Pretoria - Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka on Thursday during the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative
for South Africa (AsgiSA) 2007 review, pinpointed poverty as a "crisis" and indicated key attention needed to be zoned in on this area.
Added to this was the need to boost the second economy as a whole, and as part of this government and all individuals needed to do all they could to address the food crisis.
"I want to be the commander in chief in the fight against poverty," she said.
Mlambo-Ngcuka praised macro-economic progress for helping maintain relative growth despite the "big challenges" of food, fuel and power.
However, she pinpointed the negative effects of the food crisis on the second economy, and said "we need to do all we can to address it."
Mlambo-Ngcuka said that there is still a lot of work that has to be done on the investment front, "even though we have done a lot of things".
"SA is now a construction site - building is going on everywhere - but the important thing behind this is we wanted to create jobs," she said. She expressed concern about the longevity of jobs once a project was completed.
Mlambo-Ngcuka pointed out that another binding constraint in SA was industrial strategy and development.
However, she said resources had been allocated to take industrial strategy forward. "We need projects we can take forward and the sectors are identified we can support," she said. She highlighted energy-related investments and value adds in the manufacturing sector as examples of these projects.
Mlambo-Ngcuka also highlighted transport as one of the most basic, crucial services identified as affecting the poor.
She said public service was about making transport cheaper and safer. "For us the biggest thing about 2010 is we should leave this country with a much better transport system."
Rich is getting richer
Mlambo-Ngcuka, however, lamented the fact that SA has so many poor people in a country with "so many possibilities". She labelled this situation as a "crisis".
"We cannot reach our noble goals unless we address this. We have seen inequalities despite poverty and progress being addressed. We need a strategy to look at poverty in its own right," she said.
"We want not to just address the issue of poverty, but also the inequality which goes with it. It is impossible for government to do that alone. The biggest beneficiaries of post-apartheid SA are the rich, who have become richer," she said.
"Poor people are better off, but the gap in our society has become wide. Politically and economically it is unsustainable," said Mlambo-Ngcuka.
She added that SA needed more breadwinners among the able and young, and not people simply receiving grants. "There is something perverse about an adult who relies on a grant from a child," she said.
AsgiSA was launched by Mlambo-Ngcuka in February 2006.
- I-Net Bridge