Tag: South Africa

Parliament has the final say on the Budget

Ahead of the Minister of Finance’s Budget Speech tomorrow, I’ve just published a piece in The Conversation, explaining the core components of South Africa’s annual Budget and the fact that Parliament ultimately has the final say on each of these – subject to a public consultation process. The full process is guided by the Money Bills Amendment Procedure and Related Matters Act (2009), which I worked with extensively when I was at the Parliamentary Budget Office.

The conclusion of the article, that Parliament’s oversight may provide some reassurance in the current political context, is less comforting in light of an article published today which reveals that a vacancy has suddenly been created on the standing committee of finance. The last time that happened was when the then ANC whip of the committee, Des Van Rooyen, was notoriously made Minister of Finance for a weekend. It appears likely that Brian Molefe, former CEO of Eskom who is named dozens of times in the Public Protector’s ‘State of Capture’ Report, will be appointed to this vacancy – having been surreptitiously added to the ANC’s list of MPs. And this in turn may be a stepping stone to his appointment to cabinet in a last ditch attempt, by a faction close to the president, to take control of public finances for nefarious ends.

My case against the Parliamentary Budget Office: part II

As noted in a previous post, I am pursuing a case against the Parliamentary Budget Office at the CCMA.  And as also indicated in that post, I am not going to comment on any specific issues relating to the merits of the case, or the process, until the latter is completed. Nevertheless, given that the reporting of the matter has been intermittent and only partially informed, it is useful to recount some further, basic information here.

The most recent component of the hearing (day 5 and 6) took place on the 19th and 20th January, with the intention that the matter be completed on the 20th. Unfortunately that was not possible, for reasons which will become known in due course.

Media presence

More importantly, while the media were initially granted access, the two journalists present were requested to leave shortly after I started my cross-examination of the Director of the Office. The result is that the first two reports (News24 and Business Day) that did appear could effectively only report on 75% of the 5th day of the process and did not report any of the content of the Director’s cross-examination. One article reported the Director’s assertions, but not the testing of these assertions and more substantive issues; resulting in somewhat one-sided coverage.

While the media can only report what they observe, one might expect that the media’s (gentle) ejection from the process would be reported to at least provide readers with some context for the sudden cessation of coverage.

Meanwhile, in another case at the CCMA, the media have continued to be present despite the applicant (Mr Adrian Lackay) testifying to fairly sensitive matters, such as the alleged ‘rogue unit’ at the South African Revenue Services (SARS). Of course, every case is different and commissioners use their discretion to make such determinations. It is worth noting, though, that Lackay’s case led to the breaking of new ground on media access to CCMA arbitration thanks to work by Media24 and amaBhungane. Apparently the Commission has subsequently published rules and guidelines that formalised the position that public access, including media access, is the default. (Though many people, including legal practitioners, remain unaware of this).

Credibility

Naturally, when one raises matters like those that have emerged in this process, attacks on one’s credibility are par for the course. Exposing, directly or indirectly, the abuse of public resources and compromising of appointment processes to positions in public institutions is a sure way of engendering some hostility. In this instance, such attacks have come in blustered form within the process from Parliament’s representatives, statements by the Director (to the media and in testimony) and comments by one former colleague in testimony.

While such behaviour is to be expected, it remains very ill-advised to attack the credibility of someone who is, substantively, more credible than you are… In due course most of the truth about who acted professionally and ethically at the PBO, and who did not, will become known. It will then also become clear that serious action will be required to salvage some credibility for the institution.

A long road ahead

It is widely-accepted that independent fiscal institutions like parliamentary budget offices need to be beyond reproach:

the core values that IFIs both promote and operate under – independence, non-partisanship, transparency, and accountability – while demonstrating technical competence and producing relevant work of the highest quality that stands up to public scrutiny and informs the public debate (OECD Principles)

Unfortunately, it would appear that there is a long, difficult road ahead to achieve this in South Africa.

