Polokwane — The president of South Africa's ruling African National Congress, Thabo Mbeki, defended the party's record under his leadership, condemned some practices in the party and confronted head-on its divisions in his political report delivered at the opening of the ANC's national conference on Sunday. Excerpts:
… [T]he character of our movement at this juncture calls for a leadership seized with ethical fervour that defined the great traditions of our predecessors.
In this regard, our collective responsibility in this important gathering is to ask ourselves whether in the recent past our movement has not gravitated away from its moral axis…?
If so, what measures are needed consciously to restore the moral force of our movement so that, within the organisation and throughout all levels of the state our movement is inoculated from the insidious enticements of corruption, patronage and lust for power?
In this regard, the newly elected leadership, fired up with passionate selflessness and steeped in the vintage traditions of our movement, will bear the huge responsibility to catalyse our people's aspirations for a social order free of the trappings of poverty and the entanglements of racism and sexism.
As we meet here today we should all remember that history has imposed on the shoulders of our movement and therefore on this collective, the burden to lead all our people, whether they belong to our organisation or not. Accordingly, the eyes of millions of our people and many beyond our shores are fixed at this conference…
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST POVERTY
…A central pillar of our National Democratic Revolution is our strong, sovereign economy, whose main objective is to eliminate poverty and radically reduce inequality. The major strategy to reduce poverty and inequality is to enable the economy to create jobs. These are the core values of the RDP [ Reconstruction and Development Programme] and they remain the central tenets of the ANC's economic and social policies.
The Economic Resolutions of the [2002] 51st National Conference were reflected in the outcome of the Presidential Growth and Development Summit in 2003, in the ANC's election manifesto in 2004, and in the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (AsgiSA) which was launched by government at the beginning of 2006, after extensive consultations within the Alliance [with the Congress of SA Trade Unions and the SA Communist Party] and with our social partners. AsgiSA confirmed the election manifesto's commitment to halve poverty and unemployment between 2004 and 2014.
AsgiSA indicated that there were six constraints that needed to be addressed in order to allow for sustained growth above 4.5 percent up to the end of 2009, and over 6 percent on average between 2010 and 2014. The investment target rate is to increase investment as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from 15 percent in 2004 to 25 percent by 2014. Investment would have to increase annually by 10 percent to achieve this target.
Since 2002, the economy has grown at a gathering pace. In every single year, 2002 included, growth exceeded the 3 percent average growth rate of the first decade of freedom. Since 2004 the growth rate has been over 4.5 percent every year, including this year. This is the first time in South Africa's history that we have had four successive years of growth above 4.5 percent.
The result is that, so far, we have exceeded our AsgiSA growth target. It also means that real income per capita—our average income per person—rose from R29 000 per person in 2001 to over R35 000 per person in 2006. This is a sharp increase in per capita income. Per capita income had been rising at close to 4 percent per person annually since 2004.
It is not surprising therefore, that investment as a percentage of GDP has already risen above 21 percent from 15 percent in 2002. This is a result of fixed investment growing by well over the 10 percent AsgiSA target in recent years.
Government infrastructure expenditure and spending on preparations for 2010 have made a significant contribution. However, government investment, including the public enterprises, while higher than ever, is still only half as large as private sector fixed investment.
2010 related investments make up less than 10 percent of government expenditure. This indicates that our investment acceleration is not a 2010 based bubble at all—it is simply the most sustained, broadest and greatest investment surge in South Africa's recorded economic history, and it will continue long after the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
There are a number of reasons for our growing success in rolling back poverty—the most important factors are the increase in employment and the increase in social grants over this period.
In the 51st National Conference we agreed that macroeconomic stability was a key to our future. Since then we made enormous progress towards greater macro-stability. Government debt has fallen from around 50% of GDP to little more than 30% of GDP. We have moved from a budget deficit of 2.8 percent in 1999 to a small surplus of 0.6 percent in the budget year ending March 2007.
However, we have not done this at the expense of increasing public spending. Public spending has risen by around 9.4 percent in real terms annually for the past five years. This means that spending per person has grown at around twice as fast as the growth rate. And yet we have done this while reducing our government debt and the deficit.
The inflation rate since 2003 has been within the target range of 3% to 6%. While inflation is higher than it should be today, with CPIX at 7.3 percent, we should recall that at the time of the Stellenbosch conference inflation had shot up to 13 percent which forced the South African Reserve Bank to raise the interest rate to 17 percent. This puts the current interest rate of 14.5 percent into perspective….
Black ownership of the economy as a whole remains very low; a recent survey put black ownership of the economy at about 12 percent, which is a considerable improvement since 2002 which was probably about half of that level, though we do not have good data for that year. If we take foreign ownership of SA based firms into account, black ownership might be about 15 or 18 percent of local ownership. While we are progressing, our rate of progress is unacceptably low, and we cannot take our eyes off the empowerment challenge….
