Tavern tragedy highlights the serious economic flaws in SA

The 21 teenagers who passed on from the Scenery Park tavern tragedy have now been buried, but the difficult work of lifting that community and our country back on its feet is about to begin.

Beyond abstract theories and sociological understandings of all our social ills, the township of Scenery Park requires specific and targeted programmes to drive meaningful and impactful interventions to change the plight of that community.

When the incident made headlines in the early hours of June 26, I was one of the first people to arrive on the scene through the office I am contracted under in government as an official. The emotions and the trauma of the events, the lengthy process and protocols involved in the planning of the funeral, the engagements with families, the funeral itself, and interfaces with the media ... I witnessed it all at face value.

I am not writing about something that I am detached from. I know what I saw and the impact it had on me.

Firstly, family units in many households of the Eastern Cape are heavily fragmented and broken down. Father figures and the elderly are missing through social misfortunes, death or disease. As a result, these families are led by young single mothers and even children who also face their own personal challenges, yet they still have to lift the weight of running these households with these deficits under a climate of extreme poverty.

As the funeral was proceeding with televised speeches being made, I could not help but wonder in sadness on how many of these families will not have the means to prepare supper later that evening yet they were addressed by the president of the Republic.

The families do not have cash in hand to survive for the next day to buy electricity, meat and other basic needs to take care of themselves. The procurement systems of government only allow the president to honour the event and make a speech but not leave a cent behind for these families to survive on.

Against this background, the broad commentary being made by many analysts around this tragedy such as the demand for psychological and rehabilitation efforts for these families all falls down to the basic necessity of cash for these families to just survive.

The impact of poverty and its potential to disempower gets underestimated when we have academic conversations about such tragedies and where they occur.

But here is another problem.

The government that is expected to drive a social transformation programme to deal with these challenges that came out of the Scenery Park tragedy is deeply incapable of doing that kind of work.

For instance, our local government has been pushed to prioritise infrastructure development, housing, public transport and town planning and maintenance issues. A large chunk of its skills base and policy paradigm is engineered for these hard needs.

At  provincial government level, where the public schooling mandate lies, the attention was long shifted to the teaching and learning of science and mathematics for the purpose of achieving high matric results.

The national government is bombarded with challenges of unemployment, inequality, Eskom and fuel prices. The township economy is currently a tavern economy. Every street in the township has a tavern or a backyard shack that sells alcohol when the recognised establishments are closed.

In essence, you do not have the necessary government expertise with a grounded institutional arsenal to deeply examine these issues and the local economy in place also does not help to curb the challenge of alcohol and drug abuse and the unlicenced or illegal sale of alcohol to minors.

At a government level, the broader project to engage industry to craft relations for the purpose of restoring community organs of youth development such as the reinstatement of school sports, arts and culture festivals, and a vibrant hospitality industry that creates work for teenagers during holidays, has also been eroded.

As a result, when government officials and politicians have to now drop their infrastructure strategy and focus on implementing the national drug master plan, they are found wanting.

The necessary expertise needed to deliver such tangible work is unavailable and there is no experience in place that has exercised this function for some time to generate from. The government departments responsible for social development have all been defunded.

Under this climate, communities need agents such as the religious sector, the middle-class, ward councillors and teachers to pull the private sector to begin creating local social compact committees and civil society organisations that will critically cultivate this work of pulling every stakeholder to tackle the drug problem and restore activities in our schools.

These local social compacts must also develop economic programmes that will activate different streams of entrepreneurship outside being a tavern owner and push government to invest in the building of industries to create mass jobs.

This work must also involve mapping out how best can the social grants injected into our communities be circulated within our own young local entrepreneurs to create value and address poverty.