Number 1, 2007
Extract from ANC January 8th Statement delivered by President Thabo Mbeki
This year, 2007, we enter into the last five years at whose conclusion we will celebrate the centenary of the birth of the African National Congress, an occasion whose significance will surely resonate across our land. We, who are today's custodians of the movement whose life will soon have spanned ten decades, have a deep and profound responsibility to ensure that the organisation that turns 100 years old on January 8th 2012 truly lives up to the noble ideals on which it was founded and continues to respond to the high expectations of the South African masses, while remaining loyal to its internationalist obligations to the peoples of Africa and the rest of the world.
Significance of 2007
This year we will hold the 52nd National Conference of the African National Congress, which will be preceded by the National Policy Conference. It is also important to note that this will be the last ordinary National Conference before the ANC centenary, as well as our last ordinary National Conference before the 2009 General Elections.
Therefore, 2007 is a year for a critical assessment of both our movement and our programme, a time for the ANC to review the roadmap to its centenary, assess progress in implementing Conference and NGC decisions, and focus on building an ANC capable of meeting the challenges of the Second Century of its existence. Clearly, the guiding principle of this roadmap must continue to be to move forward decisively to eradicate poverty and all other elements of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.
The key questions that we have to answer is how much impact have we made as a movement in changing the lives of the people and advancing the ANC's strategic objectives we outlined as we acceded to power; and what it is that we need to do in the last five years before our centenary to intensify and accelerate our work to push back the frontiers of poverty.
In this regard, we must ensure that the ANC continues to represent the interests of the great majority and persists in its effort to educate and mobilise the people to be their own liberators.
As we do so, we must identify those areas where we have fallen short with regard to our own, and the people's expectations, and determine what needs to be done to address any shortcomings and further build on what has been done. We should not be timid about acknowledging and celebrating the important strides we have made as a nation. Nor should we shy away from critically examining our record in terms of the popular mandates we received in 1994, 1999 and 2004.
Accelerated and shared growth
At the ANC's National General Council (NGC) in June 2005, the commissions on the Theory of Development reported that, "the central challenge our movement faces in the Second Decade of Freedom is to defeat poverty and substantially reduce the level of unemployment. This means that the ANC and government must produce a coherent development strategy... identifying where we need to move to and what strategic leaps we need to get there".
In 2004, we received a clear mandate to lead the country to lift our economy to a higher growth trajectory, and position it more effectively to create work and push back the frontiers of poverty. In 2007, we must work even harder, together, further to implement this mandate.
The key economic challenges that faced the country in 2004 - and therefore the key concerns of the democratic movement - included: the rate of investment, the rate of economic growth, and the rate of job creation. We therefore had to focus on all elements relevant to these issues, which include improving the performance of government.
In our election manifesto for 2004 we were proud to proclaim that:"Government is running a low debt and is therefore able to introduce real increases in spending on health, education, housing, social grants and other services.
"Before 1994, economic growth had ground to a halt. Since then, our economy has grown by 2.8% a year. It has become more competitive, with increasing volumes, diversity and destinations of exports, and it has created two million net new jobs between 1996 and 2003.
"Workers' rights are protected, the trade union movement is playing an important role in society, and employers and workers are increasingly finding better ways of resolving problems as industrial relations improve. Vulnerable workers such as domestic workers and farm workers have been given greater protection.
"More and more black people are becoming professionals, managers and technicians; laws have been put in place and funds made available for black people to own businesses as one aspect of Black Economic Empowerment."
If we look at progress since 2004 we have even more to be proud of. The programme to provide social grants to benefit the poorest in our society has been extended beyond the approximately 9 million recipients to about 11.5 million. Independent research shows that the grants are having an important impact in terms of reducing poverty.
We were proud that in the period up to 2003 the economy grew on average at about 2.8%. In fact, after corrections to our GDP data, we later found that our average growth rate in the first ten years of democracy was about 3%. Since 2004 the rate of growth has risen to over 4.5% a year. The real increase in the income of individual South Africans is now growing at over 3% a year, whereas it grew at about 1% a year during the first decade of freedom.
