Cronin+and+Vavi+reject+Manuel+Gear+defence,+Terreblanche,+Sindy

Sunday Independent, Johannesburg, August 13, 2006 //Edition 1//
=New alliance row as Cronin and Vavi reject Manuel's defence of Gear=


 * Christelle Terreblanche**

A new row between the tripartite alliance partners has erupted after Trevor Manuel, the finance minister, took on Cosatu and the Communist Party in an online opinion piece about government economic policy.

As the row threatened to escalate, the article in this week's ANC Today newsletter was withdrawn from the ANC's website yesterday.

In the article, Manuel contended that there was no contradiction between the government's official Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) strategy and the alliance-endorsed Redistribution and Development Programme (RDP).

His comments drew immediate responses from the alliance partners.

Manuel's article, which itself was written in response to two attacks on Gear in controversial discussion papers formulated by Cosatu and the SACP, suggested the RDP and Gear policies reinforced each other. Gear has previously been severely criticised as diverging fundamentally from the RDP.

Gear, which the alliance partners have dismissed for failing to address unemployment and for allegedly having been imposed without consultation, is set to become a central theme as the nature of the state comes under scrutiny ahead of a crucial ANC policy conference next year.

Efforts to find common ground have resulted in bilateral meetings and consensus-seeking documents over the past two months, often overshadowed by a war of words in the media.

Manuel wrote: "Both programmes, mutually reinforcing as they are, have served us well. Thus, those who claim that the values of the RDP were buried on June 14 1996 (when Gear was announced) and only resurrected when President Thabo Mbeki delivered the Nelson Mandela Lecture on July 29 2006, do themselves, their readers and listeners the disservice of being profoundly disingenuous."

In the recent lecture, Mbeki distanced himself from neo-liberal market fundamentalism, which many see as the central thrust of Gear, while he came out in praise of the people-centred nature of the RDP.

Manuel again stated that all alliance partners had agreed to the "vital aspects" of Gear ahead of its announcement, although he acknowledged that they had "agreed to disagree on the fiscal stance" at an alliance meeting five days before the announcement was made.

Manuel said his argument that the two policy frameworks were not in contradiction also rested on the adoption of a resolution later at the ANC's 1997 congress, which stated that Gear was aimed "at giving effect to the realisation of the RDP through the maintenance of macro balances and elaborates a set of mutually reinforcing policy instruments", which he said has not yet been overturned.

"This important clause settled an exceedingly important debate in the ranks of the ANC," Manuel said. "That Gear called for a period of fiscal consolidation is not in dispute, but the objective was always to ensure the sustainable delivery of the RDP."

Zwelinzima Vavi, Cosatu's general secretary, hit back by saying "those who are disingenuous are those who are refusing to engage and impose documents as non-negotiable", a reference to statements by both Mbeki and Manuel shortly after the announcement of the policy.

Vavi strongly disputed the version of events leading up to the announcement of Gear in 1996: "They called us on the eve of going to parliament and said to us: 'we are about to release a document that is so fundamentally transformative that the whole of big capital will be up in arms' and that the alliance needed to close ranks around it. We insisted that we can't just endorse it without us seeing it … and only later we saw there was no relationship whatsoever between this and the RDP. We said: 'but we can't support this'."

Speaking from an SACP central committee meeting yesterday, Jeremy Cronin, the party's deputy general secretary, said though there was some last-minute consultation, it was aimed at informing leaders about the announcement. "The consultation process was entirely inadequate, coupled with the statement that came through afterwards that [Gear] was written in stone," Cronin said.

Manuel, however, argues that alliance leaders were consulted and endorsed Gear in subsequent statements and speeches, despite reservations over its strong emphasis on fiscal deficit reduction. Cronin said at its launch Gear was not portrayed as a "stabilisation programme as the minister now presents it as", but as a strategy for 6 percent growth and millions of new jobs in five years.

Vavi said Gear had "set us back many, many years in terms of what could have been achieved [for the poor].

"The damage [resulting from lack of spending] of that period of 1997 up to 2001 is huge. Some would say it was a necessary compromise, but it was a compromise. It is not a revolutionary programme (like the RDP)."


 * From: http://www.sundayindependent.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3388236**

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