The National Planning Commission’s 10-year review this week was a real blast from the past. Many may not have realised that the commission, set up in the early days of Jacob Zuma’s presidency, still existed.
Those were days of some optimism, when it was possible to imagine that SA could lift its growth rate to 5% and halve its unemployment rate, in line with targets set by the commission.
It brought together some excellent people and did some excellent diagnostics on SA’s many social and economic challenges. But far from implementing its recommendations, the Zuma administration instead allowed state capture to take root and to wreck state institutions, taking the economy backwards into a decade of stagnation instead of on to the inclusive growth path the commission envisaged.
Of course, the government is to blame, as the commission this week said it was, for not championing the vast document that was the National Development Plan of 2012. But it’s no good going back to the plan or its targets in 2023.
Since the NDP, the government has generated a string of laudable plans to fix the economy, including President Cyril Ramaphosa’s own 2020 Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, as well as a string of initiatives and partnerships to put the necessary reforms in place — all of which featured in that long-ago NDP. What’s missing is a state capable and willing to do its part, and a governing party that can agree on and support the growth-boosting, private sector enabling reforms that are urgently needed.
Plans can’t fix that.
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