My case against the Parliamentary Budget Office

It is now (as of this week) a matter of public record that I am pursuing a public interest-related labour law case against the Parliamentary Budget Office. The arbitration hearing at the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) began, in fact, on the 19th of September. Unfortunately, no media were present to hear the beginning of the case. That included my introductory statements and extensive arguments on the legislated independence of the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) from the Parliament administration, as well as the labour law and public interest aspects of the case (first day), and my testimony under oath (second day).

The matter then continued for a further two days on the 14th and 15th November. This began with my cross-examination by the PBO’s representative, and then continued with my calling of witnesses.

As I indicated in the hearing, I expected that the witnesses I called would be hostile but was guided by a CCMA award in which the commissioner noted that a party cannot fail to subpoena a relevant witness merely because they expect the witness to be hostile “as this can only be determined when the witness is giving testimony”. Unfortunately, despite the apparently hostile statements by witnesses referred to in various of the articles below, not one of the witnesses was declared hostile and I was therefore unable to cross-examine them.

I will refrain from commenting on the substantive details of the case at this stage, though I will certainly do so at some point after it is completed. For now I would just note a few interesting snippets from the articles produced by the Media24 journalist in attendance. (There are some important legal points that were not reported, and some errors in the articles, but I will not comment on those either at this stage).

1. Note on media access at the CCMA

Media24 requested access to the hearing. Parliament’s representative objected and I argued in favour. I specifically argued that the recent ruling in the KZN High Court allowing media into the Nkandla disciplinary cases indicated the extent to which public interest must inform such decisions. CCMA arbitration hearings must surely be more open than internal disciplinary hearings. As it transpired, the CCMA takes the view that arbitration hearings are open by default unless there are reasons to decide otherwise.

2. Some of the issues

Muller told the commission that while no one had ever approached him to do academic work, others were asked.

Others in the office were favoured because they had helped do political work, including write speeches, which were not part of the office’s mandate.

He accused the unit’s director, Mohammed Jahed, of instructing staff to do such work and even boasting about it. If Jahed denied it, he would be lying under oath, Muller said.

3. How do emails go missing in an institution like Parliament?

All emails from 2015 had been deleted, she said. This would be because her mailbox was full, she said, as other colleagues could also not find old emails.

She did not know if they were deleted because of Muller’s case, she told CCMA commissioner Madeleine Loyson.

[It was noted in the hearing, however, that Parliament’s email policy states that:

8.5 Storing, archiving and deleting e-mail messages

a) Official email messages must be archived after 30 days of receipt and all other e-mail must be deleted from the inbox/outbox after 24 days of receipt.]

4. What constitutes acceptable assistance to MPs?

Ellse explained that all he had done was give tutelage to some MPs in issues relating to tax and other areas in which he was interested.

He had been asked by the PBO’s director to have a look at questions from Van Rooyen and provide guidance if he had time.

After reading the questions, he said, he had then decided to explain a related concept to Van Rooyen.

5. Is considering the performance of internal candidates unfair when making appointments to senior technical positions in the public service?

Gabier told the commission that including internal candidates’ performance scores would have prejudiced external applicants.

As things stand, the hearing will proceed on the 19th of January 2017. The cross-examination of Ms Gabier will continue, followed by the testimony of the Director of the PBO and his cross-examination.

My work at the PBO

I have already written a couple of articles about the Parliamentary Budget Office, in which I worked for two years and one month, touching on what it should be doing (but isn’t, or isn’t doing well enough) and one rather significant failure. I suspect that I will write more in future on related matters.

For the moment, however, I thought it would be useful to lay out my own work while in that office. Despite difficult circumstances I am proud of the quality of the work that was produced and it seemed appropriate to put together a short catalogue here.

The Office has a website but, for reasons not in the public domain, does not consistently publish its outputs or requests received. Fortunately, if work is ever presented to committees of Parliament reports and slides almost automatically enter the public domain – both by law and the Rules of Parliament (committee meetings are open to the public except in exceptional cases) – and are usually published by virtue of the invaluable work of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group. Although at least 50% of my work was never reflected in this fashion, I catalogue here what I can.

