Say no to ‘political economic empowerment’!

There is a frightening article in the Sunday Times which explains that “[a] department of co-operative governance and traditional affairs skills audit revealed in 2023 that more than 300 KwaZulu-Natal councillors were illiterate, raising questions about how they managed multimillion-rand budgets and projects”. Being able to read, it would seem, is an important skill for someone who has to decide how millions are spent.

(Lack of) literacy is a societal problem, not the fault of the individual who was denied a proper education. Everyone is born illiterate, but the intervention that changes all of this is schooling. Only, not all schools are equal. We have a group of schools where children sometimes drown in toilets and are likely to be taught by teachers who themselves are shaky on literacy grounds, and then we have schools that turn out children who are literate and numerate.

The graduates of these respective schools tend to perform rather differently throughout their lives, with the pupils of the Death Toilet Academy often not even finishing school. We can safely say that going to a Death Toilet Academy is a predictor of poor prospects in life. There are however a small cadre of the Death Toilet Academy alumni who do well despite their proximity to the killer commodes, and no doubt the 300 illiterate councillors number among these.

Do the residents of the wards these councillors represent deserve to be deprived of services because they are governed by those unable to read?

These councillors might very well be the most principled, ethical and righteous people in the community, deserving of their shot at greatness, but they can’t read and that absolutely must disqualify them from office.

Should they be abandoned to a career directing traffic at yet another set of broken traffic lights? Of course not – but just like every other survivor of the Death Toilet Academy, we should have a path to train them. What should not happen is to skip the education step and preference their employment under a set of “political economic empowerment” (PEE) rules.

Under PEE, you prioritise someone’s political affiliation over their competence.

‘Educational economic empowerment’

Reading is the first step on the road to thinking critically. Add in numeracy, another skill no doubt lacking in the 300 councillors who have to work with numbers and words, and you have a recipe for disaster. And that recipe will keep delivering that terrible meal forever because that’s what the illiteracy recipe does. How did these chaps get their jobs, despite the obvious requirement to know their letters? PEE.

According to the department of basic education, in 2016 (the most recent data I could find), 92.7% of all learners went to public schools, but only 41% of them passed matric with a bachelors pass rate. Private schools on the other hand have a bachelors pass rate more than double that, at 89%.

According to the Q2 2025 Quarterly Labour Force Survey, 51% of people with less than a matric are unemployed, compared to 15% for graduates, which tells us a lot about how important education is.

The department of higher education’s 2024 fact sheet on highest educational attainment in South Africa identifies “[a]partheid legacies and demographics [as] possible explanations for the higher proportion of whites with a degree. In 2023, 28.6% of whites had a degree, while 4.8% of Coloureds and 5.2% of Black Africans had a degree. In 2023, the proportion of persons with no schooling was highest in the Black African population and lowest among whites. However, in the last eight years, the proportion of Black Africans with no schooling dropped substantially. Though the proportion of Black Africans with a degree increased by less than 2% over the past eight years, the actual number of Black Africans with degrees almost doubled over this period.”

After 30 years of democracy, these outcomes should have massively improved for Black kids, given how large the education budget is (6.5% of GDP – more than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average). Of course, the prevailing view in government is that it matters more that kids in the Death Toilet Academy are taught by union members, no matter their competence, than to actually prioritise the education of those kids.

The data clearly shows that no group of people are more marginalised than the uneducated (those 300 elite exceptions aside), yet we hear no calls for companies to be fined 10% of their turnover because their CFO is not innumerate. Where are the PEE agencies checking your PEE levels so you can tender for government work?

Education is not an immutable characteristic, yet South Africa’s great social engineering project is relentlessly focused on only immutable characteristics, without noticing the large overlap in the Venn diagram between the poorly educated and those who are the targets of upliftment.

BEE and employment equity are an attempt to shift the problem of our complete educational failure onto the shoulders of the private sector with little concern for why educational failures fall so disproportionately onto the shoulders of black people. It is absolutely true that Black people are not well represented at senior levels in companies, but that doesn’t mean the racial quotas are the way to fix that.

There remains a perpetual lack of political interest in fixing education at source and instead going right to the endpoint and trying to fix it by way of forcing companies to act against their own best interests.

Imagine for a moment the call was for “educational economic empowerment”, with companies being rewarded for the number of children they educate? Grow the number of points you earn as the kids you support attain higher levels of education from grade 1 to PhD?

I don’t know of a company that wouldn’t get behind that.

Donald MacKay is the founder and CEO of XA Global Trade Advisors. Donald has been providing advice to companies on trade and industrial policy for 27 years. 

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