National development plan
pressure on the country’s fiscus, pushing government debt into dangerous territory.
The mismanagement has materially benefited politically connected elites. Many of the current governance failures are linked to state capture. The country scored 43% and is 73rd of 180 countries on the latest Transparency International Corruption Perception Index.
We know that the crisis facing the country’s state-owned companies cannot be turned around overnight. But citizens are increasingly frustrated by the absence of any bankable sign that the bleeding will ever end, and privatisation cannot be the solution. Half of the state-owned enterprises’ black economic empowerment credentials are rotten and astounding: they still procure exclusively from service providers that were the main suppliers during the apartheid era.
This raises several questions: What is the real agenda of the government concerning state-owned companies? Is it a sign that a decision has been taken by the government to shut these state-owned entities down or to make them lose so much value that their handlers in the private sector will intervene in the name of privatisation and buy them for close to nothing? Any plan that puts the state aside when it comes to growing the economy will not work, because the private sector is driven by maximum profit.
South Africa is also the most unequal society in the world and there’s no urgency to address that pandemic. According to a 2017 government audit, 72% of the country’s private farmland is owned by white people, who make up 9% of the population.
A report from the World Inequality Database states that the top 1% of South African earners take home almost 20% of all income in the country. The wealthiest 1% own 67% of all the country’s wealth. Between 2011 and 2015, a white person earned R24646 a month on average, more than three times the R6899 of their black counterparts. At this rate, black people will never operate on the world stage, unless they own land and a bank to finance black infrastructure projects.
In 2019 there were revelations of alleged racism against black homeowners by First National Bank (FNB) that were reported by Special Assignment on SABC. Black homeowners featured on the programme claimed that they were charged extremely high interest rates for home loans compared to their white counterparts.
Racism can affect you only to the extent that you are dependent on white people who continue to exploit black people. An economic boycott would be an extremely powerful movement, but it will not work because we are dealing with black people who do not have that type of commitment to one another, have no obligation to the collective, have no interest in the progress of their people and are intentionally egotistical and individualistic about their personal pursuits.
We need to do better. Let us go back to the original plan that was formulated to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030. The NDP is the blueprint for South Africa. It explains how the government can work with teachers’ unions to improve the quality of schooling, especially in townships and rural areas. Teachers must be given additional training and support. Improving the school system includes increasing the number of students achieving more than 50% in literacy and mathematics, increasing learner retention rates to 90% and bolstering teacher training.
What we need to do is build a country with a capable state that supports citizens to fulfil their dreams and freely express their talents. We must work together to advance development, resolve problems and raise the concerns of the voiceless and marginalised. We need to hold the government, business and all leaders in society accountable for their actions.
The NDP envisages a growing economy that is responsive to the demands of a fast-changing world, an economy that does not benefit only the few. Ramaphosa has to take urgent measures to repair investor confidence, including improving institutional stability, restoring the credibility of the criminal justice system and demonstrating that the state has the political will to turn the country’s finances around. More importantly, the black majority must be given a bigger stake in the economy. The transfer of ownership and control of the economy to black South Africans must be accelerated.
The NDP also criticises political appointments: “… in South Africa the current approach to appointments blurs the lines of accountability. The requirement for Cabinet to approve the appointment of heads of the department makes it unclear whether they are accountable to their minister, to the Cabinet or the ruling party.” The continuing retention and redeployment of senior executives who were involved in corrupted scandals indicates that there is still little commitment to reform institutions. This includes the reappointment of Thulas Nxesi to the Cabinet as minister of employment and labour, after covering up former president Jacob Zuma’s costly security upgrade to his Nkandla home, as well as the retention of Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe, who is alleged to have bribed a journalist to squash a story on his alleged extramarital relationship.
It was a good move by Ramaphosa to make his new Cabinet sign performance agreements, but he was supposed to release those agreements to the public for accountability and transparency’s sake. I want to understand why Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan has not been fired by the president. Gordhan is a huge liability in his Cabinet and poses a huge threat to the fiscus, through his blatant gangsterism style and political interference at Eskom, SAA and other state-owned enterprises.
Mainstream media and political commentators at large have not called him out on the disaster he left in his wake, because that would be seen to be playing to the Economic Freedom Fighters’ narrative.
It is imperative to implement the document designed and adopted by the government — the NDP.
That document is full of rich information that can decisively change the current trajectory. If the ruling party fails to do so, it will be disrespecting black consciousness and black culture, by not doing anything other than spreading information and not taking decisive action.
And if all government has is information, then it is no better than the church. The pastor is preaching and the ANC is preaching: the pastor does not have anything for the people — and neither does the party.
Sello Ivan Phahle is the managing director of Sip Media