalities are unable to fulfil their obligations, hence the large number of service delivery protests — with those responsible seldom being held accountable. 

In the North West High Court recently, a judge ordered that the residents’ association, Kgetlengrivier Concerned Citizens, be allowed to take control of the area’s sewage works, to be paid for by the local and provincial governments. The order followed the failure of the municipality to ensure service delivery. This shows that litigation is one of the ways of holding dysfunctional municipalities to account.

The court even went as far as making an order for the imprisonment of the municipal manager. Due to the socioeconomic structures and levels of inequality in South Africa, not everyone can afford to pay for litigation to take municipalities to court, and public interest organisations face issues with capacity and funding. 

People must go back to the drawing board and strategise ways of holding their leaders accountable, as the last resort of protest through shutdowns may interfere with the rights of others and expose protesters to criminal sanctions. During shutdowns, people may also sustain serious bodily injuries and sometimes death at the hands of police officers and private security personnel during crowd management.

Organisers of protests and participants must be cautious not to interfere with the rights of others during protests as that may lead to criminal charges which will most likely delegitimise the protest.

Stanley Malematja is the attorney at the Right2Protest Project, based at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits University. This article was first published in Daily Maverick.

Why full dams don’t mean water security: a look at South Africa

25 May 2021 - Mike Muller

Gauteng citizens need to know the uncomfortable truth: for the next six years, their water supplies will increasingly have to be restricted.

After good summer rains, the dams that supply water to Johannesburg and much of South Africa’s economic heartland are full. This, then, is the time to start worrying about water supplies.

It may sound odd but it’s a lesson learnt from cities across the world over the past two decades. Whether it was Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Chennai in India, Barcelona in Spain or São Paulo in Brazil, we have seen that, too often, water crises occur because societies don’t take action until it’s already too late.

South Africa had that experience with its Day Zero crisis in Cape Town between 2015 and 2019. Nelson Mandela Bay, in the Eastern Cape province, is currently providing more evidence. Despite being advised for more than a decade that its supply infrastructure was inadequate, the municipality did not act and now the dams are almost empty.

The immediate question is whether Johannesburg and the rest of the Gauteng province and surrounding region can avoid that experience.

The region gets its water from the Integrated Vaal River System, of which the Lesotho Highlands Water Project is an important part. Completion of Phase 2 of this project, which will increase available supplies, is already nearly a decade late and water use has been growing steadily. Tenders to build the dam and tunnel for the second phase have not yet been awarded. The earliest that they will provide additional water is 2027.

How much water can a dam provide?

The system’s capacity is already used to its limit but that’s not generally understood. When asked whether water supply is sufficient, most people’s attention focuses on dam levels. By April 2021, most of the system’s dams were full.

But dam levels simply tell you how much water is stored, not how long it will last. In this sense, dams are like a household’s bank account. If wages are paid into the account once a month, the family needs to plan how to spend it so that it doesn’t run out. If the flow of money reduces, so too must the expenditures.

Dams work the same way. The water deposited in the reservoir is like the wages paid into the bank – users must make sure that it doesn’t flow out so fast that there’s none left before the next rains arrive. Enough must be kept in reserve in case there’s a dry year.

So two factors must be considered together to avoid water crises: technical matters like rainfall, river flow and infrastructure; and human factors like the behaviour of water managers and users.

South Africa’s climate is relatively well documented. The priority for water planners is to manage the fact that rainfall is highly variable.

Planners work with hydrologists and climate scientists to estimate the risk that there will be a succession of dry years. They calculate how low river flows will go and how much storage is needed to keep supplies running. That kind of information, used to plan the infrastructure of the Integrated Vaal River System, has kept the region water secure for almost 40 years. It also flagged the need to build the next phase of the Lesotho project.

That’s where the human factors intervene.

To meet the water needs of populations and economies, planned investments must be made on time. And until additional supply is available, water use must be kept within safe limits. This requires water users to change their behaviour.

Human behaviour

Since the Gauteng population is growing at about 3% per year, and supply is fixed, consumption will have to decrease by 3% a year if the region is to stay water secure.

But if people see full dams, can they be persuaded to reduce their water use?

Some efforts are already being made. Rand Water, the bulk water provider, has a critical role to play. It takes water from the Vaal river system, purifies it and supplies it to municipalities and big industries across the region. Rand Water has reached the limit of what it’s allowed to take from the system and is now rationing available water between its different users.

Consumption targets have been set for individual municipalities and Rand Water is restricting supplies to those that don’t use their water efficiently.

