JOHANNESBURG - Over the past several months COSATU has been pushing for the ANC government to adopt what it calls a New Growth Path. They seem to have had some success in this regard with their Man in Pretoria, Ebrahim Patel, producing a framework document after Cabinet endorsed the idea. In the ANC's January 8th statement Jacob Zuma claimed that "we have put in place a New Growth Path" that would make the creation of jobs the central focus of government's economic policies.
On the face of it there appears to be much to be welcomed about the way COSATU, and the Left, is pushing for a greater focus on job creation; as well as its unforgiving critique of the failures of ANC government over the past fifteen years. What is there to be feared, one might ask, from a project underpinned by such good intentions?
There is, however, real danger in the trajectory being followed by the "New Growth Path" proponents.
It is common today to ascribe the National Party's policy of apartheid to crude racism. While such motives were indeed present what is often forgotten is that this policy of total segregation also enjoyed the support of many idealistic intellectuals in the Afrikaner nationalist movement.
In 1956 the great South African historian, C.W. de Kiewiet, observed how the major pronouncements on racial policy by such men were often "remarkable for their frank avowal of the inequities and deficiencies from which the native population suffers." Apartheid would, however, allow the black African to "escape from his unhappy and unequal position in an alien [white] society." Once in his own homeland, "separate from the world of the white man", there would "be no passes or curfew, no social indignity, no nightly routine of police raids and arrests."
The flaw in their scheme, as De Kiewiet noted, was that it represented "a transfer of the responsibilities of the living world to a dream world of solved problems. It is the substitution of a wishful simplicity for a real complexity."
In the basic premise that the black African population could only gain citizenship within their own segregated society the apartheid idealists stepped "from fact into make-believe, using a dexterous logic to brush aside history and economics. Their phrases throb and glow with the justice and enlightenment that will mark the condition of all men in the clean, logical world of racial separation. Their pages are now free of feelings of guilt and frustration. The writers are at peace with their own conscience and in harmony with world opinion."
There seems to be something similar going on with the idealistic proponents of a New Growth Path. For they too are stepping from fact into make believe. As they correctly point out South Africa faces an unemployment crisis - one compounded by an utterly dysfunctional education system for the poor.
The reforms needed are difficult but obvious. The labour laws need to be amended to make it cheaper and less risky to employ labour - particularly in the poorer areas of South Africa. The merit system needs to be restored within both the civil service and the government school system. Hard work, expertise and performance - not ANC or SADTU membership - should determine who gets promoted and rewarded within the system.
The problem with pushing through such reforms is that they threaten the vested interests of certain COSATU unions. For many union leaders and Leftist intellectuals it means having to confront difficult truths , particularly how certain privileges that the unions have secured for themselves are contributing to the crisis. In this context there is the same temptation to try and transfer responsibilities from the "living world to a dream world of solved problems."
There are two dangers in this, as the apartheid experience well illustrates. At the very least it means that necessary problem solving and reform will once again be delayed - allowing already bad problems to become even worse. The other is that once liberated from all feelings of guilt and frustration COSATU - and their allies - will feel free to once again push for narrowly self-interested policies which will do great damage to the common good.
Bizarrely for a government that has committed itself to creating 5-million jobs in ten years the Department of Labour has just produced a series of draft bills that will make employers even more reluctant to create new jobs.
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
