Labour federations have called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to move away from economic policies have led to an unemployment rate of nearly 35% and are “suffocating the economy”.
The unions want the president to announce the changes when he delivers his state of the nation address in Cape Town on Thursday.
Cosatu, which supported Ramaphosa’s successful campaign for the ANC presidency in 2017, said it wanted reports on progress since the annual address in 2021 on the government’s interventions to rebuild the state, tackle corruption, grow the economy, create jobs and roll out Covid-19 vaccines.
The SA Reserve Bank has forecast GDP growth of 1.7% for 2022, 1.8% for 2023 and 2% for 2024.
Cosatu national spokesperson Sizwe Pamla said the government needed to acknowledge that the deepening socioeconomic crises in SA come from “the misguided macroeconomic policy framework” implemented over the years.
Ramaphosa needs to provide a frank assessment of what needs to be done and clear interventions to turn the country around, said Pamla.
Interventions critical to growing the economy and rebuilding the state include speedy rebuilding of power utility Eskom to ensure reliable and affordable electricity, he said.
“This includes moving with greater speed to implement the Eskom Social Compact, to tackle corruption and wasteful expenditure, to ramp up maintenance, to invest in new generation capacity and a just energy transition,” Pamla said.
The government also needed to extend the R350 social relief of distress grant beyond March and increase it to meet the food poverty line of R624, so it can be used as a foundation for a basic income grant.
The social relief of distress grant was introduced two years ago to help adults without income cope during the coronavirus pandemic.
A previous plan to let the grant lapse was thwarted by the violent looting in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal in July 2021, which cost the economy about R50bn.
Cosatu wants the SA Revenue Service (Sars) to be given more teeth to tackle tax and customs evasion, and to undertake lifestyle audits of political office bearers and senior state officials.
The president needs to address the contentious issue of SA companies that are “playing poor foreign workers against poor South African workers. The department of employment & labour, the department of home affairs and other relevant state institutions need to enforce the current labour and immigration laws to combat this problem”, said Pamla.
“This emotive issue needs decisive leadership from government because it has the potential to fan the simmering xenophobic sentiments that have led to violence in the past.”
Cosatu also called for more support for the presidential employment programme in the 2022 budget, to create an additional 2-million “badly needed jobs”.
“If economic development is to be achieved, an active [and] interventionist state is needed, because government cannot continue to outsource its developmental mandate to the private sector,” said Pamla.
SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) national spokesperson Trevor Shaku said the federation wanted Ramaphosa to focus on job creation so that the “12.5-million people in this country who are not in any form of employment, education and training may be able to find work”.
Saftu is calling for an end to “austerity measures” and a basic income grant of R1,500.
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