Jaspreet Kindra
In a move clearly directed at next month’s alliance summit, President Thabo Mbeki fired a salvo at the Left this week by hotly defending the government’s adoption of the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) strategy.
The alliance indaba, which takes place in the same month as the broader growth summit, will thrash out policy differences between the African National Congress and its union and communist allies.
Writing in ANC Today, the party’s on-line weekly, Mbeki cites Zimbabwe’s debt woes as an example of what could have happened in South Africa if the Left’s recommended route of “live now and pay later” had been followed.
For the first time, he stressed that Gear was adopted in response to a pre-1994 election ANC document, Ready to Govern, and the RDP’s call to “address the issue of macro-economic balances” and budget deficit.
The Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party have consistently accused their ruling partner of deviating from the party’s socialist reform agenda the RDP in favour of Gear. Economic differences underpinned an unprecedented public row between the allies last year.
He says despite policy decisions reflected in Ready to Govern and RDP documents the adoption of Gear has caused “persisting controversy within the broad democratic movement”.
“The strategy to finance our development with our own resources rather than depend on borrowed money was denounced as ‘neo-liberal’ and a betrayal of the revolution to the so-called ‘Washington consensus’.”
He says the Left wanted the government to follow the example of Zimbabwe that, since its independence in 1980, “financed its social and economic development on the basis of a large budget deficit, financed by unsustainable domestic and foreign borrowing”.
While Zimbabwe had made considerable progress in education, health and rural development, “sooner or later it had also to meet its debt obligations. Regrettably it defaulted, simply because many years of economic decline had resulted in the unavailability of resources to finance the accumulated debt.”
South Africa was seeking to finance “social and economic upliftment” through its own resources and not borrowed money.