We were proud in 2004 that the economy had created about two million net new jobs in the first decade of freedom. Since 2004 we have created jobs at a more rapid pace. On average jobs grew by about 200,000 a year in the first decade of freedom. Since 2004 we have been creating jobs at a rate of over 500,000 a year. The job creation rate has more than doubled. If we maintain our job creation rate at current levels we will meet our 2004 election manifesto target of halving unemployment and poverty by 2014.
In 2004, we were proud of our record of protection of workers. We remain proud of our achievements in improving the conditions of workers, and restoring dignity to workers. We have continued to strive to improve the conditions of unprotected workers in sectors like farming and domestic work.
We have also improved the training environment for workers through improvements in the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) and the National Skills Fund; the introduction of the second stage of the National Skills Development Strategy; in the recapitalisation of the Further Education and Training (FET) Colleges; and in the successive increases in financial support for poorer students within our system of tertiary education.
Empowerment has made great strides since 2004 with the introduction of a range of progressive empowerment charters and the finalisation of the Codes of Good Practice for broad-based economic empowerment.
Improvements in our economy are driven by an increase in the rate of investment. Investment was as low as 15% of GDP in 2003. Since 2004 it has steadily improved to 18.5% of GDP. Fixed investment is now growing at a rate of 11% a year, by the most recent quarterly data. This is due to increases in public sector and private sector investment.
The improvements we have experienced are partly a result of favourable conditions in the international economy and good demand and high prices for some of our traditional exports. But it is also a result of good policies. Steady macroeconomic management has led to the longest period of growth in recorded history in South Africa - we have now been growing continuously for more than eight years. This is more than twice as long as any previous boom in South Africa's recorded economic history.
Key targeted initiatives from government, including the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (AsgiSA) and the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA), will give further impetus to the improvement of the performance of our economy, including the critical area of job creation. These initiatives, introduced after discussion within the ANC and with Alliance partners, are aimed to address the binding constraints on the South African economy.
Economic growth and development is at heart about empowering the masses to take control of their own lives, ensuring that they have the means and opportunity to enjoy the freedoms for which they have fought for a long time. They must therefore be an integral and driving force behind this effort. In this respect there is a clear role for participation by the non-governmental organisations and civil society structures. There is also a profound need for sustained cooperation between the government and its social partners - labour, business and civil society.
We must therefore take care to ensure that all our policies and programmes involve the people in their design, implementation and evaluation. We must therefore work hard during the course of 2007 to ensure that forums exist and are effectively used to link government with the various stakeholders in our economy.
In particular, we must focus on the involvement of the masses at a local government level. We should not take a purely technical approach to the development of the Integrated Development Plans (IDPs). The approach must involve communities in a meaningful way, and it must be used, additionally, to empower, educate and develop these communities.
Branches and other structures of the movement have a particularly important role in ensuring that we succeed in this task of the mobilisation and involvement of the youth, the women and communities to achieve the objectives we have indicated. We must benchmark progress in this regard against the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the programmes we have put in place to ensure the realisation of its objectives.
This task has additional significance this year, as the organisation prepares for the National Policy Conference in June and the 52nd National Conference in December. These important gatherings of our movement will need to reflect in detail on the policies and programmes of the organisation and take the necessary decisions about how we further accelerate our progress towards the realisation of the vision of the movement.
A particular area of focus in 2007 must be the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (AsgiSA). For it to succeed in removing the binding constraints to faster and more equitable growth, AsgiSA needs the support and participation of all South Africans. At all times we must also strive to ensure that our development is people-centred and people-driven.
Intensifying the fight against poverty
In concert with the task of growing the economy and creating new opportunities for work, we have been hard at work since 1994 to push back the frontiers of poverty, recognising that no people can be truly free until they have cast aside the shackles of poverty and underdevelopment.