FURTHER WORK ON THE STRUGGLE AGAINST POVERTY AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT
With regard to our work on social transformation, bringing a better life to all our people and pushing back the frontiers of poverty, we are the first to state that we are still faced with enormous challenges. Yet, at the same time, as far as the progress that we have made since 1994 is concerned, the facts speak for themselves…
We certainly still have a long way to go to halve unemployment between 2004 and 2014. This would mean getting the rate of employment down to 14 percent or lower. We are not there yet, but we are moving steadily in the right direction.
Poverty has also been moving in the right direction. Using a poverty line of R3 000 per year, the percentage of South Africans living below the poverty line fell from 51.4 percent in 2001 to 43.2 percent in 2006.
The poverty gap, which is the gap between the average incomes of those below the poverty line and the poverty line fell by about 20 percent between 2001 and 2006. The income of the poorest 10 percent of the population rose from R519 in 2001 to R734 (in constant rands) in 2006. This is a 40 percent increase in the incomes of the poorest 10% of our people in 5 years.
For the poorest 20% the increase has been from R758 in 1996 to R1, 051….
Again, if we measure the percentage of people who report that they sometimes, often or always go hungry, this fell from 24% of our people to about 13 percent between 2002 and 2006. The number often or always hungry fell from about 7 percent to under 3 percent over the same period.
Part of the improvement of the condition of the poor is due to rising employment, rising wages and tax relief for lower income earners. A significant part is attributed to the importance of social grants. 2,587,373 people were receiving social grants in 1999. Today over 12 million people are receiving these grants, partly because, as proposed in Stellenbosch, the eligible age for the Child Support Grant was raised from 7 to 14….
Significant progress has been made in the provision of social wage as evidenced by the following gains:
The proportion of households who use electricity increased from 56% in 1996 to 80% in 2007. The proportion of households who have access to piped water in their homes or on site increased from 61% in 1996 to 70% in 2007. Households with access to flush toilets increased from 52% in 1996 to 60,4% in 2007.
The number of households living in formal dwellings increased from 69% in 1996 to 71% in 2007. More than R50 billion of assets, in the form of subsidised housing and land, were transferred to poor households in the period 1994 to 2003….
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS
… [T]he 52nd National Conference will have to ask itself a very direct question and answer this question honestly and frankly – is the ANC capable of discharging its responsibilities to the masses of our people, the peoples of Africa and the rest of the world during this critical phase of our National Democratic Revolution! …
I am certain that the delegates will understand why I have said Conference must pose certain pointed questions to itself. As we all know, the reason is that during the years since our liberation in 1994, certain negative and completely unacceptable tendencies have emerged within our movement, which threaten the very survival of the ANC as the trusted servant of the people it has been for 96 years…
As a consequence of the disease to which our Secretary General drew our attention, all of us, cadres of our movement and the ANC itself, have been exposed to the shame and humiliation of people who are our members, who come to meetings of our structures carrying weapons, with the intention to terrorise members of the ANC to bow to their will.
We have been exposed to the pernicious practice of people buying others membership cards of the ANC to guarantee themselves a captive group of voting cattle, whose members had and have absolutely no desire to join the ANC.
All of us are aware of the poisonous phenomenon foreign to our movement, which many of us have characterised as the ownership of some members by other members. These are people who, while holding ANC membership cards, do not belong to the ANC but belong to those who paid their subscriptions.
This includes unqualified people who get appointed to such positions as Municipal Managers, placemen and women who serve as the pliable tools of their political masters, and who are used to advance the commercial and political interests of their handlers and patrons.
We are aware of members of the ANC whom our Secretary General characterised as destructive elements which tarnish the image and effectiveness of our movement. These are people who abuse their positions in government consciously, purposefully and systematically to engage in corrupt practices aimed at self-enrichment.
These engage in criminal and amoral activities driven by the hunger for personal gain, acquired at the expense of the poor of our country, who constitute the millions-strong constituency which regularly votes for the ANC, and which we proudly claim to represent.
We have been horrified to hear reports of ANC members who occupy positions in government, who have murdered one another as they competed about who would emerge as the victor in the process of awarding government tenders to private sector companies in return for financial and material kickbacks paid by the winning bidders.
All of us, delegates to the 52nd National Conference of the ANC, are perfectly conscious of the ferocious and unprincipled battles that took place last year as our structures selected our candidate local government councillors for the 2006 municipal elections…
The fact of the matter, whether this is correct or false, is that members of the ANC and others among our citizens, have informed me that even the unprecedented fight for positions in the leadership that will be elected at this National Conference is informed by exactly the same imperatives identified by our Secretary General.
The allegation that has been made is that at least some of the contending groups in this regard have acted as they have, with an eye to who would serve in positions of authority in our system of governance after the 2009 General Elections.
