Black skills top ANC's list

The ANC, which came to power in 1994, has targeted the advancement of skills among blacks and the beneficiation of South Africa's raw materials as key elements of its 10-year economic transformation plan.

There was a need to train "as many black people as possible" to become "the modern professionals and skilled workers without whom the development we need will be impossible to realise", the national executive committee (NEC) said.

The ANC is looking to achieve at least 6% growth within the 10-year period.

"This means that we have to correct a long legacy of discriminatory economic and social development based on the maintenance of a large reservoir of cheap unskilled black labour, which necessitated the exclusion of the black masses from the educational and vocational opportunities required by modern societies and economies," the statement read.

Added value was required to the country's natural resources which it said had been "supplied to the rest of the world for a century and a half".

The transformation of raw materials into processed higher value products "is fundamental to ending the historic colonial relationship between our country and the developed North which made us an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods" the party said.

Following the ANC's local government election campaign launch at Athlone stadium in Cape Town on Sunday - an event which also marked the ANC's 94th anniversary - the NEC said: "One of the central tasks of the national democratic revolution during our second decade of liberation must be the achievement of high rates of economic growth and development."

The goal was to eradicate "the terrible legacy of colonialism and apartheid that has condemned the black masses ... to their material life of misery".