In most instances, the work would have benefited from greater specialisation (as the very broad range of topics below attests!), more time and greater access to relevant information – all of which are characteristics of the most successful PBOs. For example, for the report on SOEs we did not get data that would have enabled (in the time available) an analysis of financial ratios across various SOEs. Nevertheless, what was produced mostly holds-up well in comparison to other institutions.

I was the team leader and/or main author of:

 

  • Advice on the Eskom Special Appropriation Bill and Eskom Subordinated Loan Special Appropriation Amendment Bill for the Standing, then Select, Committee on Appropriations  [slides; PMG source#1 and PMG source#2; we did not have time to produce a detailed analysis]

 

  • Report on the Fiscal Sustainability of Social Grants for the Standing Committee on Finance [slides 39-40; PMG source; the full report has never been presented or published but it is referred to in these slides on the 2016 Budget]

 

The report on Treasury’s fiscal forecasts was probably the technically most sophisticated piece of work the Office has done and is as sophisticated as anything I have seen from any PBO internationally. It is heavily informed by the work of Charles Manski on policy uncertainty and, more directly, insights from the literature on forecast accuracy (which I became aware of at Oxford, from being taught by Andrew Patton). I intend to publish at least two academic papers related to this work.

In other cases some substantive contributions are contained within annual presentations by the Office on the Budget or the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement: [this list will be completed as/when I have time]

  • Advice on public debt and higher education funding after the 2015 MTBPS [slides 13-18 and 30-39; PMG source; the later ‘report’ on the MTBPS excluded the higher education analysis..]

A digression: ‘decolonising mathematics’ in South Africa?

The idea that academic curricula in South Africa need to be ‘decolonised’ is one that has emerged from both the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) movements. Previously I argued that there is some merit to the concerns raised about economics. (And I still intend to write my final blog post on how I think South African economics should be taught). In doing so, however, I also noted that:

Students are driven by a well-founded instinct that something is wrong, but they struggle to decipher what the causes are. In my view this is entirely understandable given that undergraduates cannot be expected to have a uniformly better understanding of the discipline than those teaching them! But muddling of issues is often used by those favouring the status quo to deflect otherwise legitimate criticism.

It would seem, unfortunately, that in recent times students calling for ‘decolonised curricula’ and their ‘radical academic’ supporters appear to not be learning any lessons in this regard. The recent #sciencemustfall Twitter debate is an extreme case that illustrates some useful points.

The issue began with a video of a meeting at the University of Cape Town where a black student called for ‘science to be decolonised’, going to the extent of stating that: “science as a whole is a product of Western modernity and should be scratched off”. Just in case one might want to wilfully misunderstand her in order to provide some kind of defense, she states that: “decolonising the science would mean doing away with it entirely and starting all over again”.

Coincidentally, on the same the day an article was published on The Conversation with the headline “Mathematics can be decolonised”. This was then used by some to suggest that the student in question had a point. I disagree: for the ‘decolonisation of curricula’ movement to have intellectual credibility, it needs to clearly delineate different interpretations of ‘decolonisation’ and make sober assessments of which aspects are (most) relevant to different disciplines.

A closer look at the arguments in the Conversation piece reveal that what the author is referring to is making the content more accessible – not changing or questioning it in any way. She states explicitly that:

it’s not obvious how mathematics can be decolonised at the level of content. This means that those within the discipline must consider other aspects: curriculum processes, such as critical thinking and problem solving; pedagogy – how the subject is taught and, as a number of people have argued, addressing the issue of identity.

This emphasises a critical point: to pretend, as some have done, that proposals to make content more accessible is the same as “starting from scratch” (i.e. critiquing or removing content) is disingenuous and dangerous. Making content more socially or culturally accessible may be a small part of ‘decolonisation’, but many such calls have something far more substantive – or, in this case, extreme – in mind.

