EXACTLY how is the country to going pay for free education? This is the question foremost on people’s minds, as the country sobers up to the events of the past weeks, which saw the unprecedented storming of parliament and storming of the Union Buildings.

Surprisingly, South Africa, ( as previously alluded to in part 2), already has a ‘sovereign wealth fund’ with a massive R1.5 trillion rand invested, and certainly the youth need to be tackling finance minister Nhlanhla Nene and education minister, Blade Nzimande on why they are suffering in the face of so much wealth.

Instead of a Public Investment Corporation (PIC), benefiting one privileged generation who just happened to be in power during the 90s, let’s make the public investment more inclusive of all citizens, and all generations, and let’s call the PIC what it deserves, by the term Publica, since the ruling party appears to have lost the distinction between what is public and what is private — funding Nkandla, and government pensions for party insiders. Publica should rather be redirected to funding a social wage for all citizens, one which includes education, health insurance and childcare grants. Instead of a party wage, we could have a social wage reducing the worst affects of poverty and mitigating the coercion inherent to the job market, even one that is Internet-enabled, while providing free education.

Publica, unfortunately, like so many self-aggrandising programmes run by the ANC, appears to have evolved and deformed into a strange facet resembling one of the pillars of the previous regime, the apartheid equivalent of cadre deployment.

The Independent Development Corporation (IDC), cooked up by apartheid cronies Anton Rupert, Chris Stals, Nico Diederichs and Owen Horward, was really nothing more than an efficient scheme to create bantustans. Escaping international sanctions by moving state capital into Swiss offshore bank accounts for the exclusive benefit of the politically-connected. In reality, a state-within-a-state, a fund that was part-and-parcel of the covert government which created apartheid and the oligarchs, technocrats and apparatchiks, that existed, hand-in-glove with the state’s volkscapitalisme.

The missing apartheid millions are all documented by news journalist Sylvia Vollenhoven, but her documentary ‘The Spear’ was banned by the SABC, as no doubt any similar investigation of the fiscus under Zuma would also be.

An investigation of the corporation we may now call Publica, i.e the massive state corporation created out of public funds drawn from the public purse over the past two decades, would undoubtedly uncover a lot more than the Nkandla millions. These funds need to be returned to the people.

The youth of today, deserve free education, and they deserve connectivity, to be online. But in saying this, we want a youth who are able to grasp the many opportunities that exist, at the same time as they are cushioned from the worst forms of economic exploitation, inequality and poverty. This can only come about through a social wage that includes free education.

Part Four examines what South Africa would look like with a social wage

Tag: PIC