People and institutions will steer SA towards growth, say planners
• NPC reports on research into what country needs to correct course
The National Planning Commission (NPC) has recommended that SA’s top priority should be to invest in people and strengthen institutions — which it said are the two crucial interventions that could reset the country on a growth path.
The NPC, an independent advisory body to the government, published a 400-page national development plan (NDP) that set out development targets and was adopted in 2012. These included eradicating poverty and achieving full employment by 2030, while reducing inequality from a Gini coefficient of 0.69 to one of 0.6.
But with nine years to go to 2030, inequality and unemployment have worsened, and while poverty was falling before 2011, it has increased since. Though these targets are not on course to be reached, they remain SA’s top goals and should not be changed, says the commission.
Over the past year the body has commissioned extensive research on a range of areas related to SA’s economic and development performance. These have been compiled into an overarching paper on economic progress and interventions for “course correction” by commissioner and economist Miriam Altman.
ENABLERS
The paper recommends wideranging interventions across the state and the economy. But among them the “single most important thing” is investment in people and in institutions that develop people. These are key enablers of economic growth. Successful countries stand out in their ability to sustain growth over a long period, even if it is not that high, while SA has experienced stop-start growth, Altman said.
“The strength in institutions and investment in people are the critical differentiators between countries that progress and those that don’t. It cannot be overemphasised,” she said.
Like the NDP, the paper recommends sets of interventions to reset the SA course in particular areas. These include interventions to achieve fiscal stability; build the country’s asset base through investment; investment in people through education and skills; accelerating digital connectedness as the driver of development; promoting dynamism in sectors of the economy critical to employment; promoting public employment programmes; and building state capacity.
In a widely attended workshop to discuss the paper on Thursday, participants from across government and civil society welcomed the interventions but raised questions about the role the NPC could or should play in monitoring and measuring outcomes and the extent to which its work is integrated into the work of the government.
Altman said the plan had been translated into the government’s medium-term strategic framework, its five-year planning cycle that guides all government work. The recommendations for the way forward are a result of interactions with government departments, she said.
Commissioner JP Landman said the missing element of the NPC approach was the absence of clear measurement indicators to monitor the effect of interventions. While the medium-term strategic framework provides the government with a plan and is very useful, it does not measure the effect of the plan.
Deputy chair of the commission Malegapuru Makgoba said the NPC was an advisory body and not an implementing body and had a very different role from that of many other presidential advisory committees.
“It advises on everything that is strategic for the country. As an independent advisory body, it has to look at the plan and review it, that is what the NPC has done,” he said.
The commission is in its second iteration with its five-year term having expired in 2020. This has been extended until the end of February.
THE STRENGTH IN INSTITUTIONS AND INVESTMENT IN PEOPLE ARE CRITICAL DIFFERENTIATORS [FOR PROGRESS] BETWEEN COUNTRIES