It is for this reason that the eradication of poverty has been at the centre of our policies and programmes since the first democratic elections. Drawing on the experience of the first ten years of freedom, and building on the firm foundation laid by our people, in 2004 we identified the goal of halving poverty in South Africa by 2014.
In 2007, we must do everything possible to make certain that we achieve further advances towards the achievement of that goal. We will be able to do this thanks to the progress already made in undoing the devastating legacy of colonial and apartheid oppression, dispossession and deliberate underdevelopment. We will also be able to do this because of the steps we have taken to redirect state expenditure towards meeting the needs of the poor, and to free up resources previously used to service our inherited public debt for spending on service provision and infrastructure.
Thus we have seen the frontiers of poverty steadily being pushed back. Between 2001 and 2004, it is estimated that the number of households living below the poverty line dropped from 4.1 million to 3.6 million. These and other gains in addressing poverty can be attributed to improving economic conditions and a wide range of government interventions spe-cifically aimed at the various forms in which poverty is manifested.
We welcome the progress made over the past year towards the establishment of the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA), and trust that it will make a significant contribution to ensuring that social grants are received promptly and regularly by all South Africans who qualify to receive them.
Expanded public works and housing
Another of the key programmes aimed at reducing poverty, while simultaneously providing work experience and skills, is the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). The programme is on course to reach its target of one million job opportunities in five years. By June 2006, it had surpassed its employment creation targets across four sectors, with more than 300,000 work opportunities created.
The number of projects within the EPWP is constantly expanding, reaching more people in terms of work opportunities, services provided and infrastructure built. Branches need to ensure that communities receive information about local EPWP projects, are able to participate, and that they have mechanisms to provide feedback to government on the effectiveness and suitability of these projects.
Poverty has also been reduced by expanding the access of poor people to assets that improve the quality of their lives and provide them with a greater degree of financial security.
Between 1994 and mid-2006, 2.8 million housing subsidies were approved, a quantity of housing provision unprecedented in South Africa's history. To build on this foundation, government has adopted an integrated housing programme for the next decade. In addition to speeding up the delivery of housing, the programme aims to make new developments more sustainable, integrating them with other social infrastructure, and improving the access of residents to economic opportunities. Work is also being done to expedite delivery of shelter to the most vulnerable and those under distress.
People-centred and people-driven development
Government alone cannot resolve the challenges of inequality and poverty. Rather they require that we unite South Africans in a 'peoples contract to create work and fight poverty'. We must seek concerted action on our development approach, involving the whole of our society.
As the RDP White Paper said, "the birth of a transformed nation can only succeed if the people themselves are voluntary participants in the process towards the realisation of these goals they have themselves helped define". It is therefore important to build a vibrant and continued integration between decision makers from the public-private and voluntary sectors and the intended beneficiaries of development - the people.
And therefore in all our efforts as we advance with our mission to eradicate poverty we have to ensure continued participation of the masses of our people in the struggle against poverty.
Building safer communities and fighting the scourge of crime
In the decade before the democratic breakthrough of 1994, the devastating impact of apartheid social and economic policies and the use of the police services as instruments of repression gave rise to a dramatic growth in levels of crime and violence in our society.
This scourge has continued to bedevil our young democracy. Though progress has been made in gradually reducing levels of most categories of serious crime, crime continues to impact severely on the quality of life on our people. Without decisive action to curb crime, it could undermine our efforts to ensure the country is able to realise its social and economic potential.
As we have consistently said, our response to crime must be based on a clear understanding of the causes of crime and the various forms that it takes across society. Our response needs to be well-considered, effectively coordinated and comprehensive. It also needs to be sustainable and its progress measurable.
To this end, we have worked since 1994 to transform the South African Police Service (SAPS) and other institutions of the criminal justice system to serve all our people more effectively and to work to safeguard their safety and security. We have increased the numbers of police personnel, improved systems of coordination and management, and improved the efficiency of our courts and prosecution services.
Yet we have recognised from the birth of our democracy that these efforts will not succeed unless we make tangible progress in addressing those socio-economic conditions that feed crime and violence. We have recognised that the police service and government agencies cannot fight crime alone, and that it requires the involvement and active participation of all communities and all sections of society to meet this challenge.
