Hatred, spittle-flecked onto your face or rage-flung online, seems central to what I do for a living. I’m paid to write opinion. I take sides and pick fights, so when readers get personal and nasty about a column, I win.
Readers had a fat go last week ... “and yet the DA’s ‘lack of economic policy’ is not good enough for you”, one sneered. There are adults who blame me for the DA’s poor showing in the 2019 election because I backed Cyril Ramaphosa during the campaign. Haha #ROTF...
It is strange, but the DA does not actually posses an economic policy, or vision, of how we might create wealth and distribute it. I think it’s an important issue because a clear statement of how you do this defines your civilisation.
I live in the Western Cape so I know exactly how good the DA is at running the towns and cities here. But the panel former DA strategist Ryan Coetzee led to examine the party’s 2019 election reversals strongly recommended they create an economic policy as the very foundation of its future programme. Why?
I asked DA leader John Steenhuisen for an exchange of Whatsapp messages. Steenhuisen is good for the DA and, as he sheds his chief whip snip, he’ll become a key national leader as well.
I wrote: “Hi John, the review panel after the 2019 election said, ‘A substantive, values-driven, evidence-based and properly-costed policy platform is critical to the party’s long-term credibility' ... and that ‘the foundation of the policy programme should be an economic policy that would enable growth, opportunity and inclusion.’ You don’t have that economic policy yet.”
He sent me a 51 page 2014 policy document which, amazingly, I’d already read, and added “Hi Peter ... Most of the policy contained in it still stands, and we are in the process of updating all our policy. Note that our economic policy is contained in all our policy documents, many of which are in the final stage before being published. Education, labour, trade, tourism, energy, transport, housing, ICT, land, environment, safety etc are all separate policy documents but are all inherent economic policies too, as each of these areas is a key pillar supporting investment, jobs, and growth.
“This is particularly so because of the DA’s fundamental approach to the relationship between the economy and the state, which is that the role of the state is to create an enabling environment in which private innovation and entrepreneurship can flourish, creating jobs and revenue — revenue that can then be used to create a sustainable social safety ‘trampoline’ for the vulnerable. So it is participants, and not the state, that are the economic decisionmakers. This is what is meant by a social market economy. Having said all this, we do have an updated economic growth policy in the pipeline, but it is coming after these key ‘pillar’ policy docs.”
He was describing a free-market economy, not a social-market economy (the closest working one being Germany, which legislates for consensus), but it’s a decent answer. I replied: “I understand that you have policies about many aspects of the economy, but the advice of the Coetzee panel was that you create a policy that is the ‘foundation’ of your policy programme and not merely the sum of its parts ...”
He replied: “We are absolutely going to release an economic vision document, which holds together all the component parts of our economic policy. Gwen [Ngwenya, DA policy chief] is extremely systematic in her approach, and she first needed to build a deep understanding of SA’s housing, transport, migration, energy, trade & industry challenges. Her unit is working on an economic vision document and it will be ready in November. They have prioritised the issues that the DA has more control over and which drive growth at the local level — ie getting energy, housing, transport, service delivery right. This is an election year, so we had to focus on a national manifesto and some of the policy areas which are most critical at the local level.”
I appreciate the exchange, and if an economic vision document finally emerges in November please let it be brief. The DA and ANC struggle with brevity. But the DA on its own, and in the SA liberal tradition, fails to be led by economic thought, choosing instead to do battle against whatever the prevailing nationalism happens to be. But nationalism, always ugly, can only be beaten by ideas. I asked Coetzee why his panel was so emphatic about centring economic policy.
“Our view was that an economic policy that generates opportunities for entrepreneurs and workers is the only foundation on which SA’s future success can be built,” he said. “I think the DA’s policy function is underresourced and suspect the party has prioritised other things in a resource-constrained environment. The party does however have a policy star in Gwen Ngwenya and I hope that after the local elections a renewed effort can be made to build on the foundations she has built.”
My November fear is another 51-page document, a sum of the parts, quickly to be forgotten. And Steenhuisen is already so close. “We want to get SA back to work by creating a playing field where private enterprise and innovation can flourish and create jobs,” would be good enough for me. We’re officially 34.4% unemployed. Why is it taking the DA so long to get something so simple right?
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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