SOCIAL SECURITY
…making Africa home
Other countries offer payouts, pensions, old peoples homes, subsidized farming housing and all sorts of social support and protection mechanisms that make their people feel at home. In Africa the vehicle that facilitates this is land. Land is perhaps the only successful social security structure that offers the combined package of social protection that is offered piecemeal by all other systems of support. With land a person can build a home, grow food, keep animals, work for a lifetime and die in peace. The landless are vulnerable, unsheltered and have no means of support. Cutting people off the land cuts them off from base production and social security creating dependency and economic despondency. Take away the land and you create a homeless person. Land is a central, compound and complex issue in African affairs
ONE THOUSAND YEARS
Land has been at the center of conflict in Africa for a full millennium. It remains a powder keg for the instability of nations. Leadership in Africa today has an unprecedented opportunity to restore order in the land question. Why is land such a central issue? Apart from the fact that the land was traversed, trespassed and traded irreverently through a millennium, the central question of land is not about acreage or heritage it is about social security. Anyone who cannot access land or property in Africa is not at home. This is compounded by the fact that everyone has some claim to ancestral land that houses the bulk of the population.
The situation is made complex by multiple cultural ownership management and inheritance practices. The advent of nationhood only brought the matter back to the foreground. This causes much tribulation for the tribunals hoping to resolve land issues.
Quite apart from the above issues, modern circumstances have introduced a whole new set of dynamics into the picture. Society has millions of homeless people in cities: poor migrant workers and affluent yuppies alike. Access to land and property is becoming the preserve of the privileged. Land has become a prime avenue to wealth. Revenues from Rates and Rents transfer billions worth of production wealth to lords of the land each year. A move to make home (and land) ownership accessible will release billions worth of precious hard earned income back into the hands and pockets of the homeless. And make Africa home again. Making Africa home will redistribute wealth in society and enhance social security.
THE LAND QUESTIONS
There used to be enough land for everyone. Or was there? The land question calls for wisdom. There are no magical solutions available. The matter may require progressive resolution to restore order. Solutions will have to incorporate the living, the dead and the unborn. Perhaps there should be a minimum and maximum allocation in land. Perhaps there should be a carefully managed population plan. Perhaps centers of development should be moved away from cities. Does idle land cause under development? Should a penalty be placed upon it? Does owning land spark innovation and enterprise? How can leadership in Africa optimize the land question to realize the hopes of the people and leverage the social economic potential of Africa? Will making national development a land-based initiative empower the people and spur economic growth at the same time.
PROPERTY RIGHTS
Property rights such as research, exploration, music, invention, intellectual and other resources need to be protected and respected both within and without Africa as contributions to world affairs. Property rights provide a social security framework that encourages and promotes the participation in enterprise and development because recognition and reward are safeguarded for individuals and posterity just as they should be in any home.
RETIREMENT
The alarming trend of (early) retirement is causing people to retire from work early. Can society afford this? Poor management of retirement practices could lead to social disorientation and cause a disabling backlash on socio economic development.
Jobs and work are not the same thing. The first entails holding a position. The latter is about engaging in productive participative activity that yields social value wherever it is found. The first is about employment the other is about deployment. Of the two, work is the more critical. It is possible to hold a job and not apply oneself in a productive manner. Work is what occupies you. A job gives you something to do.
Why is retirement and especially early retirement so damaging to Africa? As people retire from work into society, they place a strain on available social resources for support. That people are withdrawing from productive activity faster than we are able to produce social security is alarming. If we let people retire from work early we diminish the capacity to support them in society and drain social reserves.
Leadership in Africa may not be able to stop people from loosing jobs, but leadership in Africa must not allow people to stop working too soon especially when they are able bodied, intelligent and energetic. Retirement is difficult to justify at less than 75 years of age. It takes roughly 25 years to grow up in a family situation; another 25 years to establish one’s own family and another 25 to make a contribution to wider society. Anyone forced into retirement on social security below 50 has not yet made a social contribution.
By keeping people active, productive and participative in social affairs past 75 years, society is able to maximize social benefits. Creating non-productive retirees at 35 or even 50 is to create new avenues to impoverish society. Leadership must encourage people to remain productive in their social spheres of influence in order to maximize social resources and establish economic growth. This should ease the burden shouldered by the income earners and taxpayers in society and promote social responsibility.
The modern concept of retirement collapses the work ethic, creates dependency and robs society of immense value by creating despondency among millions of able-bodied personnel. Retirement stigmatizes people and removes them from the social mainstream. Improperly managed retirement process creates, panic and fear and a measure of recklessness among the productive population.
EARLY RETIREMENT
Early retirement has a negative effect on leadership development in Africa. Before leadership is firmed up or established it is consigned to the outskirts of society. Leadership will not be able to build sufficient social substructure if leadership is continually sidelined in its formative stages. Sidelining leadership at critical stages of development creates pockets of leadership voids at various levels and spheres of society. This leaves society weaker and less equipped to manage, run and control social affairs.
WORK ETHIC
Leadership needs to encourage people to work and enjoy it as adding social value and principle of life. The work ethic provides social security. Give people jobs and they get employed, give people work and they beget industry. The key to keeping people at work is to expand their (options and opportunities for) engagement and participation in production and economic development. A strong work ethic is required to produce and sustain social security.