Consumption per person in the region is around 300 litres per day – well above global averages – so there’s room for improvement. And almost 40% of the water supplied to municipalities is “non-revenue water” – either lost through leaks or not billed and paid for and thus often wasted. At the root of these problems is poor management and maintenance.

To cope with supply restrictions, municipalities face difficult choices. Most are trying to reduce their “non-revenue water”. Some are delaying new housing and industrial developments. Others are cutting supply to selected suburbs for days at a time, when they reach their allocated limit.

The region’s citizens have not yet been told the hard truth that for the next six years, this supply squeeze will get tighter. Yet this information is essential if communities and households are to play their part. People will not change their behaviour unless they’re told what’s happening and how to avoid a crisis.

Going forward

A lesson from Cape Town’s “Day Zero” experience was that when people were told about the problems, and about how the city and their neighbourhood were performing, they reduced their water use.

Cape Town showed that people will take difficult actions when there’s a problem they can see and understand.

It’s been suggested that Rand Water should publish monthly reports on the progress made to achieve municipal savings targets. That is politically delicate since national ministers are reluctant to expose their local counterparts to criticism.

So the technical dimension of ensuring reliable water supply – managing the dams, treatment works, pumps and pipes – is difficult. But even more challenging is the task of motivating human interventions, from ministers down to households.

The measure of success or failure is whether the water comes out of the taps when needed. And too often, it’s human behaviour rather than infrastructure that fails us.

Mike Muller, Visiting Adjunct Professor, School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why forcing disclosure of wages and executive pay in SA is a good idea

26 May 2021 - Imraan Valodia

Companies being required to go public with information about executive and workers pay packets is increasingly becoming the norm.

Plans are afoot to make amendments to South Africa’s Companies Act that would require companies to report on wage differentials. This is the gap between executive pay and the lowest paid workers in the company. The announcement was made by South Africa’s Minister of Trade and Industry Ebrahim Patel.

This is a significant development. And in my view, long overdue.

The proposed change would go some way to address the challenge of inequality in South Africa as well as better regulate excessive executive pay. This is because transparency about wage differentials will mean companies cannot continue to ignore the inequalities in earnings in South Africa. Transparency will also enable social actors to question inequality in companies and to change it. On top of this, at least in theory, the massive inequalities between executive pay and the wages of workers would put some pressure on the highest earners to curb their excessive pay.

In my view, this approach to addressing the problem may be more effective than laws that stipulate maximum pay.

The disclosure approach would help modernise South Africa’s corporate reporting in line with a framework designed to measure performance beyond financial returns to include environmental, social and governance responsibilities of business entities.

South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. The country’s gini-coefficient – which is used to measure levels of income inequality in a country – is the highest in the world among countries that have data to construct the index. It is estimated to be 0.65. Even very unequal societies in Latin America, such as Brazil (0.51) and Chile (0.48) have lower levels of inequality. At the other end of the spectrum, are egalitarian countries like Sweden’s 0.29 and Denmark’s 0.28.

Levels of inequality are borne out by a host of other statistics too. For example, the top 0.01% of the wealthiest South Africans – 3500 individuals – own 15% of the total wealth in the country. Whereas the top 1% of individuals each have net wealth of R17.8 million, the bottom 50% of South Africans have net wealth of -R16 000. In other words their liabilities exceed their assets.

The initiative announced by the minister of trade and industry Ebrahim Patel comes against a backdrop of increasing awareness of the excessive levels of executive pay in the country. CEOs of the top companies in South Africa earn, on average, R24 million per year while the minimum wage for workers is just above R21 per hour – about R43 000 per year. One of the most striking statistics that demonstrates the massive wage inequality in South Africa was the calculation that it would take a low paid worker at Checkers – a large food retailer – 290 years to earn the equivalent of what then its then CEO Whitey Basson earned in one month.

This is not the basis for a sustainable society. This level of inequality is a structural trap that holds people back, leads to lower levels of economic growth, and sooner or later, to much higher levels of social unrest.

Why it matters

The amendments being proposed are innovative. But they are by no means unusual. Companies being required to go public with this information is increasingly becoming the norm across the world.

The environmental, social, and corporate governance investment framework evaluates companies beyond their financials. It also measures them on environmental, social and governance performance. This approach is being used widely across the globe and more and more investment decisions are now based on this framework.

Within the ‘social’, companies are evaluated on the labour practices and levels of inclusion. For example, does the company pay fair wages; does it have good relationships with the communities around it; does it train workers; does it promote small business?

