Over the past few weeks, the leadership of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) has been vilified for announcing the union's reservations about the national development plan (NDP). We have been characterised as "spoilers", and our leaders are described as "populists" and "demagogues" who suffer from "an infantile disorder". In this throwing of mud and trading of swearwords, little has been said about the substantive issues that Numsa has raised, in particular the unlikelihood of the policies of the NDP to deal effectively with the often mentioned challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
More worrying is how, in the aftermath of the adoption of the NDP at the ANC's 53rd national congress in Mangaung late last year, there is a refusal to look critically at the NDP, although it is a known fact that in the run-up to the ANC's policy conference in July 2012 some of the party's discussion documents raised serious and vexing questions about South Africa's proposed long-term socioeconomic development plan.
More astonishing is how, after Mangaung, the NDP became holy writ, immune to critical evaluation, despite the ANC national conference resolution describing the plan as "a living and dynamic document".
The "second transition" paper prepared for the ANC's July 2012 policy conference raised a number of questions about the NDP and called for engagement. It questioned whether the shying away on the part of the national planning commission from the concept of a "developmental state" and the commission's talk about a "capable state" were signs of an ideological and conceptual disjunction or not.
The discussion paper also noted "a certain sense of timidity in dealing with some of the matters of economic debate over the last few years".
Ongoing discrimination
To break free of this timidity, the ANC discussion document raised the following questions about certain proposals in the NDP:
- Are the main problems with the functioning of our labour markets, high wages and difficulties in firing workers, as suggested, or should we not also address the huge differences in pay between workers, on the one hand, and management and executives (including in the public sector), on the other, as well as ongoing discrimination in the labour markets?
- What about our weak system of public labour market information, especially for young people?
- How do the comprehensive NDP proposals on a low-carbon economy, and an inclusive and integrated rural economy and infrastructure development relate to industrial policy?
The ANC discussion document was not afraid to ask these questions: it was glaringly obvious that the NDP skirted issues of ownership, including in strategic sectors such as mining, finance and telecommunications.
The ANC argued that the NDP offered continuity and built on the foundations of the past 18 years, but its "second transition" document asked whether what is simply more of the same will help us to transform the economy so as to address the challenges of unemployment, poverty, inequality and growth.
The document even acknowledged the export orientation of the NDP, towards "higher value goods or niche markets (agriculture and agroprocessing, mining, business services, white goods and appliances, niches in clothing and footwear, and other mid-skill manufacturing) as well as global services such as business services and tourism" as opposed to inward industrialisation.
The ANC was unashamedly explicit about the contradictions between the NDP and the State Involvement in the Mining Sector report: it says that the "NDP is rather sceptical about the potential for mineral beneficiation as well as of labour-intensive manufacturing because of our high cost structure, labour costs and management acumen for large-scale labour-intensive manufacturing projects".
Amplify and raise
This is what the ANC special national executive committee meeting, held on February 27 2012, raised, and it is exactly these points that Numsa has sought to amplify and raise. The central committee meeting of Numsa, held on March 4 to March 8, was not the first meeting at which the union discussed and pronounced on the NDP. As a union, we have a history of critical engagement with the planning commission and the NDP, and it is worth setting the record straight in terms of that engagement.
Numsa was one of the sponsors of a special resolution at the Congress of South African Trade Unions's 10th national congress in September 2009 on the green paper on the national planning commission. The resolution we sponsored called for an alignment of the commission with the perspective on the commission that was developed at the ANC's 52nd national conference, held in Polokwane in 2007, and with the outcomes of the tripartite alliance's economic summit that took place in October 2008.
After the release of the commission's diagnostic report, Numsa's central committee, in the wake of its meeting in December 2011, publicly welcomed its diagnosis of South Africa's challenges – unemployment, poverty and inequality. The central committee disagreed, however, with the explanation of why, over a 17-year period, the democratic order has failed to resolve the identified challenges.
The central committee said that "the symptoms are then treated as problems in themselves, instead of them being expressions of an underlying economic relation that persistently generates them". We also felt that there was a lack of critical evaluation of policies pursued since 1994, and that what the diagnostic report termed "policy lapses" were nothing but policy errors.
In May 2012, at the time of various discussions on the draft development plan, Numsa issued, at a public colloquium held at the University of Johannesburg, two discussion documents on the plan. In them, the union raised its doubts about some of the instruments the NDP proposed to use to achieve its noble objectives.
Again, we felt that the plan was not honest enough in its explanation of why the investment rate should have been so low in the post-apartheid period, nor on how conditions would be changed so that higher levels are achieved between now and 2030. The two discussion documents were loaded on to Numsa's website and a call was made for comment on them.
As an independent affiliate of Cosatu, Numsa submitted its position on the draft NDP to the planning commission after Kuben Naidoo of the commission's secretariat addressed the union's central committee in August 2012. So it is not as if Numsa, its central committee and leadership woke up on March 7 and started criticising the NDP. We have been consistent in our criticism. It is unfortunate that some among us did not bother to hear what we have been saying since 2009.
Robustly engaged
The only new thing that the March meeting of the Numsa central committee added was to point to the similarity between the proposals in the NDP and the policies of the Democratic Alliance (DA).
We have also made this comparison in public to open it to scrutiny. We know that our comparison of the NDP and DA policies is harsh. As our central committee statement said, speaking as members of the tripartite alliance, this discovery was equally "painful" and "extremely disturbing" to us.
But concrete facts and evidence, not sentiment, ultimately guide our politics and actions. It is on the basis of these facts and this evidence – not insults, swearwords and character assassinations – that we wish to debate with others and be robustly engaged on the issues.
The ANC and its leadership must tell us what changed between the time they issued the national conference discussion document on the "second transition" in February 2012 and the sitting of the conference in Mangaung in December 2012.
They must inform us how the concerns about the NDP that they raised as the leadership of the movement have been addressed. Failure to do so would be tantamount to switching lanes without putting on an indicator – the kind of action that is bound to lead to disarray and accidents.
From our side, and as a mature organisation, we will be the first to admit to and humbly retract anything that is shown to be incorrect in our assertions about the NDP.
We are also in support of the call by the Food and Allied Workers Union for an urgent tripartite alliance summit on the NDP. There is a lot that binds us: let's not allow the NDP to divide us.
Cedric Gina is the president of Numsa and works for BHP Billiton in Richards Bay