ANALYSIS: DA’s bold new economic policies may be out of step with SA realities By Rebecca Davis
If ever the DA needed to broadcast ideas that could capture the national imagination, now is a good time. And indeed, there is much to admire about the DA’s policy-making process. It is impossible to imagine any other major South African political party inviting public comment on draft policies in the way the DA is currently doing – though the real test will be whether any of this comment finds expression in revised policies.
To give one minor example: the DA’s latest paper proposes subsidising “the provision of menstrual cups for girls” to address the problem of girls missing school as a result of lacking access to sanitary supplies. Why menstrual cups? Because they are reusable, more cost-effective, and eco-friendly, the paper explains.
This might seem like a nit-picky point, but it compounds the perception that DA policies are made with too little consideration for the complexities of the South African context. But in a country like South Africa, where our economy has been literally built on the exploitation of cheap labour, it seems highly likely that many employers would leap at the chance to pay less than minimum wage, while there are so many economically desperate people in South Africa that there is every chance this could become a race to the bottom – and effectively negate the purpose of introducing a minimum wage in the first place.
The DA’s policy makes clear its ambition to “achieve gender equality” and for South African employers to “recruit in order to consciously broaden the pool of applicants”. Yet it is equally set against the imposition of gender and race quotas. The DA wants to abolish quotas and BBEEE and replace them with an alternative metric for measuring the social or economic contribution of institutions or businesses, based on the Sustainable Development Goals . Instead of having to fulfil the requirements of the BBEEE scorecard, companies could “focus on those SDGs most relevant to their operating environments”.
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