The input by former president Thabo Mbeki at Jessie Duarte’s memorial service was timely. We are in a crisis that is being deepened by a misplaced leadership strategy and a policy regime that is decontextualised from our most pressing challenges in SA.
Mbeki’s voice has now added the required weight to the critique I’ve been waging consistently against the political programme of the administration of President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The people named in the Zondo commission’s report who are responsible for the plunder of public assets are not under any criminal prosecution. The price of food and fuel is at its highest. Poverty and massive unemployment continue to corner people into hopelessness and indignity.
The leadership – that was elected through the public vote to fix these problems and come up with feasible solutions – has not delivered on that mandate.
The National Development Plan (NDP) that was adopted in 2012 to take our country to prosperity by 2030 is not achieving any of its minimum targets.
Jacob Zuma created the NDP with Ramaphosa and Trevor Manuel. Before Ramaphosa was appointed by Zuma as the country’s deputy president in 2014, he was the deputy chairperson of the National Planning Commission, the body that produced the NDP.
In essence, the NDP belongs to Zuma, Ramaphosa, Manuel and every national leader of the ANC and government that led after the 2007 Polokwane takeover.
All political parties in the National Assembly between 2009 and 2014 adopted the NDP and they all owned it as a common vision for us all.
Fast forward to 2022, a decade later, and this plan seems not to be working. Mbeki ridicules it and calls it a vision that merely exists in people’s heads. He says a plan rather has to be more targeted and should be prepared with the capacity and expertise for its execution – not the mess we are currently in.
The reality is that SA is a country that had apartheid thrust on it. That system was built on the backs of black people who were heavily exploited, discriminated, dehumanised and proletarianised.
As a result, black people today don’t own assets. They are uneducated. They earn poverty wages doing the most humiliating jobs in the land.
When, as a democratic government that must end the legacy of this kind of racism, you seek to build such a people from scratch, you cannot adopt a neoliberal approach that assumes the country doesn’t have an ugly past.
You’ve got to be a transformative government that delivers reparations to those who were oppressed by making the necessary policy interventions in the economy, the education system, and in communities to change the face of apartheid.
To do this kind of work as the government, you must first repossess the strategic assets of the country – farms, land, urban property, mines, electricity, food production and other relevant industries must be in the people’s hands. A people’s hand is from an arm of a democratic government that will execute its mandate for the public good.
Second, quality education and training must be made accessible to every one of the oppressed class who needs it – for free.
This education must be designed to achieve two outcomes: First, to surface critical skills that will help industrialise our country to create productive value and tangible jobs. Second, to empower the minds of our youth and ignite their curiosity to revisit our heritage, examine our current phase of struggle, and fashion a common programme and future of development for all.
The NDP doesn’t speak to this transformative language. It is silent on free education. It is silent on land repossession and its ownership by the people for productive use. It is silent on a state-driven strategy of industrialisation to protect our local assets, to process raw materials ourselves, and to set the prices for the whole world.
The NDP is quiet on these questions. No wonder Mbeki sees it as a waste of time because it will never pull black people out of poverty and unemployment.
The government needs to revisit its policy development personnel and begin to seriously question what happened to its best minds or risk being voted out by the public, soon.
Beyond policy development, the government must work with different stakeholders who have the most relevant knowledge and ideas on transformative economics and industrial development to best serve black people and indeed plan a path to SA’s own Chinese miracle.
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.