Policies+have+put+profit+before+people,+Blade+Nzimande,+Sunday+Times

Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 06 August 2006
=Policies have put profit before people=



//The government needs to interrogate its growth strategies if development is to take precedence,// **writes Blade Nzimande**

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki’s lecture raises the crucial question of moral values in our democracy. Delivered on the occasion of former President Nelson Mandela’s birthday, the speech is a moving appeal for an “RDP of the soul” and a sustained attack on capitalist market values.

“Many in our society,” Mbeki observes, “having absorbed the value system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that, for them, personal ... fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs.”

I agree. In fact, I’m tempted to say “we told you so”. But that wouldn’t be helpful as it does not foster a climate for constructive discussion.

Besides, Mbeki can legitimately say he, too, has been emphasising for several years the corrosive impact of capitalism on our society.

Given global capitalist dominance, let’s agree it is not easy to build a society where social solidarity trumps private profit. But what concrete measures should we undertake to move in that direction?

Nowhere in his speech does Mbeki offer any practical measures. Nor does he reflect critically on government policies. Are any of them fostering the very values he deplores?

In the end, to cite the President’s own allusion, we are left feeling like King Canute “trying to wish away the waves of self-aggrandisement” armed with little more than moral outrage against this growing selfishness in society.

The problem begins with Mbeki’s separation of the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme from an “RDP of the soul”.

The original RDP, like the Freedom Charter, is not a narrow governmental programme. It sees South Africans as their own collective self-emancipators. It insists on the imperative of an organic link between development and growth, and ongoing links with the people, not only during election campaigns. This is central if the people’s will is to triumph over “money”.

Unfortunately, leading comrades in the government reduced the RDP to little more than a list of delivery targets to be realised through technocratic redistribution. Without belittling our achievements since 1994, these have generally involved some significant departures from the moral values of a people-driven, participatory (and therefore thoroughly developmental) process.

The reduction of the RDP to a technocratic check list for top-down delivery cleared the way for the government’s 1996 macroeconomic policy. The Gear strategy broke the organic (and moral) link between development and growth, and made the former wholly dependent upon profit-maximising growth.

Large-scale land reform or decent public transport became not potential drivers of a developmental growth path in their own right, but contingent on capitalists (the old and the emerging) first making billions of rands, some of which we would then tax and redistribute.

This macroeconomic model has legitimised views brazenly articulated by leading ANC personalities. “Blacks should get filthy rich,” says one, as if it were a patriotic duty. “I didn’t struggle to be poor,” says another. “Why should BEE capitalists behave differently from other capitalists?” asks a third — all of them leading cadres of our movement.

Some whites and a few blacks have, indeed, got filthy rich. We have had a return to sustained capitalist growth and profitability. But this growth has reproduced all of the systemic features of under-development the original RDP set out to address.

A widening wage gap and Gini coefficient; deep-seated gender and racial inequality, one million formal sector jobs lost, large numbers of other workers casualised — these realities are not accidental, they are the pillars upon which the last decade of growth has been built.

Mbeki bemoans a world in which solidarity and professional values of public service are sidelined by self-enrichment. But many in the government treat citizens as “clients”, not as collective self-emancipators.

If you are not visible on the market as a “willing seller” or a “willing buyer”, you are likely to be invisible. The government has introduced market-place managerial techniques indepartments. Some public servants ride roughshod over communities when their performance targets, attached to monetary incentives, are threatened by consultation.

We have moved away from rampant privatisation, but we still imagine Transnet’s core agenda is to lower the cost of doing business. No doubt that is something that has to be considered, but what about using the rail network for rural land reform?

I’ll be told that’s unsustainable “macro-populism”. Well, despite all its belt-tightening strictures, Gear has been associated with extraordinarily wasteful expenditure — arms procurement, Coega, a botched Telkom restructuring and now the Gautrain. These are projects that blow billions of rands of public resources, enriching old and new elites, but they do little to overcome social inequities.

As King Canute found, it is not easy to turn back the waves. At least let’s make sure our own policies are not unleashing the tide we are trying to stem.

Nzimande is general secretary of the South African Communist Party


 * From: http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=ST6A198679**

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