Zuma defends economic departments

Johannesburg - South Africa needs answers on issues like increasing inequality and unemployment amid economic growth. This is why the Department of Economic Development had been created, said President Jacob Zuma.

At a Reuters breakfast seminar in Johannesburg Zuma for the first time gave a clear exposition of his reasons for creating two ministries and departments responsible for economic policy.

He had been asked by independent economist Noelani King Conradie why two cumbersome departments, Finance under Pravin Gordhan and Economic Development under Ebrahim Patel, had been created.

King Conradie had labelled this a time-consuming system for economic policy formulation.

Zuma responded that there were many theories regarding economic policy and economists did not all agree.

The decisions of the ruling party, he said, including its decisions on economic policy had to be applied effectively.

The Department of Finance had existed for along time and had devised many policies that helped the country move forward, but significant questions had arisen during the process.

When this economy started to grow, statistics indicated that the gap between rich and poor was widening. How should the challenge be tackled, asked the president.

South Africa in fact has two economies – a first-world and a second-world economy.

Zuma asked how one should address the issue, how one should tackle the problem of unemployment, and whether economic growth was helping to relieve the problem of unemployment.

A government still in power 15 years after liberation could not sit back and say it had this wonderful Department of Finance and would carry on as before.

The country needed renewal, and answers had to be sought.

For that reason, he went on, the Department of Economic Development had been created to deal with issues that were certainly not the core business of the Department of Finance.

The President considered this a particularly important development because the country's state departments in the economic sphere had previously worked independently and virtually isolated from one other.

What was needed was someone sitting on the sidelines, determining where it was necessary to get them to work together and considering which economic activities needed to be brought together.

The Department of Economic Development had been specifically created for this purpose, Zuma said.

- Sake24.com

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