There are three further points I want to make:
1. Calling for mathematical or scientific disciplines to reflect ‘African contributions’ without knowing what those contributions are (or indeed if they exist) is fundamentally misguided
2. Excusing absurd claims like those made in the video is patronising to black students and often self-serving (for self-styled ‘radicals’)
3. I feel sorry for the student in the video: she has been let down by the education system, her peers and the ‘radical academics’ who might have corrected her before she publicly humiliated herself.

Why do I make the strong claim that insisting on ‘decolonising mathematics’ and ‘decolonising science’ is misguided and may be racist? The reason is that this argument assumes that if Africans had not made contributions then they could not lay claim to that knowledge as a product of humanity. That in turn implies that the relative quantity of contributions by different nationalities and races to academic disciplines reflects something about intrinsic capacity of those groups. I believe that is essentially racist. My own view, from the history of mathematics I know, is that the differing extent of contributions to mathematics and sciences by different groups is to do with what we could loosely call ‘historical accidents’ in development (in earlier historical periods) as well as subjugation (including colonialism) in later periods. (To the extent that black people were deliberately denied access to education and knowledge they were deprived of opportunities to make contributions to many academic disciplines. There are of course some remarkable stories, such as Ramanujan, of triumphing over related odds but these are the exception that prove the rule.)

In some areas, like the humanities and social sciences, I do believe there is a strong case that content must be changed, critiqued and contextualised. But it is simply misguided to assume that one can call for decolonisation of mathematics in the same way as decolonisation of anthropology. It is also misguided to assume that you understand what is required and possible in a discipline you are not an expert in (or haven’t even studied at an academic level). Doing that leads, eventually, to the kinds of cringeworthy statements in the video. It is also easy to make progressive-sounding noises about such issues, like suggesting that using fractal-like patterns is the same as having a mathematical theory of fractals. But I would argue that is again misguided for the same reason stated above, and furthermore that it seems rather patronising to Africans: ‘you had fractal patterns in designing stuff so that’s kinda like us Westerners developing set theory’.

The second point is that it is patronising to black students to engage in complicated exculpations of ignorant remarks. When I was an undergraduate I had embarrassingly ill-informed views about a number of things. It was briefly humiliating when those blind-spots were exposed, but fortunately they were (usually not in public) and I was able to broaden and deepen my intellectual abilities. Students who constantly have their ignorance, or excessively definitive claims, excused on the basis of ‘being victims of the system’, ‘whiteness’ or any other currently popular exculpation, are in fact being patronised and denied the criticism that leads to intellectual development

Finally, and relatedly, I actually feel very sorry for the student in question. She has been allowed and encouraged to pursue what could be a defensible train of thought to a humiliatingly absurd extreme because of the ignorance and cowardice of her peers – and some academics who claim to support her worldview. Unlike those academics, she will forever be on YouTube and may never quite shake being an object of derision by others who are less sympathetic or understanding.

I should note that I studied history of mathematics at UCT and distinctly recall my lecturer discussing the Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese origins of various critical concepts. I particularly recall the story of how the Babylonians ‘invented’/’discovered’ zero. Ironically, the lecturer of that course – Ken Hughes – has subsequently (and somewhat deservedly) ended-up on the wrong side of transformation debates at UCT. But credit should be given where it is due.

Unfortunately, some critics will stick to simplistic claims about lack of transformation and assertions of what needs to be done no matter the evidence provided to the contrary. The rest of us, however, need to find a more balanced and nuanced understanding of when and whether the ‘decolonisation’ narrative has relevance. Otherwise we’ll be responsible for the humiliation of future generations of students who deserve a lot better.

The Undergraduate Economics Curriculum at the University of Cape Town: Part II

At the end of Part I of this comment on the UCT economics curriculum, I identified two further issues for immediate consideration: the nature of textbooks, and problems arising from academic incentives. The textbook issue also raises the important role of history of economic thought and economic history courses.

