There’s a horrifically South African expression usually uttered when throwing a bottle or banana peel on the floor; I’m creating jobs. It’s such a simplistic, short-sighted analysis that shows no regard for cost-benefit or the potential for better use of human resources. It’s also part of the reason we can’t have nice things.
You can’t focus on building when you’re consistently made to fix things that shouldn’t be broken. It doesn’t matter how much money you throw into schools if the teachers still don’t show up. Getting more police is useless if their patrol vehicles have no petrol. Oh, and a post office? It’s not like it will triple its revenue as it needs to if the public doesn’t trust it to deliver the post.
This got me thinking after the news about the legislature passing the Immigration Amendment Bill on the instruction of the Constitutional Court. The amendment states that a court must decide whether a detained illegal foreign national needs to be kept longer before deportation is authorised. It also states that detained illegal foreign nationals must appear before a court within 48 hours.
This is hailed as democracy in action. What it really amounts to is too many institutions failing, so we need to throw another one in.
We wouldn’t need judicial oversight if law enforcement did its job properly. We wouldn’t need law enforcement to deport foreign nationals if our borders worked. And now, we have more clogging up of court time to deal with prospective non-citizens while shoving cash into a congested asylum seeker system with a shocking backlog of applications and appeals, many of which will further bloat the courts when they turn into reviews.
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At some point, one has to take a step back, see how over-engineered the social order is, that it’s not working and think of a simpler way to fix it.
Take our labour laws, for example; there’s a reason why labour lawyers and consultants are in such demand. No layperson can make sense of the collections of laws, regulations and precedents, and then still try running everything else in their business. Better yet, try being an average employee and affording somebody insightful enough to fight your case.
The complexity is sometimes necessary, understandably. But always? A school can scarcely hold a fundraising raffle without falling foul of the Lotteries Act. A large portion of our political discourse over the last few years has been flooded with a debate on how long a driver’s licence should be valid. In the real world, that should have been resolved by a couple of emails. The leadership of 19 other countries must be invited to Johannesburg before anybody gets serious about making the city functional.
Yet, the murders on the streets of the city tend to go forgotten and unsolved. The head tasked with prosecuting the solved ones has her own issues in giving testimony. The few who are successfully prosecuted can get parole and strike again. 3.8! That is the official number of people who go back to prison for every 10 paroled; a solid pass brought to you by South African basic education.
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Imagine, all that resource-intensive work to put criminals away in the knowledge that 38% of them will come out and go back in again after committing another crime… and those are just the ones who get caught… again.
Doesn’t it seem daft not to see that this system isn’t working? Doesn’t it seem like there’s just not enough focus on making it work? Aren’t these interventions the presstick patches to a leaking geyser?
The president’s desk just had another seven bills thrown on it for his signature. Will they do anything? I’m sure. Will they do anything good? I hope so. Would they have been necessary if we had got things right without needing the law to intervene? I’m afraid to answer.
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