“Over the past 25 years, the lives of the people of South Africa have changed for the better,” the ANC’s 2019 election manifesto declared.

Among the pieces of evidence it cited to defend this claim:

“Children from poor communities have access to free education. In the past five years the number of HIV positive people on antiretroviral treatment has doubled while the overall rate of new infections is decreasing. Over 17.5 million of our most vulnerable citizens receive social grants.”

The continued expansion of the number of South Africans accessing social grants has long been touted by the government as one of its major successes in the democratic era.

Before 1994, many of the current forms of social assistance did not exist, and some of those that did were available only to white South Africans, or available to black South Africans only in smaller amounts or at less frequent intervals. One example is the old-age grant, which in the pre-democratic era provided a monthly stipend to white South Africans, but only a bi-monthly stipend to black South Africans.

In 1994, 2.7 million people received a social grant, according to former president Jacob Zuma’s 2013 Freedom Day address. This figure has grown exponentially since then: Stats SA reported in 2015 that almost half of all South African households — 45,5% — were receiving at least one form of social grant.

Quite a lot of academic research has been done on the impact of social grants, and the results have consistently shown that the grants provide a vital lifeline, though they have done very little to address overall inequality in South Africa.

But critics maintain that the vast number of South Africans dependent on government grants should not be seen as a success. In a 2017 report, the SA Institute of Race Relations said that the fact that more South Africans were on social grants than had jobs was “a recipe for social and political chaos”.

Dr Richard Pithouse, of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser), told Daily Maverick that the social grant system — although “not without its flaws” — is usually taken to be more successful than the state’s healthcare and education systems.

“But grants are more about enabling people to survive rather than overcome impoverishment,” Pithouse says.

“Millions of people have been able to enter the middle class, and for these people, and their families, there has certainly been progress. But with mass unemployment and mass, racialised impoverishment persisting, there are millions of other people for whom life moves in circles rather than upwards.”

Some of the claims made by the ANC’s 2019 election manifesto relating to progress made in the provision of health and education over the past 25 years were analysed by Africa Check and found to be misleading.

One was the claim that school attendance has increased “from 51% in 1994 to 99% today”. Africa Check reported that although school attendance figures from 1994 were unreliable, a more reliable data set from 1996 showed that 89.3% of children aged seven to 15 were in school.

It noted, however, that school attendance rates, in general, are a misleading barometer of progress, as they do not record how regularly children actually attend school, and also offer no useful information about the quality of education being received.

But Equal Education’s Leanne Jansen-Thomas says there are other concrete indications that “some very important progress” has been made in democratic South Africa when it comes to education.

Jansen-Thomas points out that pro-poor policies and legislation have been expanded, such as no-fee schools. The Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure — which stipulate in law the bare minimum school infrastructure required — has been promulgated; the number of matric qualifications awarded each year has exceeded population growth; and South Africa was recently declared to be the “fastest-improving country” in Grade 9 maths and science in an international assessment.

“However, improvement in achievement is from a low base — meaning the quality of primary school education is still low, and this is a binding constraint to children realising their rights and freedoms and to socio-economic transformation,” warns Jansen-Thomas.

“It is criminal that 78% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning in any language, and that government has not demonstrated the urgency required to address this.”

She adds that the fact that at least four children have died in pit latrines in South African schools since 2014 is a clear indication that the Department of Basic Education is still failing to comply with basic infrastructure requirements for schools. At the same time, budget allocations for school infrastructure continue to diminish.

“It’s true that the size of the task is immense, and that the apartheid legacy is stubborn, but it is also true that we would be far further along if it weren’t for an astonishing lack of political will, severe mismanagement and bald-faced corruption,” Jansen-Thomas told Daily Maverick.

When it comes to healthcare, Section 27’s Sasha Stevenson is quick to acknowledge that some important strides have been made in democratic South Africa. One is South Africa’s HIV programme, once the ruinous legacy of the Mandela and Mbeki administrations in this regard was able to be overcome.

“We are far from where we should be, however,” Stevenson told Daily Maverick.

“The HIV programme is losing people all the time — we initiate people on treatment, but are unable to keep them on treatment. In some districts more than half of the people initiated on treatment in the district were no longer on treatment by the end of 2018. This is disastrous for the HIV programme.”

Stevenson says public health facilities are consistently failing to meet adequate standards. But it’s not even clear how bad this problem is, because the body tasked with auditing the quality of health facilities — the Office of Health Standards — will only have the personnel and resources to assess 18% of facilities in the system.

And one thing that remains consistent in democratic South Africa is the inequality of resources available to the rich and poor. Stevenson says that the number of medical specialists in the private sector, as opposed to the public, is vastly skewed.

Assessing the state of play for most of the South African population in 2019, Pithouse puts it more bluntly.

“The democracy established for the middle classes after apartheid was never fully extended to the majority,” he says. DM