Amy Musgrave
4 November 2009
Johannesburg — CONGRESS of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi has criticised the Zuma administration's slow pace in implementing economic policies the African National Congress (ANC) and alliance partners had agreed to.
Vavi and Cosatu have been highly critical of the new administration, and led opposition to key discussion documents such as Minister in the Presidency Trevor Manuel 's green paper on a national planning commission.
The debate on policy has been blamed for the delay in implementation, which Manuel also warned of last week. At the SA Municipal Workers' Union congress in Bela-Bela yesterday, Vavi said seven months after the election of President Jacob Zuma 's administration "we are beginning to be nervous about the slow pace at which we are moving in this new direction".
"The public discourse is not based on how we must move fast in the new direction Polokwane spoke about, but is characterised by a combination of defence of the status quo in policy and turf battles that do not take us forward," Vavi said.
At the Polokwane conference of the ANC in December 2007, delegates voted for policies they described as radically different to the growth, employment and redistribution strategy championed by former president Thabo Mbeki and his administration.
Vavi said he wanted next weekend's alliance summit to clarify the role of all of those in the economic cluster, and resolve disputes over the National Planning Commission.
The summit is likely to see intense debate. Already senior ANC leaders such as treasurer Mathews Phosa have said SA will maintain its "conservative and sound" fiscal and monetary policies.
But Vavi said yesterday that the country had done little to tamper with its apartheid growth path.
"The worst mistake we can ever make is to continue blaming only the international economic crisis for our woes. It is true that failure to regulate the financial institutions and the massive inequalities worldwide are largely responsible for the crisis. But in SA we have been in any case sitting on a ticking bomb since the 1994 democratic breakthrough."
Vavi said it was important that the country's ambitious job-saving and job-creating measures were implemented. The labour federation would propose alternatives to the country's economic policy at the alliance summit because immediate measures needed to be taken to protect industries and prevent a "total" economic meltdown.
SA has shed almost 1-million jobs as a result of the recession this year, and has usurped Brazil as the most unequal society in the world.
He said that the government, the Reserve Bank, business and labour "must focus all their policies on saving jobs, creating new jobs, ending the job-loss bloodbath as rapidly as possible and getting the South African economy moving forward again. We will provide detailed proposals on how this can be done, as a way of placing the alliance as an autonomous centre for policy formulation."
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