Two weeks ago all three of SA’s living past presidents — Thabo Mbeki, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma — criticised Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership of the country on the same weekend. At the start of the following week, on the Kaya FM drive show, presenter Sizwe Dhlomo asked the members of his team and listeners to rank the performance of all four presidents.
Mbeki was ranked highest. Motlanthe was second because he had not been president long enough to cause damage, they said. Two of the members of Dhlomo’s team had Zuma and Ramaphosa as joint third. Dhlomo said: “So yeah, last on my list will have to be Cyril, who I had such high hopes for but there’s just too much that he’s getting away with that doesn’t sit well with me. He cut me deep, it’s like not only did he stab me in the back but he twisted the knife just to make sure I won’t survive.”
This year I have met three of the country’s four living presidents to discuss issues such as the basic income grant. I don’t want to compare them. But the hour-and-a-half Social Policy Initiative director Isobel Frye and I spent with Mbeki about three weeks ago was the most engaging discussion I have had for a very long time. Unlike fellow columnist Jonny Steinberg, I found him to be a pleasant person (“The mantle of sage doesn’t fit the head of nasty Mbeki”, October 27). Before you scream “Mbeki apologist”, I opposed both his Gear and his Aids policies.
In his last state of the nation address, Ramaphosa said there would be a social compact within 100 days. Mbeki’s passion was the need for a social compact, and when I spoke to him he said his biggest disappointment was the inexplicable paralysis in the government, which cannot implement the smallest of things. A minister within the economics cluster had told him he had not read the business proposals on the social compact.
I promised to travel with the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and learn about a social compact it is developing in the Free State with an inspirational mayor and farmers. I said it should be easier, with the new leadership at Cosatu, to get the unions to agree on a common position for discussions on the social compact. On my bucket list for 2023 is to help develop such a position.
But unemployment is a macroeconomic policy issue that we cannot address through structural reforms or projects. There is enough evidence over the past decade since the words “structural reform” first appeared in the Budget Review that they do not add much to GDP growth. You can deregulate the whole economy and even abolish BEE, but it will not make a difference if there is no demand in the economy.
The macroeconomic policy levers to reduce unemployment include GDP growth, industrial policies to increase the labour intensity of growth, the expansion of public employment programmes, and increasing Eskom’s energy availability factor. But over the past two weeks the National Treasury and the Reserve Bank have said it is not their job to increase GDP growth or address the unemployment crisis.
In the medium-term budget policy statement, the Treasury showed that it cares only about debt. After announcing windfalls over three years of R470bn in February and R294.4bn in October, it will still implement austerity policies that will reduce GDP growth. In a speech at Wits, Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago said “real solutions to faster growth and job creation lie in other policy domains”.
If the two most important institutions in the economy say they are not responsible for growing the economy and creating jobs, where will the growth come from? The National Treasury has forecast GDP growth of 1.6% a year from 2023 to 2025. This is a recipe for disaster. We cannot continue on this dangerous economic development path.
The government has no clue how to get us out of this economic crisis. It could at least ask Mbeki to help develop a social compact.
• Gqubule is research associate at the Social Policy Initiative.
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