Johannesburg - Business Unity SA (Busa) has welcomed the
final National Development Plan (NDP) as an essential roadmap to take the South
African economy to where it is supposed to be.
"What matters now to business is that the NDP must be
urgently implemented, to create the certainty and predictability that business
and investor confidence needs," said Busa CEO Nomaxabiso Majokweni on
Wednesday.
Busa said the three most pressing priorities were
unemployment, education and a capable state.
"The NDP also emphasises what business has been saying
for some time -that all the plans and projects in the world will fail without
successful implementation.
"For the NDP this will require tough decisions,
political leadership and close collaboration with key stakeholders like
business and labour," said Majokweni.
She said the NDP was meant to be a shared national vision
over the next two decades.
"Busa therefore believes that the finalisation (sic) of
the NDP should not be an excuse for further talk-shops, but rather be seen by
all as a platform for urgent national action."
Earlier, National Planning Commission Minister Trevor Manuel
presented the revised NDP to President Jacob Zuma. Zuma said the all South
Africans could identify with the plan.
The commission's diagnostic document released last year
outlined key problems, including too few people working, poor quality of school
education for blacks, poorly located, inadequately and under-maintained
infrastructure, spatial divides hobbling inclusive development, and an
unsustainable, resource intensive economy.
Others were that the public health system could not meet
demand or sustain quality, public services were uneven and often of poor
quality, corruption levels were high, and that South Africa remained a divided
society.
* Follow
Fin24 on Facebook,
Twitter and Google+.