View from Up Close: Why this plan is different

 

Full disclosure: Saul Musker works for the Project Management Office in the Presidency. 

We are a people with an apparently endless capacity for both hope and cynicism. This is one of our best qualities – it also makes life in South Africa something of a roller coaster.

Why should we be hopeful, and not cynical, about the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan which President Cyril Ramaphosa announced to a joint sitting of Parliament on Thursday?

As many have pointed out, the plan includes a number of existing commitments, from energy reform to infrastructure investment. Some commentators have held this up as a weakness. Most of the same people would have complained if the plan was too new – “We don’t need more plans, we need to implement the ones we have!”

The truth is that we need a bit of both, and the plan represents exactly that. One of the important features of the plan, as the president’s address made clear, is that it selects a small number of mission-critical priorities from among the commitments of the National Development Plan and the State of the Nation Address earlier this year.

The difference lies in prioritisation and sequencing, two of the key ingredients for success. For many years, the government has lagged in implementation because of a dissipation of focus across too many competing issues, which has resulted in an inability to see the wood for the trees.

Another difference lies in the institutional mechanisms to ensure implementation. The recovery plan is backed by a National Economic Recovery Council, which will bring together the relevant members of Cabinet to facilitate rapid decision-making. This could be thought of as a “policy clearing mechanism”, enabling a determined focus on a few issues at a high enough level for decisions to be made and obstacles unblocked.

The plan is also empowered by dedicated capacity within the Presidency and National Treasury to drive implementation and accountability from the centre of government. Operation Vulindlela represents a “big push” to implement urgent reforms and monitor progress on key priorities, shifting from a compliance approach to an emphasis on outcomes and impact.

The Vulindlela team will report directly to the president and will advise the National Economic Recovery Council on decisions that need to be made and challenges or delays to be resolved. In this way, the mechanism combines technical capacity to execute complex reforms with political oversight to ensure that progress is made. Both are necessary for the recovery agenda to succeed.

So yes, there are some existing commitments in the plan. But these are the things that need to be done to place South Africa on a new growth trajectory. Implementation is make or break, and the mechanisms to do so are what count.

But the plan also contains new ideas to meet an unprecedented challenge. It would not be enough to simply dust off old plans, formulated before the global pandemic, and expect those to have the same effect in an entirely new context.

The employment stimulus is one of these new frontiers. In February this year, it would have been unthinkable to double the scale of public and social employment in the space of a few months – but this is what is being done to respond to massive job losses caused by the economic shock of the pandemic.

Again, the proof is in the doing. Each opportunity created or supported through the stimulus is fully funded, and most programmes have already begun implementation. 

The stimulus will support the expansion of many existing public employment programmes, such as our world-leading natural resource management programmes. And it will create new forms of employment where there is capacity to absorb labour – such as in the roughly 26,000 schools across the country, each of which can easily take on a handful of teaching and school assistants.

Importantly, it will go beyond traditional forms of public employment to support livelihoods in vulnerable sectors. This includes grant-making for the creative and cultural sector, where open calls for proposals will support artists and creators who have suffered a sudden loss of income. Early childhood development centres, most of which stopped receiving fees from parents during the lockdown, will also receive support to survive.

What South Africa does not need is a brand new plan. What we do need is to implement those existing commitments with the highest impact and respond to the immediate crisis through new forms of support and expanded social protection.

It is hard not to be cynical or impatient with the slow process of rebuilding a broken state.

But there is reason for hope, and cause to persevere. The best way for the government to regain public trust and convince the cynics is to demonstrate its capacity to implement a few things well.

That is exactly the point of the plan. DM