Note: This article appeared as an Op Ed in Business Day in Jan 2011. Has anything changed as we await his State of the Nation Address in 2012?
"President Zuma's Vision 2011: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"
Speaking to the ANC faithful at Polokwane, President Jacob Zuma this weekend articulated in surprising detail the latest thinking about economic growth and jobs at the highest levels of the ANC Alliance. "It's all about jobs" was his mantra, not surprisingly after the SA economy shed a million of them over the last eighteen months. Our 40 % unemployment rate in the US would have put Palin into power and Obama into retirement forever. This time the President wisely avoided making a fool of himself again by promising 500 000 new jobs, as he has done in the past. Now everyone is on board that it is jobs, jobs, jobs. The question of course, is how?
Since the ANC has been in power for seventeen years now, this acknowledgement is a small step towards reality for most ordinary South Africans. That is good. Indeed, there is much in Zuma's speech that builds on Ebrahim Patel's New Growth Path and should not be dismissed out of hand by critics of the ANC, for all its manifold flaws. There is some good; but there are still many bad ideas, and a few truly rotten ones – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good. Zuma rightly foregrounds two of the key sectors if the economy that have the greatest potential to create lower skilled jobs, where we have an oversupply of labour- mining and agriculture. The problem is the contradictions between this and actual policies around land redistribution and mining ownership, which Zuma foes not address.
But he can be pragmatic as well. Thus Zuma supports the concept of the unaffordable National Health Insurance (NHI) ideal, but deftly avoids committing to a time scale. He says out loud what we all know – that chronic school underperformance lies predominantly in the hands of teachers' performance or lack thereof at SADTU -controlled schools. But he gives us no guidance on how this will be resolved.
Zuma also resurrects the idea of artisanships, sacrificed at great economic costs at the altar of ANC ideology a decade ago for the wasteful SETAs – which thankfully do not get a mention in this speech. He records the real achievements of the ANC in the provision of housing, water and electricity. Fair enough. He links social grants to developmental requirements, rather than the ANC left's vision of a perpetually dependent, and therefore pliant citizenry. And, perhaps most important of all, the President stresses the need for a new "Pact" between labour, business and government on the economy. This gap should be seized with vigour and rapidly built upon, going well beyond the outworn Nedlac model, if only to get the ANC to accept that you will not have higher levels of economic growth solely by giving in to the demands of one section of stakeholders alone, in this case the labour aristocracy represented by COSATU and the SACP. Let's remember that these two interest groups ( and that is all they are) together represent in membership terms less than 10% of South Africa's population, yet exercise a veto on economic policy within the Alliance.
The bad. Zuma (and many of his Cabinet colleagues) use the undoubted success of the World Cup last year as a repudiation of the complaints that the State in South Africa, far from being developmental is merely incompetent. His argument does not hold water. The State is failing South Africans on a daily basis and we all know it.
In addition, the ANC still wants to have its cake and eat it. They want cadre deployment, but they want effective government. Our experience has shown that from the SABC to SAA it's one or the other, not both. As for the central role of the parastatals, who thinks Eskom, Transnet and Telkom have been doing a fabulous job? There is also no distinction between core and non core activities. So what we get is job sacrificing situations where our coal mines cannot take advantage of the current global shortfall caused by the Australian floods because the state monopoly on railways is still not up to the job -after seventeen years. We missed the whole commodities boom of the last decade because if this, but we don't seem to be seized with any urgency to address it. So here's a case (amongst many) where the State is actively destroying potential jobs. Not to mention the fact that when our apples and coals do reach the ports, they get stuck because of the massive incompetence of the state owned ports authorities and their highly unionised workers, which make SA ports simultaneously among the most inefficient and the most expensive in the world. That too destroys jobs
Also disturbing is what is not said in Zuma's speech. As a leader, his is the responsibility to give guidance on the realities of the world we live in. Yet his acknowledgement of the central role the private sector and the market, however constrained, plays in any economy anywhere in the modern world (even in "market-Leninist " China) is muted. Throughout Zuma's speech remains the deep suspicion of the market in general and of the job creating potential of the private sector in particular– especially when it comes to sustainable jobs – is less than enthusiastic. And the real potential of SMMEs in this equation gets hardly a mention. Nowhere is the ANCs failure to make the transformation from liberation movement to political party more clearly illustrated than in this ambivalence.
The ugly. The ugly parts of Zuma's speech almost always have two ingredients – an overdose of leftist ideology.
As for ideology, what is disturbing in Zuma's speech is the lack of emphases on export led growth – which is powering the economies of both China and Germany as to many to list here. Also of concern is the sinister emphasis towards the end of his speech reflecting the national liberation movement thinking of ANC hardliners on intellectual hegemony and the shutting down of alternative voices in our young democracy? This is what lies behind the media tribunal threats and, in Gauteng, the closing down of freedom of speech even within the Legislature.
It is not true that South Africa supports international best practice on human rights, as Zuma declares. Not with the example of Mugabe on our doorsteps, not with the blind eye we show to Cuba's long term political prisoners. And, in the case of Zimbabwe, there is a real cost which can be measured in terms of real jobs forfeited through the descent into savagery in that country. Zimbabwe used to be an important market for SA goods. No more. That costs thousands of "decent "jobs. All in the name of ideology. You really can't have your cake and eat it, Mr President.
Gavin Lewis is a DA MPL in the Gauteng Legislature.
No comments:
Post a Comment