One measure is whether the gap between workers and executive pay is fair and justified.

A number of countries have laws in place that require companies to report on pay gaps. In California, for example, firms are required to submit pay data reports. In Europe and the UK, companies are required to report on the gender pay gap within their organisation. The UK legislation has been effective at making gender pay inequality transparent.

South Africa’s own corporate governance codes – the King IV report – is also in line with this framework, emphasising the fact that companies are part of a wider society where inclusivity and sustainability need greater attention.

There is a lot that needs to be clarified about the proposed amendments: will it apply to all companies, or just listed companies? Will it apply only to large companies, with an employment threshold, such as the employment equity reporting requirements, which apply only to companies that employ more 50 workers? Will the amendments include the requirement to report on the gender pay gap, as is the case in many other jurisdictions? How is ‘executive’ defined? How does the legislation propose to deal with extensive sub-contracting arrangements that often hide low-paid work in so-called independent companies?

And will the minister use the opportunity to introduce tighter controls and reporting requirements on environmental considerations?

First step

Legislation to require reporting on issues such as wage differentials, the gender pay gap, and the impact on the environment are important for accountability and for creating the conditions for a more equitable society. But it’s important to recognise that changes to the law, on its own, won’t ensure more inclusive and equitable organisations.

As a society, South Africa needs to use the legislation to pressure companies to change the patterns of wage differentials. Without social action, the legislation alone will not change behaviour.

For example, South Africa’s Companies Act gives a lot of power to shareholders. Yet, shareholder action to hold executives accountable is not a hallmark of the country’s corporate governance milieu. Even when highly paid executives have failed to perform, shareholders have found it difficult to hold executives to account..

To ensure more equity and accountability, the amendments being proposed by the minister will require civil society organisations, NGOs and trade unions to use the data for social action aimed at promoting inclusivity and equity in companies.

Imraan Valodia, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, and Head of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How pots, sand and stone walls helped us date an ancient SA settlement

28 May 2021 - Ruby-Anne Birin, Alex Schoeman and Mary Evans

We now know that Bokoni Phase I was built as early as the 15th century – before the arrival of European colonisation or trade.

If you go for a walk in the green hills of Mpumalanga in the north east of South Africa, you may stumble across some stone walls. Either stubbing your toe or appearing through the grass at about chest height, these walls direct and disrupt your path.

Climbing to the top of these gentle slopes, your eye is drawn to circular and linear patterns. From above you quickly realise these patterns are the remains of towns – clusters of homesteads, traditional households, terraces and roads. These ruins are the remnants of the Bokoni polity, a region that contains the southernmost collection of stone terrace farming sites in Africa.

Archaeologists study the Bokoni sites as they are a marvel of urban farming innovation and ingenuity.

In our research we have broken new ground about the Bokoni sites, and solved a mystery that’s puzzled scientists for decades – when the first sites were built. Our findings were made possible with techniques and technology usually used in geology.

The search for the beginning

Archaeologists, in collaboration with historians, have defined four phases of occupation for Bokoni. Oral histories provide particular insight into phase II, the zenith of the Bokoni’s urban growth and planning, when the larger towns were occupied.

For instance in 1936, as part of his research into the seKoni language, linguist C.W. Prinsloo mapped the extent of Bokoni in the 1800s and indicated earlier capitals. Pedi oral traditions recorded by missionaries in the 1960s refer to the Marateng (Pedi) royals encountering seKoni speakers in approximately 1650CE.

But there are no known historical accounts of Phase I. So, until now, it hasn’t been known exactly when the Bokoni emerged. But, by turning to the material record and archaeological science, our research has solved this enduring mystery.

We applied a technique called luminescence dating to resolve the origins of this tradition. We now know that Bokoni Phase I was built as early as the 15th century – before the arrival of European colonisation or trade reached the interior. And that the Bokoni farmers continued to thrive for centuries despite the turmoil that was arriving at nearby shores.

These findings disrupt past narratives that decry the presence and ability of African farmers before and during colonisation. They also offer new ways of understanding individual lives and familial patterns. This research helped us reconstruct when people began to build these incredible structures, how long a household was occupied before abandonment, and how their successors interacted with the structures they left behind.

Four phases

The four phases identified by researchers as being key periods in the Bokoni polity are as follows.

Phase I marks Bokoni’s emergence (the date of which remained unknown until now). Phase II, in the 17th and 18th centuries, saw the peak of Bokoni’s urban growth and planning. During this period, most Bokoni residents would have been urban farmers, first in and around the capital called Moxomatsi, and later at the succession capitals Mohlo-Pela and Khutwaneng, which lies in modern day Mpumalanga, South Africa.

