Prayer Letter: The Best Way to Give

Perhaps the predominant theme of my prayer letters since returning from South Sudan has been how to resource a ministry in the context of a shrinking economy.  Thus an article in today’s New York Times caught my eye.  I have cut and paste about half of it for you:

Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit Excerpts from: Joshua Lott for The New York Times PHOENIX — Perhaps no law in the past generation has drawn more praise than the drive to “end welfare as we know it,” which joined the late-’90s economic boom to send caseloads plunging, employment rates rising and officials of both parties hailing the virtues of tough love. But the distress of the last four years has added a cautionary postscript: much as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged. The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow. Critics of the stringent system say… the revamped law encourages states to withhold aid, especially when the economy turns bad. The old program… dates from the New Deal; it gave states unlimited matching funds and offered poor families extensive rights, with few requirements and no time limits. The new program… created time limits and work rules, capped federal spending and allowed states to turn poor families away. “My take on it was the states would push people off and not let them back on, and that’s just what they did,” said Peter B. Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the law. “It’s been even worse than I thought it would be.” But supporters of the current system often say lower caseloads are evidence of decreased dependency. Even in the 1996 program’s early days, when jobs were plentiful, a subset of families appeared disconnected — left with neither welfare nor work. Their numbers were growing before the recession and seem to have surged since then. No Money, No Job While data on the very poor is limited and subject to challenge, recent studies have found that as many as one in every four low-income single mothers are jobless and without cash aid — roughly four million women and children. Many of the mothers have problems like addiction or depression, which can make assisting them politically unpopular, and they have received little attention in a downturn that has produced an outpouring of concern for the middle class.

This really grabbed my attention!  It is so similar to the controversy that South Africa is facing!

As I have stated repeatedly, there is a double jeopardy for youth in South Africa, where the populations chart bulges at the bottom (not at the top like North America).  Not only is unemployment on the rise, but demographically the ranks of the unemployed are comprised largely by those under 35.

Under apartheid, a minority of “the haves” kept at a distance from the majority of people who were “the have-nots”.  They mixed during working hours, but after that each had to go into a zone defined by skin-colour.  This was immoral.

Today the scenario is that during working hours, the work place is occupied mainly by people over 35, while 74% (national average) of the 45% unemployed (in our province) are out of work?  They don’t mix with youth in the work place, but then they go back after hours to “the community” where youth are idle, frustrated and angry.  This is immoral too, in my view - a kind of generational apartheid.

When ever the subject of unemployment comes up in South Africa, government’s one-liner is always “skills development”.

But I have to wonder how far-sighted that is.  Why give skills to youth in the context of a shrinking number of jobs (it’s down 3 million since 1995)?

While I am a great believer in promoting Entrepreneurship and the “informal sector” as the best way to create employment, I also feel that Welfare is part of the problem.  Almost one in three South Africans in on some kind of direct state assistance – over 13 million the last time I saw statistics.  This must be rising too, unlike in the USA - according to the article above, where states have kept the lid on it.

I have to say that some kind of increase in Welfare is inevitable here, as South Africa passes through this period of world economic recession.  The big challenge is that “welfare as we know it” can create Dependency.  Particularly when offered to youth whose prospects of entering the job market are dismal.  What a terrible way to start out your life as a young adult!  And so many of these are the ones who lost one or more parents ten years ago when government was resisting the roll-out of ARVs!  Is their government going to fail them again, by taking away their incentive and entrenching the grid lock that keeps them out of jobs at entry level?  A new way needs to be found.

At Easter we celebrate something that could not happen – but did.  Pray for such a miracle in South Africa.  Another such miracle.  In the age brackets used in South Africa, Jesus was a youth.  (Under 35.)  Just about the same age as Julius Malema is today!