Business and human rights are inextricably linked, so let’s talk about it

02 April 2019 - 05:10Business and human rights have been at odds for most of SA’s history. In 1893 British periodical Truth called Cecil Rhodes “the head of a gang of shady financiers” who operated “on the principle that godless heathen ought to be mowed down with Maxim guns if they happen to inhabit a country where there may be gold”.

Yet measured voices such as that of Harvard economics professor and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen remind us that “no economy in world history has ever achieved widespread prosperity, going beyond the high life of the elite, without making considerable use of markets”. We only need to look around, from smallholder farmers to street traders, to remind ourselves that making, buying and selling are deeply embedded in our collective DNA.

A starting point for an answer might be to more critically examine the global economic system we have wholeheartedly embraced since the democratic transition — one where hot capital with short-term objectives is richly rewarded in SA, to the detriment of long-term investment in productive assets and human capital.

SA has a youth unemployment rate of about 50%. The prospects for the future may be even dimmer: extrapolating from recent statistics, less than a third of pupils currently in grade 1 will achieve their matric, and only a third of them will go on to higher education — even as the economic prosperity and civic engagement that underpin human rights require ever greater skill and engagement. This is a recipe not only for human rights disaster, but for massive social upheaval.

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