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22 October 2018 Photo Sonia Small
Prof Philippe Burgers book Getting It Right
Prof Philippe Burger’s book Getting It Right: A New Economy for South Africa highlights the urgent need to purge government policies of all forms of toxic patronage relationships and mismanagement in order to save our economy.
South Africa is in an economic rut. Economic growth has collapsed, the unemployment rate has increased, and the country’s level of inequality is of the highest in the world. As if that’s not enough, high levels of corruption, patronage, and state capture also mean that it suffers from severe institutional rot.

It is a sobering picture that is painted on the outside cover of Getting It Right: A New Economy for South Africa – the latest book by Prof Phillipe Burger, Acting Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences.  In the book, he explains how the legacy of the Apartheid era labour system, the old system of Bantu Education, and the former Bantustans still cripple our economy. And why 24 years of democratic government reforms could still not deliver on the promises of work and prosperity.

Education to blame
 
One of the chargeable factors he singles out, is the state of our education system.
 
“Half of South Africa’s children start school, but never finish. Less than one percent of learners achieve a distinction in Maths in the final matric exam. And on an organisational level, many schools are crippled by labour unions calling the shots, which often means that underperforming teachers stay in their jobs. All these things eventually contribute to our unemployment rate of 27%,” he says.

Towards solutions
The solutions he advocates include securing recurrent economic investment by creating an investor-friendly environment, but also paying urgent attention to ridding our education system and communal land areas under traditional chiefs, where 32% of South Africa’s population are still living, of all forms of self-serving patronage relationships.
 
Prof Burger wrote the bulk of the book during his nine-month tenure as a Fulbright Exchange Scholar in the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University’s Earth Institute (New York). The time he spent there with renowned American economist, Professor Jeffrey Sachs – who also wrote the foreword of his book – was invaluable to his research.
  
Returning from an overseas trip recently, Prof Burger was delighted to see Getting It Right on the bestsellers shelf of Exclusive Books at the OR Tambo Airport. 
“It was a great welcome-home gift!”

He hopes the book will be read by the generally informed public in the run-up to next year’s elections, and that it will help to influence how people think about policy issues.

News Archive

Prof Antjie Krog speaks on verbalising revulsion and the collusion of men
2015-06-26

From the left are Prof Lucius Botes, UFS: Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities; Prof Helene Strauss, UFS: Department of English; Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, UFS: Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies; Prof Antjie Krog, UCT: Department Afrikaans and Dutch; Dr Buhle Zuma, UCT: Department of Psychology. Both Prof Strauss and Dr Zuma are partners in the Mellon Foundation research project.

“This is one of the bitterest moments I have ever endured. I would rather see my daughter carried away as a corpse than see her raped like this.”

This is one of 32 testimonies that were locked away quietly in 1902. These documents, part of the NC Havenga collection, contain the testimonies of Afrikaner women describing their experiences of sexual assault and rape at the hands of British soldiers during the South African War.

This cluster of affidavits formed the foundation of a public lecture that Prof Antjie Krog delivered at the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Bloemfontein Campus on Tuesday 23 June 2015. The lecture, entitled ‘They Couldn’t Achieve their Goal with Me: Narrating Rape during the South African War’, was the third instalment in the Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series on Trauma, Memory, and Representations of the Past. The series is hosted by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor in Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Studies at the UFS, as part of a five-year research project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Verbalising revulsion

The testimonies were taken down during the last two months of the war, and “some of the women still had marks and bruises on their bodies as evidence,” Prof Krog said. The victims’ words, on the other hand, struggled to express the story their bodies told.

What are the nouns for that which one sees? What words are permissible in front of men? How does one process revulsion verbally? These are the barriers the victims – raised with Victorian reserve – faced while trying to express their trauma, Prof Krog explained.

The collusion of men

When the war ended, there was a massive drive to reconcile the Boers and the British. “Within this process of letting bygones be bygones,” Prof Krog said, “affidavits of severe violations by white men had no place. Through the collusion of men, prioritising reconciliation between two white male hierarchies, these affidavits were shelved, and, finally, had to suffer an embargo.”

“It is only when South Africa accepted a constitution based on equality and safety from violence,” Prof Krog said, “that the various levels of deeply-rooted brutality, violence, and devastation of men against the vulnerable in society seemed to burst like an evil boil into the open, leaving South African aghast in its toxic suppurations. As if, for many decades, we did not know it was there and multiplied.”

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