ANC committed to its pro-poor policies

● Issue taken with columnist’s views

I was taken aback by Pedro Mzileni’s article, “ANC policies sideline the poor” (February 26). I read it with the hope of finding out which ANC policy or policies he was referring to.

Unfortunately, I could only find snippets of an armchair revolutionary, comfortable within the confines of the NMU library and fascinated by the works of all the “dependency” theorists.

I could only conclude that he is still stuck in the old development discourse of “state or the market”.

Let me state without equivocation that the ANC is one of the organisations in SA that has pro-poor policies and has demonstrated that over a number of years in government.

Its pro-poor policies have benefited a number of households, be it in old age grants, disability grants, foster care grants, child support grants, free primary healthcare or free higher education for students from a working class background.

The municipalities are compelled by the constitution as well as section 74(2)(c) of the Municipal Systems Act 32 of 2000 to provide free basic services such electricity, water and sanitation to those who are poor and cannot afford it.

The ANC has always recognised the dialectical and reinforcing nature of the relationship between human development and economic growth.

On the economic front, the author has demonstrated he has no clue about the SA political economy and its links with the global economy.

That SA was a few months ago in a technical recession, faced with declining economic growth, the debt to GDP ratio sitting at 51% because of mismanagement of our SOEs, is definitely not an issue in his conception. To him the R500bn government guarantees to SOEs are not considered a drain to the fiscus that require creative ways of managing these public entities, together with the private sector, because he views the “market” with suspicion.

The “state or the market” paradigm is what blinds the author.

The article has demonstrated that the author tends to conflate the policy discourse with the subjective weaknesses of ANC leadership.

He downplays the retrogressive tendencies of corruption that have undermined the revolutionary transformation agenda of the movement as mere “uninterrogated accusations”.

Strangely, he does not see a link with what he refers to as “raiding of government procurement services” and “constant violation of the founding values” (I assume of the RSA constitution) with corrupt tendencies of individual members of the society.

Last, he argues that “the structural problems (I assume socioeconomic) will not be solved by the bourgeois elections which will put in office another class accountable to the market”.

He offers as a solution an old gramscian theory of hegemony, particularly the “war of position” and the “war of manoeuvre” which denotes that organic intellectuals and others within the working class need to develop alternative values and an alternative ideology in contrast to the bourgeois, which must be rooted within civil society or social movements.

The ANC can be described as an “old social movement” according to the theories of social change and development. The ANC is an antithe- sis of the policies of underdevelopment, poverty and economic exclusion.

It is an organisation rooted within the masses of SA.

The ANC continues to maintain a supportive macroeconomic policy framework, oriented towards inclusive growth and development, and informed by the imperatives of sustainability and macroeconomic stability.

It understands the complexity of our political economy and does not resort to populist revolutionary sounding rhetoric to solve the country’s old socioeconomic woes.

The only solution that we need, therefore, is social movements that will work with the state in growing the economy so that it can create jobs, and reduce poverty and inequality.

Lutho Nduvane, a member of the ANC writing in my personal

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