At the Mail & Guardian critical thinking forum at the Castle in Cape Town two weeks ago, moderator Professor Adam Habib said we should not judge the annual state of the nation address by the poetic foundations of the text or the floridity of its language, but by how much it allows us to understand the state of the country. What did it say about the economic crunch, the fourth democratic election and how did it guide us in an era when all orthodoxies are disappearing? The panellists give their views:
Nyami Booi, chief whip, African National Congress: “The nation is quite healthy and the ANC quite competent to continue governing.” The economy, said Booi, was challenging but South Africa was not alone. The level of confidence of South Africa’s citizens was high and the ANC was humble enough to find solutions to continue to improve the lives of the poor. Booi said that local government was the biggest problem. Habib asked Booi if the ANC planned to pass legislation to ensure that a sitting president could not be prosecuted. “There’s no strategy like that [within the ANC],” said Booi. He said that ANC president Jacob Zuma recognised the constitutionality of South Africa and the ANC recognised that it had to defend the Constitution. “We will never defend an individual at the expense of society,” said Booi, adding: “The only thing we said was that members of the ANC should support Jacob Zuma. We have never been mandated [to pass such a law].”
Mangosuthu Buthelezi, chairperson of the Inkatha Freedom Party: “We met”, said Buthelezi, “in strange circumstances just two days after President Kgalema Motlanthe reportedly said that he had seen enough of the job [of president] to know that he didn’t want it.
“New energy is needed in government. I beg to differ with the view that everything’s fine. Each time I go to town and my wife asks me to buy groceries, I know how hard things are.”
Buthelezi criticised the practice of groping for political solutions to judicial problems. He said democracy was ailing with a failure to distinguish between party and state. Efficiency and competence were being lost.
He warned of a new denialism as no senior leaders were grappling with the economic meltdown; he compared this with the denialism about Aids and of crime.
Phillip Dexter, Congress of the People (Cope): “We got a state of another nation,” said Dexter, adding that he recognised little in it that resembled the country he lived in. “We’ve all been treading water for a couple of years,” he said.
There was a constitutional crisis; former president Thabo Mbeki had been removed by a putsch and this had been ignored in the address.
The attacks on the judiciary were missing and President Kgalema Motlanthe had not mentioned last year’s xenophobic attacks. Other events notably absent from his speech were the closure of the Scorpions and the SABC crisis.
“Essentially, the ANC was saying the answer to all these problems is social grants. Vote for us, we’ll give you social grants.”
Bantu Holomisa, the United Democratic Movement: “The address was typical of that of an outgoing head of state,” said Holomisa. It was aimed at winning hearts and minds of South Africans, to capture lost ground. There’s no way he would have said something contradictory to what the “palace” expected him to say.
Holomisa welcomed a paradigm shift in economic policy with decisive state intervention on the cards. He said that about 40-million blacks still queued for jobs, the democracy had failed to build black wealth creators.
“Words like integrity and trust will feature in the minds of people [as they head to the election] — can we trust this government when its leaders dodge their day in court?”
Tony Leon, Democratic Alliance: Leon said he had enjoyed this year’s address because it had been free of intellectual pretension and there had been no race-baiting. He had spoken at a Sunday Times panel on the state of the nation where both Wendy Luhabe and Mamphela Ramphele said that Bantu education had been better than that which we have now. “I wouldn’t have the chutzpah to make that statement but they did.”
Increasingly, he said, the ANC asked us to vote for a better yesterday because their key reference point is a period they were not responsible for: the apartheid years.
In the first 15 years of democracy as a first generation of born-free children completed a schooling cycle we lost 1,2-million learners who dropped out of the system. The class of 2007 revealed an outcome where only 7 000 of the 25 415 learners who passed maths and science at the higher grade were African.
“We spend an inordinate amount of time talking about a developmental state — so much of what we do is on the demand side and so little on the supply side. We debate how much or little government, how liberal or socialist it should be — “, but fail to talk about the nuts and bolts such as how we prepare our young people for the present economy.
He criticised Parliament’s term being extended only so that the national director of public prosecutions (NDPP) could be fired.
Patricia de Lille, Independent Democrats: She said that few people slept through the address as they used to do when Thabo Mbeki was president and she was happy with the plans for various economic stimuli. She said key concerns were that South Africa was weak on implementation and that the civil service was inefficient, bloated with cronies and beset by nepotism. There were 55 000 vacancies in the health sector alone and this posed an additional challenge. De Lille said a widespread embracing of renewable energy could create thousands of jobs. Her party proposed a wage subsidy for the 70% of young people who were unemployed. “We must give young people a space to come into the market.”
On the same topic Bantu Holomisa said the civil service should be depoliticised. He criticised South African Democratic Teachers’ Union members being given leave to campaign for the ANC and the Gauteng minister of education, Angie Motshekga, campaigning with Jacob Zuma rather than attending an important education meeting.
De Lille said the ID supported a budget deficit of between 2% and 3%. If elected, her party would lobby for 5 000 more social workers to prevent women and child abuse in poor communities. Problems also needed to be picked up before they became crises.