There is what we call bush-mechanic mentality. When you take your car to a bush mechanic, he often asks you if you have taken your car to another bush mechanic before. Should your reply be in the affirmative, he blames your car’s disrepair on him (or on her, in our gender-equality world!)
So it is, that this bush-mechanic mentality has pervaded our economic planning. The buzz word in today’s politics is Radical Economic Transformation or radical socio-economic transformation. So much of a catch-word that even the ANC, a party that has ruled South Africa since 1994, has caught up to it since 2012.
What is radical in 2017?
What have we been doing since 1994 that was not radical?
When political power changed hands in 1994 from white minority rule to black majority rule, have we all these years been radically transforming our economy – and our society? Do people really have to now say wake up, wake up Tat’uMandela to hurl insults upon him?
Let us quickly recall what happened. In line with the Biblical injunction: let us build a new Jerusalem, Nelson Mandela’s government conceived of the Reconstruction and Development Programme which, in its preamble, confesses of being wholly anchored on the Freedom Charter of 1955.
Indeed its four pillars – meeting the basic needs of our society, developing our human resources, re-building the South African economy and democraticising the state – around which it builds have, as the cornerstone, the Freedom Charter.
Further, the RDP states, for all to hear, that “the legacy of apartheid cannot be overcome with piecemeal and uncoordinated policies”.
It is in developing the first pillar, namely meeting the basic expectations of the people, that the RDP excelled.
We witnessed the rapid erection of houses that in turn were virtually given free of charge to the poor.
Primary health care was equally free. So was the school nutrition programme. Millions received old-age grants.
Most visible was the electrification, water and sanitation projects of rural South Africa.
Whilst, in the apartheid era, a cluster of lights indicated the next town a motorist was approaching, today that signal is invisible. Many villages have light.
And on a lighter note, the electrification of the countryside, fortuitously derailed witchcraft, since the myth that witches are choked by electricity meant they could no longer enter people’s houses in the dead of night!
All told, this ambitious mandate of the RDP stretched the elasticity of the national budget to the hilt. Not only were millions of citizens on the national agenda for the first time, but new and costly programmes were also introduced.
On a balanced score-card, the RDP was a resounding success envied by fellow African countries that gained independence before us.
This success-story was not without sacrifice. A thin tightrope it was, meaning that the credit side of the budget could only grow if capital inflows were encouraged, exchange rates kept vibrant and trade barriers relaxed.
Recently Lord Peter Hain of the British House of Lords, a fan of the South African success story, praised Tat’uMandela for his foresight in keeping our economic planning on an even keep as there could have been a stampede of capital outflows, much to the detriment of financing the RDP.
Then came the Thabo Mbeki government. Blissfully imagining that we were getting the economy into the next gear, we introduced the Growth, Employment And Redistribution policy .
Faced with an ever increasing budget deficit because of the afore-mentioned programmes and high inflation, it was thought prudent to grow the economy at the expense of key stakeholders like labour and the poor.
The logic or illogic was: grow the economy first and with the windfall create more jobs. To do this we had to liberalise the domestic industry and relax trade barriers. A solution the RDP had sought.
The RDP had succinctly stated “reconstruction and development are parts of an integrated process. This is in contrast to a commonly held view that growth and development, or growth and redistribution are processes that contradict each other. Growth – the measurable increase in the output of the modern industrial economy – is commonly seen as the priority that must precede development. Development is portrayed as a marginal effort of redistribution---”
That is the reason some of us, in writing and on public platforms, rejected GEAR on all fours.
The more GEAR was injected into the economy, the more poverty and low earnings began to engulf the country.
The rich became richer and the poor poorer. Lavish wealth and abject poverty become the key characteristic of our society – as it is to date.
Like a good cure for the wrong disease, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa policy was introduced – without regard to the analysis of cause, course and consequence.
Partly because of this and the change in political leadership, ASGISA in reality never saw the light of day.
As if to distance ourselves from ASGISA, or in DH Lawrence’s words, as if we were “apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves” we then paved a New Growth Path for the country.
This was to rush in where even angels would fear to tread.
What was new, what growth was anticipated and what clear path we paved still requires a prophet with the wisdom of Daniel to decipher.
Clearly with so much chopping and changing, going forward in a backward direction; something needed doing.
Add to this the many education systems we forced our children to be guinea-pigs of; ever-changing mining policies; ambivalent land restitution approaches; ambiguous industrial policy frameworks and their house-keeping – the list is legion. In 2013, we at last came up with the National Development Plan whose vision 2030 is beyond your horizon and whose milestones have not, to my knowledge, been unveiled and evaluated for achievability.
A primary school story warned us against unbridled gullibility. A man and his son set out to the marketplace to sell their only remaining donkey. At the first village to the market place, they were advised to rather have the boy mount the donkey, for he would soon get tired. At the second village, people laughed at the untraditional sight of a father parading the boy on horseback. So the pair were advised to rather carry the donkey on their shoulders so it would not tire and lose weight before being sold at the market. Such a sight was the most ridiculous! So in the end, they went back to the original plan and reached the market.