In the paragraphs I have quoted the Secretary General pointed correctly to the impact that low levels of political education among some of our members has on our capacity to fight corruption in our ranks, as well as other negative tendencies.
Repeatedly over the years, our leadership has drawn attention to the critical importance of political education and cadre development. Again the Secretary General will reflect on this matter.
The reality is that we have not attended to this matter with the seriousness and consistency it demands. As a result of this failure we must therefore expect that we will have members who, among other things, will have very little familiarity with the history and traditions of the ANC, its policies, its value system and its organisational practices.
One other negative consequence of this, in addition to what the Secretary General said, is that this makes it easy for people with bad intentions to mislead such members. Over the years we have seen the persistent propagation of outright falsehoods intended to discredit our leadership.
These have included entirely false claims about a shift of the policy making function from the constitutional structures of the movement to government, intolerance of different views and therefore the suppression of open discussion especially in the NEC, centralisation of power in the Government Presidency, and abuse of state power, thus further reducing the capacity of our movement to play its proper role as our country's ruling party.
All these are complete fabrications. However, it is easy for members who, as I have said, have scant familiarity with the policies and procedures of the ANC. This is particularly so if those who spread these falsehoods are people whose word our members would have no reason to doubt.
In this regard I must mention yet another challenge that has assumed a higher profile during the years since our last National Conference. This is the practice that again is entirely foreign to our movement – the practice of using untruths, of resort to dishonest means and deceit to achieve particular goals.
Throughout the most difficult years of our struggle, our movement always refused to resort to these means to hide our reverses and difficulties and present a more optimistic picture than the circumstances justified. It was for this reason that what the late Amilcar Cabral once said gained great popularity in our ranks – tell no lies: claim no easy victories!…
One of our continuing and important tasks is further to strive to promote the campaign for moral regeneration, based on doing everything we can to develop a value system in our country inspired by the concepts that are integral to the ubuntu/botho world outlook. This is central to our pursuit of the objective of building a caring and people-centred society….
All the challenges I have mentioned, including the… need and possibility to accelerate the process of socio-economic transformation, once again emphasise the need for us decisively to strengthen the ANC. As our experience during the last five years has shown, this is not just a matter of numbers. Critically it is a matter of the quality of our membership.
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Without such a membership, which is steeped in the policies, the value system and the traditions of the ANC, our movement will fail in its effort both to respond to the challenges we have mentioned as well as act in an effective manner to advance the National Democratic Revolution, in the interests of the masses of our people.
By the time we close this National Conference we must have discussed this matter and taken decisions that will be implemented, literally to save both the ANC and our revolution. I am certain that all those of us who have followed the evolution of the political situation in our country and movement over the last five years will have no hesitation in agreeing that the single and most strategic task we face is to strengthen the ANC both quantitatively and qualitatively to the point of understanding and accepting the proposition – better fewer, but better!
In this regard I must also make the point that Conference should examine very carefully the assertion that has been made insistently for some time, that our movement is divided. We must ask the question and discuss it frankly – if we are divided, what divides us! If we are divided, what should we do to address this challenge, given the naked truth that a divided ANC can never discharge its historic responsibilities to the masses of our people!
All of us make the statement genuinely that we will emerge from this National Conference more united than ever before. We must ensure that this is not an empty slogan. We cannot afford to make merely rhetorical statements about the issue of our principled unity, with the purpose only to comfort our troubled hearts and minds. Conference must therefore confront this issue frontally, so that we do indeed emerge from this 52nd National Conference more united than ever before….
I would like formally to propose to the delegates that this National Conference should give itself time to discuss these matters that are of central importance to the very nature and survival of our movement as truly a people's movement.
Fortunately, the entirety of our leadership at various levels is present in this hall. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of our branches also have their representatives in this same hall.
These representatives now have the possibility to ask our leadership, including the President, any and all questions they may seek to pose, which would clarify any and all issues that have troubled them during the last five years, affecting the functioning of our movement.
They have the possibility openly to contest any and all the assertions I have made, as I sought to identify some of the problems that have confronted our movement in the last five years…
Needless to say, one of the most difficult and painful challenges we have faced over the last five years have arisen around out of matters affecting our Deputy President. Part of the difficulty we faced in this regard, which has resulted in many of our members criticising the NEC for failing to provide leadership, was that here we were dealing with an unprecedented situation, and therefore had no body of experience that would help our leadership and movement to deal with this situation adequately. All of us hope that we will and can put these matters behind us sooner rather than later.
As I have said and as the National Conference knows, we are only five years away from celebrating the Centenary of our movement. This will be a moment of immense pride and great inspiration not only to our members and people, but also to the peoples of Africa, all black people everywhere, and all those in the world who are striving and dream of their all-round emancipation.
And therefore I pose the question once again - does the ANC have the will and capacity to lead our country and people over the next five years in a manner that will enable the nation to celebrate our Centenary in 2012 together…?
