The Big Read: What about the NDP, Mr Nene?

03 March 2015 - 02:00 By Justice Malala
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What is South Africa's greatest economic challenge right now? The question has to be asked because surely our duty is not merely to survive through the tailwinds of the global financial crisis.

Our goal is to grow and lift up the millions of our people who are without a job.

Minister of Finance Nhlanhla Nene unveiled his maiden Budget last Wednesday and managed to impress many.

In turbulent and uncertain times, he did enough to assure ratings agencies that his hand is firmly on the tiller and that the populist policies that have been thrown about by some politicians will be given short shrift.

His prognosis is that we will fix the government's growing debt, that we will not spend money we don't have and that there will be steady growth.

"Solid Budget," said many. "Workmanlike," others said. And a round of applause went up for the man who has stepped into the very big shoes formerly worn by Pravin Gordhan and Trevor Manuel.

Is it enough, though? South Africa needs way more than a solid budget. It needs a vision, a dream, and very vigorous implementation of the plans that emanate from that vision. Thankfully, we are not without a vision and a plan for that future.

It is called the National Development Plan (NDP) and was produced under the very keen stewardship of Manuel, who was chairman of the National Planning Commission, and the now deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa. It was encouraging to see - after two months of the document hardly being referred to by our national leaders and mention of it absent from the president's State of the Nation speech - the NDP finally make a return to the national conversation in Nene's Budget speech.

Yet the speech itself failed to harness the wealth of vision that is in the NDP. Nene did well to speak about fiscal prudence over the next three years. That is our tactic to survive through the winds buffeting economies globally today. But for a country with the challenges of unemployment and poverty we face, that is a mere holding pattern.

Every speech, every action, needs to be linked to the greater goal - the growth of the economy as advocated in the NDP. It is not by mistake that such growth should be constantly underlined. With growth will come jobs, and with jobs will come a prosperity that we have only dreamed of in the past.

So it was with much sadness that I scanned the minister's speech for a show of fidelity to the NDP and found that he did not harness the courage to put it at the heart of his speech.

Instead, the necessary steps were done in half measures. On the new Small Business Department, for example, Nene said: "Over the [medium term, Small Business] Minister [Lindiwe] Zulu's new department will spend R3.5-billion on mentoring and training support for small businesses."

That sounds great because it is now generally agreed that the job creation we need can come only from a vigorous entrepreneur class that creates thousands of small businesses. But Nene announced that those using the government's system of turnover tax will, from this year, not pay a cent if their turnover is less than R335000. A business with turnover of between R750000 and R1-million will be taxed at 3% and not 6% as was the case last year.

That is great, but why not go the whole hog and raise the turnover ceiling to R3-million for the complete tax exemption? The small businesswoman needs as much of a break as she can get, surely?

Why are we still pouring money into Eskom, SA Airways and the SA Post Office after they have proved themselves such abject failures? The minister and anyone else who believes that these entities will be turned around could open themselves up to being accused of smoking strong herbs from Swaziland.

Education will get an increase of 8% over the next three years. Applause all around. The issue, though, is the quality of teaching in township and former homeland schools. Throwing money at the problem is not fixing the problem. The NDP demands qualified teachers who appear in class and on time. That is where more work is needed.

These are just three examples. There are other areas that just bamboozle.

They all demonstrate one malaise with the Budget: it lacks ambition and courage.

It fails to present a coherent vision of our great plan to work our way out of the legacy of apartheid into becoming a country that is serious about its growth. Nene started his speech by pointing out that most developed countries are growing at about 4.5% a year. South Africa, he projected, will achieve 2% growth this year.

The failure of this budget is that it failed to convince anyone that we have a plan to move away from being Joe Below Average, growing at 2% a year, and not eradicating our problems. It is time we stopped believing that mediocre is fine. It is not. We should be growing at the NDP's recommended rate of 5.4%. Anything less is failure.

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