Interview with Jeremy Cronin We can do it for ourselves The poor of South Africa should be mobilised to spearhead their own social and economic development Vusumuzi Shabangu, The New Age, Johannesburg, 22 July 2015 South Africa needs to make a radical shift towards involving ordinary people in spearheading their own social and economic development initiatives, instead of a top down services delivery mechanism that culminates into a wheelbarrow state, says Deputy Minister of Public Works Jeremy Cronin. "Those tremendous values of the struggle of the '70s and '80s in particular, of public participation, got a little bit lost and the message that we tended to send was Aluta discontinua. Jeremy Cronin "Thanks a lot for voting for us and we as the bureaucracy, will take over the full responsibility of service delivery while the public awaits without involvement," he said. Cronin believes, this type of "wheelbarrow service delivery" needs to be replaced with more public participation, such as having the public build their own houses and take care of their own resources. He says driving these initiatives, that culminate in grass-roots communities taking care of their own communities, such as home-based care, doing food gardens, feeding orphans and providing school feeding is what he is most passionate about. "It's so refreshing to see programmes that work well, when they work. "They (the public) tend to do these programmes themselves on a voluntary basis in any case and we are able to move in with our programmes and resources," he says. For him what is wonderful about these programmes, is the partnerships and relationship that is created with the government, where the government ceases to become a service delivery machine that delivers services to the people. "In these programmes, communities become engaged and help in taking care of their own resources as well-built community cohesion. "People begin to take care of their communities and the municipalities must assist that. It's not communities that sit back and say the government must fix that," he said. This is even more pivotal in communities that are ravaged by social ills, such as poverty, Aids and drugs. "It's amazing in the programmes that work well how it builds confidence. You know we are dealing with households in South Africa where there is multigenerational unemployment were grandparents, parents and now an 18 year old youth have never experiences the socialising impact of work and the lousy capitalist labour market just isn't creating jobs. There is a massive market failure," he says. It is these public employment programmes are an important space for creating an alternative form of work and validating work that does not necessarily need one to work for a boss. He thus takes issue with the opposition and the DA for arguing against these government interventions and labelling them as programmes that do not constitute "real work". "Well it is a whole lot more real than handing out pamphlets for some estate agent at a street corner. This is rewarding as it gives dignity to households without income streams, when it works well," he says. However, he argues that part of what tends to slow down social and economic development in SA can be traced back to the negotiations agreement of 1994, as big business used the democratic breakthrough to disinvest outside of South Africa, betraying the commitments made in favour of giving fat dividends to foreign investors. "We were very naive in the early years of democracy as we sort of opened windows and doors because we thought we were going to have a flood of foreign direct investment. Instead what happened is that we had a huge amount of surplus flowing out of the country, making us reliant on speculative money." He says these are part of the reasons why South Africa now finds itself in a conundrum, of a democratic state that has a redistributive delivery, but very bureaucratic and unable to mobilise people to drive their own development. This is even made more difficult by the continuing massive loss of capital to foreign investors. However, Cronin highlights that certain achievements were still worth celebrating, such as more than 3 million RDP houses built since 1994 for poor people, half a million solar geysers and about 17 million people on social grants, which lessens the extent of poverty on the lives of the poor. For a man who was born in a typical English speaking middle class family, Cronin's participation in politics was against his parents' advice. "They sat me down and said whatever you do, please do not go into politics, leave that to the Afrikaners and the blacks, so it was a very typical English family," he said. However, while studying philosophy at UCT in 1968, a global student movement strike broke out, and its distant echoes descended on the university. He was then drawn in by its distant echo, after a close friend alerted him of an alternative "communist university" taking place on campus. "Very quickly I then joined the underground of the South African communist party," he says. However, throughout his political life and many years of being harassed by police, his mother would turn out to play a very key and supporting role in his life. "My mother is completely apolitical and a very sweet person who loved her children. So when the police arrived at 3 o'clock in the morning, she opened the door and offered them tea," he says. He says time spent in Paris as a postgraduate student gave him the opportunity of making more formal links with the exile network, which eventually led to him working for the ANC at its headquarters in Lusaka. "I was then deployed in Lusaka at the ANC headquarters, working with Joe Slovo and Steve Tshwete alongside Tito Mboweni and Joel Netshitenzhe," he says. He then received training in how to lose a tail, do clandestine work and create bucket bombs. Among those who trained [him] was former defence minister Ronnie Kasrils. On growth of SACP, Cronin says it is the unity among its current leaders that played a critical role. There was quite a heavy attack on the communist party led by the Thabo Mbeki and the others, so inside the national executive committee of the ANC there were tough arguments and battles. "I think what helped us was that under the leadership of Blade Nzimande and Solly Mapaila a little bit later, we really started to build large campaigns like the financial sector campaign and the Cuban solidarity campaign," he says. From: http://tnaepaper.co.za/DRIVE/main%20edition/22072015/epaperpdf/21.pdf -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. 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