Phase III marks the start of the upheaval that resulted in Bokoni’s decline in the 19th century, while Phase IV documents the diaspora from the mid-19th century onwards. Bokoni broke apart because of regional conflict in the early to mid 1800s.

Given the dearth of written or oral history from Phase I, we turned to the science of dating in our search for answers.

Dating methods

Only two radiocarbon dates exist for sites from this period and region. This is because radiocarbon dating is not ideal for Bokoni. Radiocarbon dating measures the radioactive carbon isotope in organic remains. The technique provides the date of death by measuring the remaining radiocarbon component of organic remains like bone or wood. But in certain conditions the soil does not preserve organic remains.

Luminescence dating was far more suitable for the Bokoni site. Optically stimulated luminescence is a dating technique that measures when quartz or feldspar grains within the soil were last exposed to light or heat. This time stamp tells us when these minerals were buried (or trapped in an object like a pot).

When quartz grains are exposed to light, their electrons become excited and leave their correct orbitals; this is called bleaching. At the point of bleaching, the grain has age zero. Once the grain is buried, it uses the radiation within the surrounding soil to return its electrons to their correct orbital.

A GIF showing the process, Ruby-Anne Birin via GIPHY

Scientists then measure the dose absorbed by the grain and divide it by the rate at which that dose was absorbed. This value provides the date of the last exposure to light, which allows us to determine when a material or surface became buried, or when a pot was last fired.

Our team used this technique at two homesteads in Komati Gorge Village, a southern town within Bokoni. We already knew that one homestead was older than the other because many of its stones were re-purposed to build the more recent settlement.

Our results indicate several periods of occupation, abandonment and new construction. The older homestead was occupied from as early as 1489CE until it was abandoned around 1577CE. The builders of the younger homestead reused the older from approximately 1682CE to 1765CE. The younger homestead itself was reused at some time between 1738CE and the early 20th centuary.

Future work refining our understanding of the occupation periods of Bokoni may also allow us to better reconstruct the environmental and political landscape people lived within.

Ruby-Anne Birin, DPhil student in Archaeological Science, University of Oxford; Alex Schoeman, Associate professor, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, and Mary Evans, Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography and Geochronology, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why regional military intervention in Mozambique is a bad idea

28 May 2021 - Gilbert M. Khadiagala

The Southern African Development Community does not have a remarkable record of military interventions in civil conflicts in the region.

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi has called an extraordinary summit of the leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) this week. He wants them to deliberate on plans announced in early May to send 3,000 troops to help the beleaguered Mozambican government address the ongoing insurgency in Cabo Delgado province.

The insurgency, led by an Islamist group known as the Sunnar (popularly known locally as Al-Shabaab), has destabilised the region since October 2017. Its strength has grown tremendously since last year. In October it made a daring raid on one of the major towns in the north, Mocimbao da Praia. And then in March this year it targeted foreign contract workers, including South Africans.

This rang alarm bells in the region.

But is an intervention by the regional body a good idea? And will it help?

Past experiences suggest it’s not. And that it won’t help.

I suggest that the SADC does not have a remarkable record of military interventions in civil conflicts in the region. It would therefore be misguided to attempt an intervention without adequate understanding of the political dynamics at play in northern Mozambique.

Interventions that are hastily prepared by military leaders without deep contextual knowledge of the drivers of conflict are not likely to end well.

Mixed legacy of intervention

SADC interventions in internal conflicts in its neighbourhood haven’t worked out well.

In 1998 Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe took the lead on behalf of the regional body to restore order and constitutional legality in Lesotho. The haste in which the SADC conceived the operation guaranteed that it would not produce clear outcomes. South African troops lost their lives and SADC troops had to withdraw in ignominy.

The SADC has since had to continually intervene as a peacemaker in the fractious terrain of Lesotho politics.

The other major experience in intervention was through the Force Intervention Brigade composed of Malawi, Tanzania and South Africa. This was put together to defeat the M23 Movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2013. It was deployed under a United Nations Security Council resolution to assist the United Nations Mission for the Stabilisation of the DRC.

Initially, the Force Intervention Brigade made a difference. It routed the M23 and contributed to a return to some form of stability. But the militia menace in the region has continued unabated, raising questions about the long term efficacy of the brigade’s work..

The brigade remains in place, though countries contributing troops have lost enthusiasm for managing the multiple problems in the region.

