SA’s economic performance after 28 years of mismanagement under the ANC government has been dismal. Between 1994 and 2021 GDP per capita increased 20.5%.
SA is now an unviable society, with record levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality. With an unemployment rate of 46.2% there are 12.5-million people living in the country who cannot find work. About half of the population wallow in poverty and one in five people has inadequate access to food.
According to the National Income Dynamics Study Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey, in 2021 1.8-million people and 400,000 children lived in households affected by perpetual hunger, which was defined as hunger every day or almost every day. Women were more likely to shield their children from hunger than men.
The World Bank said recently that SA was the most unequal country in the world, ranking first among 164 countries in the Bank’s global poverty database. We have just emerged from the deepest recession in almost a century, during which 1.8-million people lost their jobs.
On the current trajectory — GDP growth of 1.8% a year until 2030, according to the Indlulamithi scenarios — I estimate that there will be 17-million unemployed people by the end of the decade. We are facing a dystopian future that will result in repeated cycles of political and social instability.
You would think the ANC would care enough to come up with proposals to arrest the socioeconomic decline after last year’s electoral clobbering and ahead of a national poll in two years’ time. But nobody seems to care. On Friday, I went to the party’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg for the launch of a special edition of its Umrabulo magazine, which contained discussion documents for its policy conference in July.
Jeff Radebe, the party’s head of policy for a quarter of a century, said he was rushing to catch an international flight and did not have time to engage. He read a long document that had half a page on the economy, and took a few questions. When I asked him why the document said nothing about the economic crisis, he quoted from a 2012 ANC conference resolution.
Reading the discussion documents was torture. The one on the economy was the same as the draft leaked earlier in 2022 — the worst I had read until I went through chapter six on social transformation. Half of this so-called discussion document is a long list of resolutions from the 54th ANC conference in 2017. The other half is cut and paste from the websites of five government departments.
There is no analysis of why the ANC and the government did not implement the 2017 conference resolutions. There are four paragraphs of new policy proposals — taken from the websites of two government departments — and none from the ANC.
It is clear that ANC resolutions are just suggestions that are not binding on anyone. The government can cherry-pick which resolutions it wants to implement and provide lame excuses to ANC branches why it cannot or does not want to implement the others. Nobody monitors what the ANC and the government have achieved because nobody cares.
Unemployment is a macroeconomic policy issue that we cannot tackle through projects. Yet the ANC discussion document on the economy has no macroeconomic policy targets. It cherry-picks what it likes from the National Development Plan (NDP). But it ignores the NDP’s macroeconomic policy targets, including an annual GDP growth rate of 5.4% and the creation of 11-million jobs between 2010 and 2030.
The plan also has targets of 30% of GDP for total investment and 10% of GDP for public investment. But these targets are not binding on anyone. The National Treasury and Reserve Bank have ignored them. The discussion document has no macroeconomic policy tools. With no targets and no policy tools, it is just a waste of time.
• Gqubule is founding director at the Centre for Economic Development & Transformation.
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