I plead that we do not re-invent the wheel. Let us rather ride on it.
- Professor Mncedisi Jordan taught accountancy the Fort Hare and Walter Sisulu universities
OPINION: What’s radical about 2017 economic transformation?
So it is, that this bush-mechanic mentality has pervaded our economic planning. The buzz word in today’s politics is Radical Economic Transformation or radical socio-economic transformation. So much of a catch-word that even the ANC, a party that has ruled South Africa since 1994, has caught up to it since 2012.
What is radical in 2017?
What have we been doing since 1994 that was not radical?
When political power changed hands in 1994 from white minority rule to black majority rule, have we all these years been radically transforming our economy – and our society? Do people really have to now say wake up, wake up Tat’uMandela to hurl insults upon him?
Let us quickly recall what happened. In line with the Biblical injunction: let us build a new Jerusalem, Nelson Mandela’s government conceived of the Reconstruction and Development Programme which, in its preamble, confesses of being wholly anchored on the Freedom Charter of 1955.
Indeed its four pillars – meeting the basic needs of our society, developing our human resources, re-building the South African economy and democraticising the state – around which it builds have, as the cornerstone, the Freedom Charter.
Further, the RDP states, for all to hear, that “the legacy of apartheid cannot be overcome with piecemeal and uncoordinated policies”.
It is in developing the first pillar, namely meeting the basic expectations of the people, that the RDP excelled.
We witnessed the rapid erection of houses that in turn were virtually given free of charge to the poor.
Primary health care was equally free. So was the school nutrition programme. Millions received old-age grants.
Most visible was the electrification, water and sanitation projects of rural South Africa.
Whilst, in the apartheid era, a cluster of lights indicated the next town a motorist was approaching, today that signal is invisible. Many villages have light.
And on a lighter note, the electrification of the countryside, fortuitously derailed witchcraft, since the myth that witches are choked by electricity meant they could no longer enter people’s houses in the dead of night!
All told, this ambitious mandate of the RDP stretched the elasticity of the national budget to the hilt. Not only were millions of citizens on the national agenda for the first time, but new and costly programmes were also introduced.
On a balanced score-card, the RDP was a resounding success envied by fellow African countries that gained independence before us.
This success-story was not without sacrifice. A thin tightrope it was, meaning that the credit side of the budget could only grow if capital inflows were encouraged, exchange rates kept vibrant and trade barriers relaxed.
Recently Lord Peter Hain of the British House of Lords, a fan of the South African success story, praised Tat’uMandela for his foresight in keeping our economic planning on an even keep as there could have been a stampede of capital outflows, much to the detriment of financing the RDP.
Then came the Thabo Mbeki government. Blissfully imagining that we were getting the economy into the next gear, we introduced the Growth, Employment And Redistribution policy .
Faced with an ever increasing budget deficit because of the afore-mentioned programmes and high inflation, it was thought prudent to grow the economy at the expense of key stakeholders like labour and the poor.
The logic or illogic was: grow the economy first and with the windfall create more jobs. To do this we had to liberalise the domestic industry and relax trade barriers. A solution the RDP had sought.
The RDP had succinctly stated “reconstruction and development are parts of an integrated process. This is in contrast to a commonly held view that growth and development, or growth and redistribution are processes that contradict each other. Growth – the measurable increase in the output of the modern industrial economy – is commonly seen as the priority that must precede development. Development is portrayed as a marginal effort of redistribution---”
That is the reason some of us, in writing and on public platforms, rejected GEAR on all fours.
The more GEAR was injected into the economy, the more poverty and low earnings began to engulf the country.
The rich became richer and the poor poorer. Lavish wealth and abject poverty become the key characteristic of our society – as it is to date.
Like a good cure for the wrong disease, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa policy was introduced – without regard to the analysis of cause, course and consequence.
Partly because of this and the change in political leadership, ASGISA in reality never saw the light of day.
As if to distance ourselves from ASGISA, or in DH Lawrence’s words, as if we were “apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves” we then paved a New Growth Path for the country.
This was to rush in where even angels would fear to tread.
What was new, what growth was anticipated and what clear path we paved still requires a prophet with the wisdom of Daniel to decipher.
Clearly with so much chopping and changing, going forward in a backward direction; something needed doing.
Add to this the many education systems we forced our children to be guinea-pigs of; ever-changing mining policies; ambivalent land restitution approaches; ambiguous industrial policy frameworks and their house-keeping – the list is legion. In 2013, we at last came up with the National Development Plan whose vision 2030 is beyond your horizon and whose milestones have not, to my knowledge, been unveiled and evaluated for achievability.
A primary school story warned us against unbridled gullibility. A man and his son set out to the marketplace to sell their only remaining donkey. At the first village to the market place, they were advised to rather have the boy mount the donkey, for he would soon get tired. At the second village, people laughed at the untraditional sight of a father parading the boy on horseback. So the pair were advised to rather carry the donkey on their shoulders so it would not tire and lose weight before being sold at the market. Such a sight was the most ridiculous! So in the end, they went back to the original plan and reached the market.
I plead that we do not re-invent the wheel. Let us rather ride on it.
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