Government leaders, bureaucrats, planners, economists and civic and union leaders are set to meet for Nedlac’s annual national summit on Friday, more than a year after partners failed to hammer out a social compact to address runaway unemployment and slow economic growth dogging SA.
This has spurred Dr Asghar Adelzadeh, economist and director at the Economic Modelling Agency at GIBS Business School, to come up with guidelines the social partners need to keep in mind in their quest to address the country’s socio-economic crises.
Adelzadeh said these guidelines will help to understand, plan, design interventions, and to monitor progress and “fine tune policies we need to measure”.
“Measurement requires taking existing data and modelling its trajectories into different future scenarios to ensure preparedness across a broad range of possible outlooks,” he said.
“We need to use models that reflect the reality of the economy and provide executive decision makers with foresight to pull on the right policy levers at the right time, especially in times of crises,” Adelzadeh added.
“This means actively investing in modelling; and building policy that aligns with what the trajectories show will be the reality.”
He said good policy is needed to effectively address low growth, high unemployment, poverty and inequality.
“Economies that have higher growth and a lower incidence of social challenges tend to fare better in crisis. The opposite is true for those which don’t – and we have seen and are feeling this in the SA case. But this does not mean we are without hope. There are known policy pathways and models that can be applied to right the economic engines. We just need to commit to them.”
Adelzadeh said now was the time for leaders and all levels of government to invest in training: “Training in economic modelling puts powerful impact and outcomes information in the hands of those who need it, including Nedlac constituency partners, and it is desperately needed in SA. This type of modelling is used by leading global economies already, and applied effectively in SA, could unlock our potential.…”
“This,” said Adelzadeh, “means putting in place urgent backstops for our current and most pressing complex crises of inadequate economic growth, unemployment, sharp inequalities, low levels of fixed investment and frail social capital, so we can absorb other shocks in the future.”
During his state of the nation address in February 2022, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the government and its social partners would, within 100 days, hammer out a comprehensive social compact to deal with poor economic growth and unemployment.
In March, Ramaphosa — criticised by former president Thabo Mbeki for making false promises to the nation — sought to explain why the social compact had not been realised: “We had wanted to have a comprehensive social compact and we had put together a timeline and we were not able to reach that timeline, but what we have seen over time is that we have been able to reach a number of compacts.”
The social partners have constantly berated the government, saying it lacked seriousness to see to the cohesion required for strong economic growth.
Deputy President Paul Mashatile is expected to deliver the keynote address at Nedlac’s annual national summit. The National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) is the country’s dispute resolution and policy formulation body.
Employment and labour minister Thulas Nxesi, and Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi are also expected to address the gathering at Gallagher Estate in Midrand.
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