EDITORIAL NOTES
ANC NGC: Let’s discuss the relevant economic issues
This issue of The African Communist coincides with the convening of the ANC’s mid-term National General Council (NGC), involving some 3 000 delegates. NGCs, non-elective meetings with branch-level representation, are designed to unleash a process in which there can be the widest review of progress made since the last national conference in this case the ANC’s 2012 Mangaung national conference. The aim of an NGC is to refine mandates going forward for the ANC and ANC-led government. A critical objective should also be to unite on the ground the ANC and its Alliance around branch-level active programmes of action that help to reinforce our strategic objectives.
As Cde Mcebisi Jonas’s contribution in this issue of The African Communist (“Some thoughts on the ANC’s economic transformation document”) carefully notes, the documentation going into the NGC on the critical issue of our current economic challenges is less than optimal. In fact, the NGC economic transformation discussion document reflects symptomatically many of the internal challenges the ANC currently confronts. Much the same points are made in the initial reflections of Cde Solly Mapaila, the 2nd Deputy General Secretary of the SACP (“On the ANC NGC Economic Transformation Discussion Document: Some Preliminary Reflections”) and Cde Neva Makgetla, a veteran socialist activist linked to the movement.
In the first place, with whom is the “discussion” document in discussion? The document appears to be written by different individuals – either government officials or ANC-connected business-people punting particular interests. As a result, the document is largely focused on specific legal or regulatory changes, and advocacy for more resources from the state, either directly or through increased local procurement. There is also pressure on the private sector to fund specific (private) interests.
The document often advances these proposals in a very technical way, with little justification or examination of counter-arguments and risks. Rather than promoting branch-level discussion, it is disempowering, and could undermine reasoned policy decision-making.
For instance, there is a relatively extensive section within the document dealing with “Real Estate”. This section amounts to little more than active lobbying of government and the private sector to ensure that black individuals are promoted within the private estate agency business. There is, of course, nothing wrong, in principle, with a significantly improved demographic representation within this and other sectors of the economy. However, the “Real Estate” section in the discussion document is silent about the substantive issues affecting land and immovable property in South Africa. There is nothing about land reform, for instance, or transforming urban settlement patterns. What is more, the largest real estate property owner in South Africa is actually the state! The property portfolio of the national Department of Public Works (DPW), for instance, is six times larger than the largest property investment holding company listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange (Growthpoint).
Surely any ANC economic transformation document should provide policy debate and direction on this massive publicly-owned portfolio? How can it be used to ensure inner-city regeneration, or township development? Is DPW managing this portfolio with the required strategic professionalism? What is the progress that is being made with DPW’s establishment of a dedicated government entity – the Property Management Trading Entity? The NGC discussion document devotes several paragraphs to the question of “real estate” but is absolutely silent on these matters.
The ANC leadership has quite correctly condemned any attempt to use the NGC as a forum to lobby for support for this or that electoral slate in the ANC’s still relatively distant 2017 National Conference. But surely using NGC discussion documents to lobby for private business interests is equally problematic.
Our discomfort with the NGC economic transformation discussion document is widely shared within the ANC and Alliance (and, indeed, within government). We therefore trust that in the NGC process, and particularly within the relevant commissions, a much greater focus will be placed on the key challenges of our time – the crises of unemployment and inequality.
These challenges will not be effectively confronted by simply whipping up popular frustration and anger to demagogically advance personal or factional interests. Nor will we seriously address the crises of unemployment and inequality by endlessly attempting to please the markets.
We need to effectively analyse and popularise a clear understanding of the systemic challenges confronting our political economy. As other contributions to this edition of The African Communist highlight, these systemic challenges include the persisting global capitalist crisis, and South Africa’s continued location as a semi-peripheral formation dangerously dependent upon global commodity markets now in steep decline.
The ANC’s NGC needs to be used as an opportunity to widen the appreciation of these challenges and to jointly mobilise our formations to help advance the key pillars of a strategic response. These key pillars include the continued state-led infrastructure programme, state-led industrial policy action plans, with a major emphasis on agro-processing, major interventions into education and vocational training, and the upscaling of our public employment programmes, which already employ over a million participants a year.
This editorial first appeared in the SACP journal Africa Communist, October 2015.
