Johannesburg - Government's eagerly-awaited economic policy document aimed at charting a labour-absorbing growth path for South Africa will be discussed at the ANC's national general council (NGC) meeting before being finalised, President
Jacob Zuma has announced.
In his opening speech to the NGC, Zuma, who is under pressure from the ANC's labour alliance partner and youth league to make radical economic policy shifts, warned his critics that they should respect the way the ANC operates and formulates policy.
He warned his critics, as well as those who have been using policy debates as lobbying instruments in leadership debates, that the ANC was reintroducing "revolutionary discipline". The time had come, Zuma said, to deal with people who did not respect ANC discipline, hierarchy and the way the party made decisions.
Zuma re-committed his party to building a strong mixed economy where the state, the private sector, cooperatives and other forms of social ownership complement each other "in an integral way to achieve shared economic growth".
"We have to achieve higher levels of economic growth and have to ensure that such growth benefits all society, especially the poor," said Zuma.
While he did not comment on specific and controversial proposals the ANC Youth League and the ANC's alliance partner Cosatu have been calling for, such as nationalisation of mines, Zuma stressed the ANC had to take note of the global environment the country was operating in when making plans to achieve these goals.
Zuma's government has been criticised for taking too long to release the so-called new economic growth path document, which has been formulated by Minister of Economic Development Ebrahim Patel. Zuma explained that government could not go ahead with this policy document until it had been debated and ratified by the ANC's NGC meeting.
While this dovetailed with the point Zuma made about the ANC leading government on policy-making, he conceded that the ANC's economic policy had not achieved the kind of equality and wealth redistribution it should have. This issue, he said, needed urgent attention.
'New partnership opportunities'Zuma urged the NGC to take note of the economic trends that had been thrown up by the recent global economic recession. He said these trends presented opportunities, and challenged the organisation to be "bold enough" to seize these.
Listing some of these trends that offered South Africa new economic opportunity, Zuma focused on what he called a "shift of economic dynamism and growth" away from developed economies to developing economies. In this respect, he stressed that the recent pact that South Africa and China signed was an important signal.
"There are fresh opportunities for South Africa, and indeed the continent, to achieve its economic goals through new partnerships," said Zuma.
Zuma said the global economic meltdown and the fact that developed countries were not showing as much robust growth as Asian and Latin American economies provided proof that rigid adherence to traditional economic orthodoxy was no longer the key to success.
"The economic crisis has created a challenge for orthodox one-size-fits-all policy," said Zuma. He stressed that now was the time for South Africa to develop policies that were better suited to the country's needs.
The economic transformation document that will be presented to the NGC, Zuma said, had to assist the government with refining appropriate fiscal and monetary policy measures that help to achieve higher economic growth and significantly higher job creation.
These, said Zuma, should be linked with measures to control inflation, improve efficiency and stabilise the exchange rate.
Zuma was careful to stress that the way he planned to run the new economic growth path past the ANC first and the way in which he was reviewing state-owned enterprises was not an arbitrary decision on his part, but carefully and specifically aligned to resolutions taken at the ANC's last national conference in Polokwane in 2007.
Once Patel's economic policy document had been given the NGC nod, it would be discussed at a special cabinet meeting and implemented as a matter of urgency, said Zuma.
- Fin24.com