Lessons learnt from past forays

What can we learn from these military experiences to inform the envisaged Mozambique intervention?

First, military interventions in complex internal conflicts are fraught with profound obstacles. The biggest are inadequate knowledge about the parties to the conflict and what drives the conflict, and uncertainties about the outcomes.

In Mozambique, the insurgents have grown because of preexisting grievances. This includes the political marginalisation of the largely poor and rural Muslim-dominated region. This has coincided with the discovery of one of the world’s largest natural gas deposits, which has attracted French, Italian and American companies.

The rich gas finds have turned Mozambique into a typical resource-cursed nation, where natural resource abundance in marginalised communities predictably fuels dissent and rebellion.

Second, it is dangerous for regional actors to pick a fight with a group they believe they can easily subdue. The insurgents started low level guerrilla attacks targeted at government installations and gradually escalated to widespread massacre of civilians and the acquisition of territory.

This escalation, in part, follows the government’s response to the crisis. Rather than engaging with the communities on stemming the crisis, the immediate response was to hire Russian mercenaries to fight the rebellion.

But the rebels launched a scorched-earth counteroffensive that led to the defeat and withdrawal of the mercenaries. The consequences were obvious: militarising the conflict inflamed local passions and expanded the recruitment of people into the rebellion.

The deployment of the mercenaries also showed the government wasn’t confident in the capabilities of its own security forces.

Intervention in a quagmire

The SADC is now being asked to intervene in a conflict that it has neither resources nor the political will to manage. When the body bags begin to come home, there will be tremendous pressure on SADC forces to withdraw.

Rather than the folly of an intervention, the region should be encouraging the Mozambican state to address the grievances of the communities in Cabo Delgado.

Throughout Africa, military approaches to grievances over resources have often ended in disaster. For many years, the discovery of oil in South Sudan encouraged the government in Khartoum to militarise a conflict that was, at heart, about self-determination and dignity for Southerners. South Sudan did attain independence in 2011, but after tremendous loss of lives.

Similarly, a low-level insurgency in Angola’s Cabinda oil-rich region has persisted because of Luanda’s indifference to the plight of the local population.

Since the early 2000s, Nigerian governments have learnt to use political approaches in meeting the demands of the Niger Delta oil-producing communities. In a conflict that has festered for decades, the minorities in the region have contested the exploitation of oil resources by multinational companies, in collaboration with the federal government, to the detriment of their livelihoods and welfare.

Mozambique can learn from these and many other experiences.

What’s needed

It took years for the Mozambican government to address the need to decentralise power and resources to the provinces. This had been a long-standing demand by the former rebel movement, Renamo.

But Frelimo, the dominant ruling party, continued to depend on a heavily centralised form of governance where provinces were mere outposts of the central government. Alternative actors and voices were prevented from participation in major decisions.

In the negotiations to resolve the resumption of the Renamo insurgency in 2013, Renamo prioritised decentralisation. Frelimo reluctantly gave in to this demand. But implementation has remained sluggish.

The resource curse is not inevitable. Many countries have avoided it through prudent natural resource governance and improving the access of local communities to the resources generated in their communities.

Botswana is an example. It has used creative institutions and political will to manage its mineral wealth. Ghana has also put in place robust mechanisms to ensure that its oil resources are used for the common good and not to enrich elites.

It should not take decades for the government to build credible and transparent natural resource governance institutions that meet the yearnings of impoverished communities in Cabo Delgado.

The SADC’s military intervention will only embolden die-hards in Frelimo who are reluctant to find peaceful and political solutions to the crisis. And the intervention will postpone a problem that is not going to go way any time soon.

Gilbert M. Khadiagala, Jan Smuts Professor of International Relations and Director of the African Centre for the Study of the United States (ACSUS), University of the Witwatersrand. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How South Africa dropped the ball on health communication

28 May 2021 - Sue Goldstein, Nancy Coulson and Nirvana Pillay

Community leaders and outreach community workers are calling on education to enhance their understanding of Covid-19.

Ongoing case study research conducted by the SA Medical Research Council (SAMRC), Human Sciences Research Council and the www.sarraouniatrust.org on the Covid response and likely vaccine hesitancy in four wards in South Africa has found that on the ground the Department of Health is absent as an authoritative voice about Covid-19 and vaccinations.

Instead, community leaders have relied on popular media and the “family meetings” hosted by President Cyril Ramaphosa for information. As a consequence, despite being more than one year into the Covid crisis, community leaders and outreach community workers are asking for education to enhance their understanding of Covid and to build their capacity to respond to questions and health emergencies in their areas.