Continue reading “The Undergraduate Economics Curriculum at the University of Cape Town: Part II”

The economics curriculum at UCT: Part I

It would be no exaggeration to say that I have taken a critical interest in UCT’s economics curriculum for over fifteen years, and some of the associated dissatisfaction has shaped my career and approach to the discipline as a whole. As an undergraduate majoring in economics I was bored stiff for the first two years by being taught how to regurgitate graphs and solve equations from American textbooks. I seriously thought of quitting – this was not what I had signed-up for. There were some useful ideas about the functioning of markets and individual behaviour, but they were so obviously crude, decontextualised and evidently infused with free-market, anti-poor (pro-rich) ideology that as a student it was not possible to separate what was useful from what was irrelevant, implausible or ideological.

For example, minimum wages were stated as definitively reducing employment (with no reference to possible effects on effort or aggregate demand), but higher taxes on the rich were stated as negatively affecting economic activity (without any reference to benefits from public expenditure or reduced inequality).

Economist readers might want to note that this was 10 years after publication of Akerlof and Yellen’s paper on efficiency wages. It was 5 years after publication of Card and Krueger’s landmark book on minimum wages, challenging the ‘conventional wisdom’ on the minimum wage in economics with empirical evidence. I had to find that book in the library on my own to get an alternative view. Scanning library shelves also led me to Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, which introduces the notion of conspicuous consumption, and JK Galbraith’s History of Economic Thought.

Our lecturers did little to assist: they were mostly graduate students, rushing to get through material that they did not have the incentive, inclination, or intellectual foundations, to critically evaluate or present differently. Only in the third year electives did I finally find a reasonable amount of intellectual stimulation, evidence of alternative views and explicit reference to the South African context.

For this reason, I am sympathetic to the recent criticism of UCT’s curriculum by Ihsaan Bassier. He notes, among other things, that:

“I find myself at the end of my undergraduate degree without the tools to interrogate the economic situation surrounding me”.

“Critical economic thinking is simply not taught during an economics undergraduate degree. The department attempts to push mathematical concepts, but only succeeds in promoting rote learning, characteristic of a production centre for ideology.”

Such concerns can be located in broader, international student movements to change the undergraduate curriculum. In general, I support those movements as well. However, they have a tendency of conflating a number of important issues: ideology, academic incentives, bureaucratic obstacles, fetishisation of quantitative methods and the problematic status of economics as a ‘science’.

Students are driven by a well-founded instinct that something is wrong, but they struggle to decipher what the causes are. In my view this is entirely understandable given that undergraduates cannot be expected to have a uniformly better understanding of the discipline than those teaching them! But muddling of issues is often used by those favouring the status quo to deflect otherwise legitimate criticism. The points I make below can be applied as much at Harvard or Oxford as at UCT, because they pertain to deep problems with economics as a discipline and universities as institutions, but I will use UCT as my working example – having studied and lectured there.

Continue reading “The economics curriculum at UCT: Part I”

Some thoughts on Taylor and Watson’s (2015) RCT on the impact of study guides on school-leaving results in South Africa

Since 2010 most of my time spent on academic research has focused on two particular areas:

  1. The use of randomised control trials (RCTs) to support inappropriate, or overly strong, policy claims or recommendations
  2. Empirical examples of how this has manifested in the economics of education.

I was therefore somewhat frustrated when I attended a presentation at the Economic Society of South Africa conference in 2013 to find some rather strong policy claims being made on the basis of what is very weak evidence (even by the standards of practitioners favouring RCTs). I raised my concerns with the relevant author, but I see that the recently-published working paper contains the same problems.

It therefore seems appropriate to summarise my concerns with this work: partly so that interested parties can understand its flaws, but mainly to provide an illustration of how the new fad for RCT-based policy is often oversold.[1] That’s important, because despite seemingly ample evidence I often get economists saying: “Oh but no-one really uses RCT results in that way”.

Continue reading “Some thoughts on Taylor and Watson’s (2015) RCT on the impact of study guides on school-leaving results in South Africa”