Red Alert: Let's not get pushed into opposing corners by those who don't have the interests of our Alliance or our country at heart
This past Sunday, 33 leading business-people published a call to action. They distanced themselves from the negative doomsayers, they committed to supporting the public sector in its programmes and in the fight against corruption, and they endorsed the National Development Plan (NDP). On Monday Cas Coovadia, MD of the Banking Association of SA, said the banking industry would be happy if the ANC adopted the NDP as the "critical vision" for the country. In principle, we should all be happy if leading sectors of business throw in their weight behind the NDP and contribute to building a broad national consensus on a more equitable, inclusive society.
I say "in principle". Over the past few weeks a campaign (underway for many months) has been unleashed not to unite our country, but to divide the ANC and its alliance on economic policy by dumbing down key policy documents and setting up false oppositions. With the ANC's Mangaung national conference just days away, the campaign has reached a crescendo. I am not fingering the call to action by leading business-people - my problem is with the usual hangers-on, the neo-liberal media commissars.
Journalist Ethel Hazelhurst writing in Tuesday's Business Report, for instance, tells us: "While business leaders have given a thumbs up to Planning Minister Trevor Manuel's vision for the next 20 years, the implementation and the future of his National Development Plan (NDP) rests with the deeply divided delegates to the ANC elective conference in Mangaung...Manuel's plan is only one of three launched over the past three years and it is not the one favoured by the SACP or alliance partner Cosatu. Patel's approach [in the New Growth Path] and Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies' interventionist Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP) are more to their taste" (December 11, 2012).
Tim Cohen in the Business Day (December 10, 2012) trots out the same and by now much repeated spin. The ANC's "sheer size", he writes, "complicated by its alliance with the South African Communist Party and COSATU, means it is trying to incorporate too many points of view...the ANC can't decide whether to back the rabid [i.e. bad] interventionism of Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel, or the fine-grain [i.e. good] incrementalism of Planning Minister Trevor Manuel."
Hazelhurst, Cohen, and just about every other mainstream commentator along with the DA, are trying to bill the Mangaung policy debate as a simplistic punch-up - the "moderates" in the ANC vs. SACP/COSATU; the NDP vs. the NGP/IPAP; Manuel vs. Patel and Davies; " incrementalism" vs. "interventionism".
(Ironically, in the very same column Cohen goes on to attack the ANC's alleged assumption that in economic policy "it all comes down to a binary decision...That's how people thought in the 1960s..."!!)
Given their own rabid and retro binary prejudices, one doubts whether any of these commentators has ever bothered to do more than a rudimentary scan of the NGP or IPAP. But what about the National Development Plan itself, have they actually read it in all of its fine-grain? Or have they plucked out, with a very small pair of tweezers, a sentence or two, which they now hold triumphantly aloft like so many 'Look-What-A-Good-Boy-Am-I' Jack Horners?
For the record, Cabinet collectively has endorsed all three policy documents - the NDP, the NGP and IPAP (now in its third iteration). There are strong and welcome convergences between all three (and other important policy positions - notably the infrastructure build programme). However, they are of course also different documents in their scope, objectives, time-frames and status. The Planning Commission that produced the NDP is not a government organ, for instance, and the NDP is intended to be a broad, society-wide vision. It is not that it is necessarily (as we shall see) less state interventionist than the NGP or IPAP, but it seeks to envision what ALL South Africans should contribute to a better SA by 2030. On the other hand, the NGP and IPAP are essentially government policy documents and their emphasis is likely therefore to be more (but not exclusively) on what government has to do.
Also for the record, the ANC in Parliament has endorsed the NDP, while the SACP has welcomed its broad vision, without necessarily agreeing with every detail. Conversely, and interestingly, COSATU was (at least initially) critical of "Patel's" New Growth Path - joining some in business in attacking (and misunderstanding) the 'remuneration restraint' proposal, amongst other things.
It is important to understand that none of these policy perspectives is presenting itself as "written in stone" (as GEAR was once notoriously proclaimed to be in 1996). None is monolithically all right, or all wrong - they are setting out broad (and let me emphasise converging) guide-lines for action. All will require ongoing evaluation, and amendments in the light of experience and the inevitable unpredictable twists and turns of reality itself.
