President Thabo Mbeki’s ”conciliatory noises” to the African National Congress’s communist and trade union allies at the weekend have been interpreted as a strategic shift ahead of next year’s elections.
In a speech in Rustenburg marking the ANC’s 91st anniversary, Mbeki surprised members of the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) by raising the Growth and Development Summit, scheduled for May, and describing it as a critical forum for producing answers to poverty and promoting economic growth.
The SACP and Cosatu have been calling for the summit, which will also involve business and civic organisations, since 2001, seeing it as a forum in which alternatives to current economic policy can be debated.
Both alliance partners welcomed Mbeki’s reference to the summit, while a senior ANC member said he had ”certainly given it a profile”.
The SACP’s Umsebenzi online said this week: ”The growth and development strategy will not happen only through a single summit … it must have clear targets, time frames, implementation and review mechanisms, if it is to lay a basis for sustainable job creation.”
ANC insiders said they believed the speech set out to ratchet down tensions in the alliance because the ANC was moving into election mode. With more than a million members and superior infrastructure and organisational skills, Cosatu is a critical support base of the ruling party.
Mbeki also called on the ANC to strengthen links with trade unions to improve service delivery, while urging public sector unions to encourage members to become committed public servants.
He was reading from an abridged version of the ANC national executive committee’s anniversary statement, which urged members to work as ”honest members” of the SACP, Cosatu and the South African National Civic Organisation.
The statement said a critical product of the summit would be a ”firm agreement among the three social partners, the government, business and labour, on what should be done practically to improve the growth and development of our economy in a sustained manner”.
The new executive, which meets for the first time this weekend, has been charged with elaborating the ANC’s position on the ”outcomes” the party ”desires and expects” from the summit.
These, it said, included higher rates of investment, a higher savings ratio, acceleration of human resource development, job creation, black economic empowerment, development of small, microeconomic and medium business, acceleration of microeconomic reform, remedying race and gender imbalances, improving the economy’s international competitiveness and projecting a positive profile of South Africa.
ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngon-yama said the executive would review the resolutions adopted by the party’s national conference last month.
The executive will also elect 15 members to the ANC’s ”inner leadership core”, the national working committee. The committee also includes the party’s six office-bearers and a member each from the ANC Women’s League and the Youth League.