When last did you think about Irvin & Johnson’s Steakhouse Melts? The challenge with ageing, having grown up long before the Internet and Google, is that my memory is just as fragile as the Internet’s and Google’s when thinking back too far. Some days a memory, a partial memory, is triggered, but when I turn to the search engine to supplement my memory, I end up being none the wiser.

Not sure what triggered it a few days ago, but I thought of Steakhouse Melts. I vividly recalled the two acting legends, Bill Flynn and Paul Slabolepszy, but couldn’t recall the setting and the actors’ interaction. I recalled the latter in connection with the the bilingual tagline – “In the mirrel, Cyril” – with mirrel translating as ‘middle’.

Talking about ‘middle’ – how would you tell whether a bathroom has been tiled by a skilled artisan? No, not that the tiles are all laid straight and perfectly aligned or affixed. A skilled artisan will centre the first tile, aligning it with the toilet bowl, using it as its marker. This would be the starting point. The challenge with tiling from the inside out is that, inevitably, you would need to cut the tiles on both ends of the room.

This made me think about what is at the centre of the South African government’s economic and socioeconomic plans. As I have mentioned before in this column, plans are not scarce in South Africa; what is scarce is their implementation.

You will be disappointed to discover that your favourite search engine is unable to provide a definitive answer as to what lies at the centre of government’s economic and socioeconomic plans.

The search I performed returned a list that featured broad-based black economic empowerment twice and education once. I would have expected to see poverty alleviation at the centre, in the mirrel, if you will. Surely, it should be the single most import economic focus of the South African government.

Without wanting to quote highfalutin academic publications, Wikipedia’s assessment suffices, and it is that poverty alleviation comprises a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, intended to permanently lift people out of poverty.

Poverty alleviation requires no radical thinking. It merely needs one to acquire a copy of social theorist and economist Henry George’s 1879 economic classic, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. No wheel has to be reinvented.

Should government not want to trust an aged economist’s insights, it could consider the insights of the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Sustainable Development, which, in its 41-page publication, The Future We Want, argues that the priority actions to eradicate poverty include: improving access to sustainable livelihoods, entrepreneurial opportunities and productive resources; providing universal access to basic social services; progressively developing social protection systems to support those who cannot support themselves; empowering people living in poverty and their organisations; addressing the disproportionate impact of poverty on women; working with donors and recipients to allocate increased shares of official development assistance to poverty eradication; and intensifying international cooperation.

You might ask why poverty eradication should be at the centre of government policy. Surely, government has many priorities. I contend it has only one. You don’t believe me? For an answer, cast your mind to 19 years ago. Poverty eradication was addressed in Chapter II of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation of 2002, which stressed that “eradicating poverty is the greatest global challenge facing the world today and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development, particularly for developing countries”.

“In the centre, Mr Venter”, as Flynn and Slabolepszy’s other Steakhouse Melts advertisement reminds.