The recession has forced the ANC to rethink its election manifesto. Rapule Tabane spoke to the party’s head of policy, Jeff Radebe
As in 1994, you’ve again identified job creation as a priority. What’s new?
People should believe in the ANC because we learn from our experiences. We’ve had the longest period of economic growth, we’ve created 500 000 jobs in the past five years and if we work together with business and other stakeholders we can do more. Remember that we reached our target of a million job opportunities this year, before the 2009 target.
You also talk of reducing crime by 7% to 10% annually. That’s been the government’s target for five years and it hasn’t been reached.
Contrary to public perceptions crime has been going down in the past few years, but one crime is one too many. We need to involve our people more in crime-fighting through street committees and community courts. We must also work harder at improving the criminal justice system, including correctional services, and speeding up the processing of courts so that we get rid of the awaiting-trial prisoner backlog.
Will you introduce an income grant for adults aged 18 to 25?
No, it was discussed but is not part of our plans. We’ll increase the child support grant for children under 18.
What is this ”developmental state” the ANC is working towards?
It entails the acceleration of government programmes that we’ve started over the years, such as industrial policy. We need to implement central planning so that this working in silos ends, because our people don’t care which layer of government provides services — they just want services. So the developmental state will also include a lot of integrated government work.
Economists say implementing your manifesto will cost billions of rands, which government doesn’t have …
We’ve always kept our promises and 2009 will be no different. We will realise all the commitments we make in our manifesto. I can assure South Africa that each and every item in the manifesto will be in the line budgets of government departments. We will not bankrupt the state, but the money will be there.
There are fears about a populist left government coming to power next year. What is your comment on that?
Those are very strange comments — it’s as if the ANC is a right-wing movement. The ANC has always been left-wing and our alliance with Cosatu and SACP didn’t start after Polokwane. We’re a parliament of South Africa and we include capitalists, communists and Christians. We’ve never been dominated by communists.
The SACP wants to nationalise Sasol. Is that also part of the ANC’s plans?
No, it’s not on the ANC agenda. You can ask the SACP about that.
What does the ANC mean by the ”decent work” it wants to create?
Laudable as our economic policies have been it’s clear poverty and unemployment are still a problem. Although there has been job creation we’ve also been faced with outsourcing and casualisation, which result in people being employed but not enjoying the benefits of employment and where employers can fire workers at whim. We have to increase the capacity of the labour department to ensure labour laws work for our people.
Some predict that the ANC will fail to increase its majority for the first time since 1994 …
I have no crystal ball, but the love and support for the ANC by our people is unshaken, in my view. If you look at the meeting initiated by black professionals in Sandton last week, it was oversubscribed. We’ve seen so much support where we’ve been recently and even people we haven’t seen in a long time are coming out to campaign.
Won’t ANC leaders who formed Cope take some of your support with them?
The ANC has been the leader of the liberation movement for 96 years and people understand that it’s their organisation. How can people who cannot accept a democratic outcome [at Polokwane] be taken seriously? They’re interested only in themselves. We have yet to hear what they’re going to do for our people.