During the course of 2007, we need to make every possible effort decisively to tackle this challenge, drawing on the resources and capacity of all sectors of society in a united front against crime.
As the ANC we will therefore undertake an extensive mass campaign to mobilise communities to assume leadership in the struggle for peace, stability and safer places to live. This campaign will seek to strengthen partnerships between communities and the police services, and between the public and private sectors.
Critically, this campaign will pay particular attention to crimes of violence, especially as they affect women and children. As part of the effort to extend our campaign of activism against women and child abuse to be a year-long effort, we will need to draw on the experiences and lessons of the 16 Days of Activism.
Infusing the spirit of ubuntu
The task of building a new society founded on the vision of the Freedom Charter extends beyond improving the material conditions of the people and ensuring the masses continue to play a role in determining their own future. Underlying the clauses of the Freedom Charter lies a set of values and principles that stand in stark contrast to the social values and norms which were able to take hold during the centuries of colonial and apartheid capitalism.
We are bound to acknowledge, in the 13th year of our democracy, that many of those values and norms are still pervasive in our society, dominating many - though not all - areas of social interaction. We have spoken in the past about the destructive effects of the relentless pursuit of individual self-enrichment at the expense of the broader development and progress of society. Our people are daily told - through the media, through advertising, through forms of cultural expression - that their sole concern should be the accumulation of personal wealth and the display of the associated trappings of affluence.
As millions of our people seek, understandably and correctly, to escape the cycle of poverty by improving their material conditions there are some who suggest that the natural extension of this important social objective is the exclusive activity to amass as much personal wealth as possible. There are similarly some who continue to suggest that such avarice arises from efforts to deracialise the economy and specifically the benefit that black economic empowerment is purported to have brought to a small group of black business people.
We need to counter both of these contentions. The pursuit of personal wealth to the exclusion of all else is not an unavoidable corollary of the efforts of our people to lift themselves out of poverty. Similarly, the pursuit of personal wealth to the exclusion of all else is primarily a consequence of the social and economic relations that developed under colonialism apartheid, a goal that was inherent within the system of white minority domination.
Yet existing alongside, and contrary, to the values and norms that we inherited from the apartheid past are values and norms that have also resided among our people and which have held together our communities from ancient times up to the present. These values contained in the worldview we known as ubuntu, succinctly expressed in the phrase 'Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu', emphasise society, community and family as critical elements of personal development, security and fulfilment.
Ubuntu acknowledges the truism that no person is an island, but an integral part of broader society and humankind, and therefore that our individual fortunes are intimately connected to the fortunes of the whole.
These are the essential values that informed the formation of the African National Congress 95 years ago today, and which have underpinned its existence over the intervening nine-and-a-half decades.
Combating corruption
We have also pointed to the corrosive role of corruption in the erosion of democracy, public confidence, good governance and social stability.
We must vigorously counter all corrupt practices not merely through effective rules and regulations, and scrupulous monitoring, detection and, where appropriate, prosecution, but also through the strengthening of political consciousness and the values associated with ubuntu.
Similarly, these values must infuse the work of all those who provide a public service. Among other things, ubuntu should give content to the Batho Pele campaign, ensuring that at all times and all instances, the interests of the people are prioritised, and that any impediments to optimal public service are identified and removed.
Broad front for development
When it was formed, the ANC undertook the mission of forging the broadest front possible in the fight against white minority rule. Throughout its history, our movement has sought to organise and mobilise all social forces and organisations that share the broad vision of a democratic South Africa.
Now that the reviled system of apartheid has been overturned, we should continue to seek the mobilisation of the broadest range of forces in society to overcome the poverty, unemployment and underdevelopment that continue to afflict many of our people.
As we resolved at the 2002 Stellenbosch Conference of our movement, one of our key tasks for 2007 should therefore be to continue to work to bring together as many people and groupings as possible into a common struggle to build a better life for our people.
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