Three years have passed since the inception of the RDP. Two writers consider how it is faring today
Hein Marais
THE Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) debate has become a pantomime, a rehearsal of predictable affirmations and affectations, gripes and allegations.
Issuing from the government comes the cheery mantra that the RDP remains the cornerstone of all policy, even the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy programme. The left retaliates with doleful indictments of betrayal, as it catalogues the discrepancies between the RDP-in-practice and the grand promises of the base document, the first version of the programme drawn up by the African National Congress, the Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
Both sides can trundle out impressive evidence to buttress their claims. The government points to a slew of advances, from school feeding schemes to land-reform activities to the new labour regime.
Progressive critics invoke the desultory findings of a recent RDP audit commissioned by the RDP Council and are dismayed by the violations of the RDP Base Document.
But they all the miss the point. The RDP has been gradually and methodically metamorphosed into a programme that is neither the touchstone of, nor a mere sop to, the transformatory demands that brought the ANC to power.
It has mutated into something altogether different.
This process did not occur with the closure of the RDP office a year ago, nor was it suddenly effected by the elevation of a conservative macro-economic strategy to pre-eminence last winter.
The fate of the RDP has been consonant with government pronouncements and policies which have shown considerable consistency since 1994.
Commendable activities have been spawned and they will probably increase. But their overall effect is not to dismantle or weaken the structural causes of inequality. On the contrary, these inequalities are being reinforced by policies that predicate transformation on the prior servicing of the prerogatives of capital.
Gear consummated this approach, but its lineage extends back fuzzily even to pre- election economic policy outlines of the ANC.
It was manifest also in the RDP White Paper which bristled with thinly veiled injunctions that would later be elaborated in Gear.
Which is why, 30 months ago already, economists Vishnu Padayachee and Asghar Adelzadeh warned that “those welcoming the RDP White Paper will share a belief that policies involving any form or degree of effective state intervention are antithetical to economic growth”.
“Sadly,” they concluded, “it appears that there are far too many in this latter category inhabiting the corridors of state power in the new South Africa.”
The RDP is alive, but in an incarnation few of its original architects could have anticipated. Rather than serving as a touchstone for, and engine of, transformation, its utility lies elsewhere – as a stabilising agent active in two, related realms.
* The first is ideological.
Inscribed in the RDP is the political- historical continuity between the Freedom Charter and the reality of an ANC government.
Its political resonance as a programme of mooted transformation prevents it from being discarded formally – despite the private derision of even some leading ANC figures.
Within the context of the national liberation struggle, the RDP signifies continuity. Within the transition, it signifies unity.
Indeed, it is within the nation-building project that the RDP’s utility is manifest. Here it functions as an axis around which the principles of inclusion, conciliation and stability can be promoted in tangible form. Within its ambit, disparate interests are seen to become reconciled in a unifying “national endeavour”.
In this discourse, the self-help activities of working class residents and the unbundling exercises of corporations share the same stage as expressions of a postulated “unity of purpose”, of a new patriotism.
* The second realm is socio-political. As Latin American countries have discovered, a social development programme cannot be appended to (let alone integrated with) a macro-economic strategy characterised by privatisation, deregulation, fiscal austerity, trade liberalisation and the predominance of the financial sector over production and commerce.
Not only the programme’s sweep, but its very character and logic is overwritten by the macro-economic context which, in our case, adheres to the contours of neo- liberal orthodoxy.
Adopting such policies might well be “inevitable” – as the voices of reason insist. But to claim that the RDP survives in this context as a programme of transformation is spurious.
As phrased by Mexican sociologist Carlos Villa: “Neo-liberalism considers the growth of poverty to be a pathology, not a consequence of the economic system.”
The upshot is that the government “isolates poverty from the process of capital accumulation and economic development, and reduces the solution to designing specific social policies”.
Anyone willing to probe beyond the sheen of official rhetoric will recognise the reconstructed RDP in Villa’s formulation. As a patchwork of developmental activities, it now functions as a stabilising agent which (at best) contains poverty within an overall economic strategy that reproduces and fortifies social inequality.
Is it the best we can hope for? Surely not. But the search for alternatives will remain stunted and warbled as long as the left insists that a happier route remains imbedded somewhere in its holy grail, the RDP Base Document, awaiting only its excavation by those faithful to its vision. That RDP is dead. Another has arisen to take its place. Long live the RDP!
Journalist and researcher Hein Marais’s book South Africa: The Political-Economy of Transformation will be published soon by UCT Press and Zed Books