{"id":324485,"date":"2019-06-20T12:50:32","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T10:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=324485"},"modified":"2019-06-20T12:50:32","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T10:50:32","slug":"south-africans-are-clear-about-what-they-want-from-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/324485\/south-africans-are-clear-about-what-they-want-from-government\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africans are clear about what they want from government"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has published a new report<\/a> <\/strong>titled ‘reasons for hope 2019’, showing how race relations in the country have held up surprisingly well.<\/p>\n

“Racial tensions could easily have risen strongly in a year characterised by increasingly harsh racial rhetoric from both the ANC and the EFF.<\/p>\n

“Much of this invective was aimed at securing a constitutional amendment that would allow land expropriation without compensation (EWC). Now that Parliament has recommended this EWC amend-ment, racial accusations have declined again,” the report said.<\/p>\n

The report is based on a survey carried out from 8 – 19 December 2018 which generated 1,010 telephone interviews.<\/p>\n

Of these respondents, 771 were black, 97 were coloured people, 25 were Indian, and 115 were white. All respondents were interviewed by experienced field workers and in the languages of their own choice.<\/p>\n

What South Africans want<\/strong><\/p>\n

Respondents in the survey were also asked to choose – from a list of possible answers supplied to them – \u2018which one of the following issues should be the top priority for the government\u2019.<\/p>\n

The three top issues identified were \u2018creating more jobs\u2019, \u2018fighting corruption\u2019 and \u2018improving education\u2019.<\/p>\n

In total, a quarter (26%) of respondents identified \u2018creating more jobs\u2019 as the key issue for the government to tackle.<\/p>\n

Other key concerns were \u2018fighting corruption\u2019 (cited by 14% of all respondents) and \u2018improving education\u2019 (mentioned by 11% of all respondents).<\/p>\n

‘Fighting crime\u2019 (mentioned by 10% of all respondents), \u2018building more RDP houses\u2019 (cited also by 10% of those interviewed), \u2018fighting drugs and drug abuse\u2019 (cited by 9%), and \u2018fighting illegal immigration\u2019 (mentioned by 7%), also ranked highly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Proportions exceed 100% because more than one such issue could be mentioned.<\/em><\/p>\n

By contrast, only 2% of all respondents wanted the government to focus on \u2018fighting racism\u2019.<\/p>\n

In addition, only 2% of black respondents wanted the government to focus on \u2018speeding up land reform\u2019, while only 1% of black interviewees wanted it to concentrate on \u2018speeding up affirmative action\u2019.<\/p>\n

“These results show that relatively few black South Africans want the government to focus its efforts on \u2018fighting racism\u2019 or accelerating the pace of land reform, while fewer still think the state\u2019s emphasis should be on faster affirmative action,” the IRR said.<\/p>\n

“Unemployment has been the concern most often cited by South Africans in all five of the IRR\u2019s opinion polls on race relations since 2001.<\/p>\n

“In each of these polls, by contrast, only a very small proportion of respondents identified the need to counter racism as a pressing priority,” it said.<\/p>\n

\n

Read: New case deals with employees who play the \u2018race card\u2019 to get out of trouble<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) has released a new report on ‘reasons for hope’ in South Africa, and what the country’s different population groups expect from the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":310400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[26,9583],"class_list":["post-324485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-headline","tag-irr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324485"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324499,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324485\/revisions\/324499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}