Business Day
*Sterile words won’t get us to the honey on the hill* *Aubrey Matshiqi, Business Day, Johannesburg, 29 November 2010*IN MY previous life, I was a political education officer in one of the biggest zones of the African National Congress (ANC). After conducting a few workshops on revolutionary theory, it became clear that the example of a river and a mountain worked well with learner-comrades. I used to tell candidate-comrades to think of a mountain laden with honey (money for those comrades who were doing their articles in tenderpreneurship).
The problem, or challenge in revolutionary parlance, I used to tell them, is that they needed to cross a deep river with violent currents to get to the mountain. In other words, reaching the honey on the mountain constituted the goals of the revolution and the means by which the river would be crossed were the tactical choices that were available to the ANC. Because the comrade-learners were sharp, they never failed to see that a boat would be needed to take us to the mountain.
In case you are wondering, it is the launch of Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel’s New Growth Path that caused this nostalgia.
All of us — big business, the ruling party, the government, the media, what is left of civil society, the Congress of South African Trade Unions , the South African Communist Party , think- tanks and academia — are much better at talking about the mountain and the river than we are at designing boats. When we do get to the point of designing them, we spend too much time fighting over the designs.
There are those among us, of course, on whose boats we have relied in the past, who refuse to change their designs. And then you have those who, since 1994, have been peddling talk about the need for boats but continue to fail when it comes to producing credible designs.
To a large extent, the New Growth Path is the same old thing — lots of talk about the honey on the mountain, the need for a boat to take us across the river and very little sense of where workable boat designs will come from.
But the argument that the New Growth Path offers very little that is new has become as sterile as what it seeks to criticise in how the ANC and the government deal with matters of policy.
Last Thursday, this newspaper’s front-page lead headline was "Patel wages cap will put off investors – business". This, from the same people who tell us that one of the pillars of future economic growth must be the moderation of workers’ salaries.
The teaser on the same front page for one of the columns inside read: "The government’s new economic plan needs a sturdy roll-out strategy".
The headline and the teaser capture the challenge perfectly. First, we must not be dishonest in how we engage with the New Growth Path. Second, all of us, and not the government and the ANC alone, must not be content with stating the obvious. The failure in the production of new ideas is not that of the ANC alone. All of us have failed in this regard.
We must recognise that the New Growth Path document is not policy but a discussion document we must engage with honestly and intelligently because I am convinced that there is no economy of honesty and intelligence in SA.
The launch of this discussion document must be seen as a call for us to rise to the challenge of tackling poverty and unemployment through the implementation of an economic strategy founded on the commitment and compromise of key social partners.
This will not happen if big business and big labour do not stand down from their religious positions. The alternative is a shrinking working class and a growing unemployed class.
Dealing with the sterility of our well-rehearsed arguments must extend also to debates about improving the education of our population.
I maintain — to resuscitate another sterile argument — that the underperformance of our education system is not caused by a lack of money, but results from a lack of collective ownership by citizens of education as a national resource.
Without quality education, a new growth path is but a dream.
* Matshiqi is senior research associate at the Centre for Policy
Studies.
*From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=128093*
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