It is beyond the scope of this intervention to deal in detail with one, still less all three of these documents. What follows is a brief argument of why at Mangaung the ANC must absolutely not take the bait of simplistically playing off the NGP (or IPAP) against the NDP. The actual NDP, as imperfect as it might be, needs to be defended against an "NDP" distorted beyond recognition by Hazelhurst, Cohen, the DA, Mamphela Ramphele, Ann Bernstein, and the rest of the tribe.
In the first place, in its general theoretical approach the NDP breaks with the neo-liberalism of the mainstream commentariat. It acknowledges important progress made post-1994 ("today's SA looks very different from the one we left behind in 1994") - unlike the "worse-than-apartheid" misanthropy of a Ramphele or a DA (when it's talking to a white constituency). At the same time (like the NGP), it acknowledges persisting problems, key of which are crisis levels of unemployment, inequality and poverty.
More importantly, unlike the neo-liberals (who blame everything on government distorting the market), it attributes these challenges substantially to a systemic legacy still embedded within our and society - like "skewed ownership and control: the corporate landscape...remains highly concentrated. This poses a barrier to business entry and expansion in key markets, which is critical to employment creation." (NDP, p.102) Another systemic and reproduced legacy feature constantly mentioned in the NDP is the "spatial misalignments whether in reference to urban/rural, or within urban areas and binding constraints posed by poor physical planning and network infrastructure" (NDP, p.102). Indeed, the NDP is particularly strong in analysing the spatial dysfunctionalities of our South African reality.
Even more importantly, the NDP constantly re-iterates the need for "strengthening the links between economic and social strategies", for "creating a virtuous cycle of growth and development", for simultaneously (an impossibility according to Ann Bernstein) "eliminating poverty" and "sharply reducing inequality". These mark important (if tacit) breaks with a trickle-down, growth-then-development paradigm that dominated the orientation of GEAR. Of course, such a virtuous cycle needs to be embedded in actual policy perspectives and proposals - and, indeed, there is much detail in the NDP that reinforces the linkages between sustainable inclusive growth and social development interventions - in health-care, education, public transport, human settlements, land reform, social grants, etc.
There are times when, I think, the virtuous cycle between growth and development could have been better articulated in the NDP. For instance, while public works programmes are accorded an important place, they are seen as essentially stop-gap measures, rather than also programmes in which skills can be transferred and participants graduated into SMMEs, co-ops, or formal public sector employment. But there is nothing inherent in the logic of the NDP that prevents this kind of further elaboration.
What of the role of the state in the economy? Hazlehurst tells us that "Manuel's plan...identifies the private sector as the main generator of jobs..." (as if "Patel's" NGP or "Davies'" IPAP disagreed). Clearly, in the reality of SA, any inclusive, job-creating growth path requires close cooperation with a dominant private sector. But equally, given our deep legacy of structural distortions, such a growth path requires decisive intervention and leadership from the state. This is why the NDP constantly reiterates the importance of "strengthening government's capacity to give leadership to economic development". Such leadership is not about amassing bureaucratic power for its own sake, and it will certainly involve cutting down on unnecessary red-tape in key areas noted by all three policy documents (for example, lightening the bureaucratic reporting burden on SMMEs).
But in many other areas the NDP is counselling firm, active (but capable), more (not less) state intervention into the economy. I don't know if Cas Coovadia, for all his welcome enthusiasm for the NDP, got as far as pages 129 and 130? There the NGP notes that "it is concerning that SA's banks do not extend sufficient credit to businesses, especially small, medium and micro enterprises...Several countries, most notably India, have specific quotas for credit to the business sector." (Hmm, now there's an interesting idea - prescribed credit quotas imposed on private banks for SMMEs and coops...) But let me not be guilty of using a small pair of tweezers to extract a passing comment in the NDP.
The essential point is that at Mangaung let's not get hoisted into the ring, and shunted into opposing corners in a boxing line-up that's been arranged for us by those who do not have the interests of the ANC, our Alliance, or our country at heart.
Jeremy Cronin is SACP 1st Deputy General Secretary. This article first appeared in Umsebenzi Online.
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