Implement the NDP, then lead the world
Everyone seems to have a to-do list for new ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa. My list includes restructuring state-owned enterprises; encouraging private sector employment; improving relations between employers and employees; rooting out anticompetitive behaviour by dominant companies; trimming the regulatory burden on business; improving the efficiency of government services and infrastructure; and resolving policy and legislative impasses in sectors such as mining and telecommunications.
As the ANC’s anniversary statement acknowledges, one of the most immediate tasks is to restore confidence in the potential of the economy.
The new leadership has to work to restore faith that institutions work, leaders and officials are held accountable for their actions and the policies that the government has adopted are implemented.
With everything that will be on Ramaphosa’s plate in his quest for unity, the best gospel to advance is that of the resurrection of the National Development Plan (NDP). This is the most efficient way forward as the organisational infrastructure for its implementation and monitoring is already in place. It just needs some reinvigoration.
The recommendation by the Kgalema Motlanthe-led highlevel panel on the assessment of legislation that Parliament should legislate the plan could give it a new lease on life. This would elevate it into a law to be enforced and not just a special project of the Presidency.
The resurrection of the NDP will also need to be accompanied by a ruthless focus on execution, and there are better political prospects for this in a Ramaphosa-led ANC.
The ANC has to provide fresh answers to the questions of economic development in post-apartheid SA. It can no longer get by through grasping for easy solutions along established ideological positions.
Going beyond my list, I have a bigger challenge for the ANC. SA carries the burden, and the opportunity, to lead the world in developing a new kind of economic vision. The answers, as must be painfully obvious by now, are not going to come from history or from the rest of the world. This is not to say that SA is exceptional or that it cannot learn from the world.
It is simply that the old models of the right and of the left do not provide a way forward for a diverse population grappling with the aftermath of an extractive and exclusionary economy.
Time is almost up for the ANC. If it has any chance to buck the trend of the flailing liberation party, it must develop a coherent intellectual and practical programme that gives meaning to inclusive growth (or shared prosperity or radical economic transformation).
Putting aside the rhetorical packaging, what matters is whether the party can deliver socioeconomic change that can be placed alongside other ambitious modern projects like the post-Second World War welfare state in Europe or the east Asian industrial miracle, which lifted millions from poverty to affluence in Singapore and South Korea. Those projects did not reinvent the wheel but they were original in the manner in which they blended institutional, technical and social innovation to address their contexts.
The ANC needs a theory of change that goes beyond dismantling the legacy of apartheid. In a restless and integrated global economy, the deadline for the “second phase of the national democratic revolution” is much tighter than that of the first.
SA is a microcosm of a world struggling with inequality and the prospect of large-scale technology-driven disruptions in labour markets. It’s time to imagine ways in which we can emerge from our moment of adversity to conceive African solutions for global problems.