How did it come to this?

Epidemics are not new in South Africa. The country has a long history of health communication work to respond to infectious disease. In the early 1990s as the HIV epidemic escalated in South Africa there was a thread of misinformation about HIV being brought into the country by ANC cadres who had been living in exile. HIV stigma and homophobia were commonplace.

Over time, the Department of Health positioned itself through effective partnerships with NPOs, media and communication consortiums to challenge this and boost prevention efforts (increasing consistent condom use from 11% in 1995 to 84% of young men in 2012) by launching successive well branded and researched campaigns that included media and social mobilisation.

The Department of Health’s Khomanani Campaign (in its early years), and the Department of Health-funded Love Life and Soul City campaigns were all found, in successive evaluations, to increase knowledge, challenge social norms and support behaviour change, including increasing knowledge about antiretroviral therapy (ART) and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Importantly all these campaigns confirmed that where communities are met with education activities on the ground that reinforce mass media messaging this is an effective approach to behaviour change. The decision of the Department of Health to include community health workers into ward-based outreach teams to work in specific neighbourhoods in 2012 was the opportunity to establish a sustainable mechanism in the Department of Health for on-the-ground health promotion activity that could complement national mass media messaging.

The last decade has witnessed a severe decline in health promotion and health communication capacity in the Department of Health. For example, research has found that community health workers are poorly prepared for their education role.

There are no publicly available evaluations of Department of Health campaigns. The impact of the Phila campaign was not measured; however, an independent evaluation of all NPO campaigns in 2012 showed that the joint impact of these campaigns was good, but needed to be consistent and continue to support changes in behaviour.

Over the past 10 years, less funding has been made available by the government to NPOs working in health communication. Given the ongoing seriousness of HIV and TB in SA, this decline in resource allocation makes no sense. One argument put forward in explanation of this is that the option for treatment, such as ART, has outpaced disease prevention, making health communication, which is more often associated with disease prevention rather than treatment, redundant (treat to prevent).

However, the enormous cost to our health service of managing HIV as a chronic health condition for the estimated seven million affected people should challenge this orthodoxy, and in addition health communication is critical in maintaining adherence to long-term treatment. In fact, if anything, the introduction of HIV treatment made the health messaging around HIV more complex, not less.

In the last 10 years there has been no dramatic policy shift in the Department of Health away from prevention activities, yet with a burgeoning crisis of non-communicable diseases, communication around prevention of these, including decreasing alcohol, tobacco and highly processed food consumption, is absent from the department. 

Thus, the demise in health communication capacity is more likely to be because of the absence of political will and/or its vulnerability to corruption.

In 2020, as South Africa was gripped by the early months of the Covid crisis, an offer to the Department of Health was made by a group of health communication researchers and practitioners from the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand, the SAMRC and the NPO sector to support Covid communication. This support was rebuffed. In addition, a carefully designed strategy by one of the NPOs and supported by the other players was examined and rejected. 

The revelations about the siphoning of resources by Digital Vibes provide the first convincing explanation of why this happened, suggesting that the primary reason for the collapse of health communication capacity in SA has been the vulnerability of these resources to corruption. Current revelations beg questions about the past 10 years.

Covid communication has become an exercise in high-level public relations, with the president himself leading communication efforts. While the stance of the president is to be commended, it should not be confused with being an adequate substitution for an evidence-led national health campaign.

Although the Solidarity Fund has a communication campaign, this is no substitute for a government-led campaign, (and support and oversight of this campaign was also rejected by Solidarity). In the absence of such communication, community leaders on the ground are left to try to make sense of news stories. 

On the ground, the authoritative voice of the Department of Health is missing in action.

The world is in the throes of a climate crisis, and the possibility of future pandemics and disasters related to this crisis is ever-present. Preparing for these crises is critical, especially in an unequal world and country. One way to prepare for this is to ensure that all people are health literate, which is defined as: “The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information needed to make appropriate health decisions.”

It is incumbent on the Department of Health to take a leadership role in ensuring that the SA population is health literate, and not to use communication resources for public relations, or worse, for individual enrichment.

Sue Goldstein is deputy director at SAMRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science PRICELESS SA. Nancy Coulson is director at the Sarraounia Public Health Trust and visiting senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. Nirvana Pillay is director at the Sarraounia Public Health Trust and visiting researcher at the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand.

This article was first published in Maverick Citizen/Daily Maverick.