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Letter of the President
26 October, 2007
Today is better than yesterday
Two days before the publication of this edition of ANC TODAY, Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) published its Community Survey 2007. This is an important document about the progress we are making to meet the basic needs of the masses of our people.
I urge as many of our people as possible to study the Survey as it addresses matters that are central to the realisation of the goals of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). This is particularly important because of two reasons.
One of these is that our movement has an obligation constantly to make an objective assessment of whether we have put in place policies that are actually working in terms of advancing the objectives of the NDR.
This is necessary because such assessments would give us the scientific basis to determine whether we should change any of our policies and the direction that such possible change should take.
These objective assessments are also important because arguments have been advanced that our policies, especially since 1996, have actually impoverished the already poor black section of our population, especially the Africans.
The democratic state against poverty
From the very beginning of our democracy we put the struggle for the alleviation and eradication of poverty at the centre of our government programmes. We understood that the critical variable in this regard is job creation, and therefore the creation of the possibility for all our citizens to rely on their labour to extricate themselves from poverty and build a better life for themselves.
At the same time we understood that it would take time to accomplish this goal. We therefore knew that necessarily the social wage would have to play a critically important role in the struggle to help lift millions of our people out of poverty. In this context, we took the decision that we would not allow the market to be the sole determinant of what happens with regard to the achievement of the goal of a better life for all.
This meant that the democratic state had to play its role to help address what the RDP policy document described as 'meeting the needs of the people'. This is one of the reasons why we have consistently opposed the neo-liberal/neo-conservative propositions about 'a minimal state' which seek to surrender everything about the human condition to the market.
To implement one of the policy directives explicitly stated in the RDP document, we adopted GEAR in 1996, to address the challenge of correcting the negative macro-economic imbalances we had inherited from the apartheid years. One of the focal points of GEAR was the reduction of the budget deficit to ensure that our new democracy does not fall into a debt trap, as a result of which we would have to use a large part of our budget to service the national debt, necessitating even more borrowing.
This would mean that we would have to reduce the public resources available to achieve the development objectives of the NDR because of the large volume of public revenues that would have to be devoted to servicing an expanding public debt. The RDP document said that in order to achieve the socio-economic objectives it set we should do everything necessary to avoid this outcome, focusing centrally on achieving the required macro-economic balances.
As expressed explicitly in GEAR, we adopted measures to reduce the budget deficit, which we succeeded to do. At the same time, we took the decision that this budget deficit reduction should not negatively affect our capacity to respond to the RDP goal to meet the needs of the people.
The social wage
Accordingly, even a cursory study of the statistics on public social expenditure to expand the social wage would show that exactly during the period when we were reducing the budget deficit, our social expenditures increased.
It is exactly for this reason that we rejected and reject the false allegation that GEAR represents a neo-liberal assault on the standard of living of the working people, for the benefit of capital, and that it has resulted in further impoverishing the poor.
For the same reason we rejected and reject the entirely wrong assertion that GEAR constituted a 'structural adjustment' programme that had been imposed on us by the World Bank and the IMF, which we had willingly accepted because the leadership of our movement, the ANC, had become confirmed neo-liberals and servants of capital.
Historically, structural adjustment programmes implemented to secure the financial support of the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, which invariably include the reduction of budget deficits, have consistently insisted on, and resulted in the reduction of the public expenditures focused essentially on meeting the needs of the people.
As we have indicated, we refused to follow this path. By sovereign decision, we continued to increase the social wage even as we addressed the macro-economic challenge identified in the RDP document. We did this specifically for the benefit of the poor, completely rejecting the 'structural adjustment' prescription that the democratic state should abandon them, leaving it to the market to determine their fate.
The entirely false argument that sought to portray GEAR as an ANC betrayal of the working people has resurfaced in the recent past under the label of a so-called "1996 class project". The shameless fabrications advanced under this label have sought to discredit our movement in the eyes of the masses of our people, to prepare for its political defeat.
In this regard, the strategic objective, emanating from factions that seek to present themselves as "the left alternative", was and is the displacement of the ANC as the leader of the NDR. This offensive seeks to create the possibility for these anti-ANC factions to capture the leadership of the NDR for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with advancing the interests of our working people.
These working masses include the poorest in our country, who were among the new masses that carried the struggle for the victory of the democratic revolution on their shoulders. Those who pose as "the left alternative" to the ANC seek to exploit the continuing misery of these masses, which the democratic revolution inherited from the centuries of colonial and apartheid white minority domination, to persuade them that the ANC has betrayed them.
The criterion of truth
One of the fundamental propositions of materialist philosophy, to which the "left alternative" claims to adhere, says that practice is the criterion of truth. Accordingly, the only reliable standard we should use to measure whether our policies are succeeding to achieve the RDP objectives is practice.
This is exactly what the StatsSA Community Survey 2007 seeks to use, focusing specifically on one of the important strategic objectives of the NDR characterised in the RDP document as "meeting the needs of the people". To discharge its mandate as the official body charged with the vital task to establish and publish the facts about our social reality, StatsSA conducted the Community Survey to establish whether measurable practice confirms the truthfulness of our assertions that we have put in place and are implementing policies designed to meet the needs of the people.
StatsSA has entitled the Survey "The RDP Commitment: what South Africans say". This is because the Survey is composed from responses given by South Africans to StatsSA enumerators, who carried out a scientific survey based on a random sample of 255 000 households, which are structurally representative of our diverse population.
RDP commitments
The Survey says: "In 1994 upon winning the election and forming government, the ANC led government adopted the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) as a policy framework for development. The RDP is an integrated, coherent socio-economic policy framework which seeks to mobilise South Africans and their associated resources toward the final eradication of apartheid and the building of a democratic non-racial and non-sexist future.
"The RDP commitment consists of five key pillars of delivery:
"The report tabled today,(the Survey), after 13 years of taking the first step in the domain of democratising the state, deals specifically with measurement in the domains of meeting basic needs and developing our human resources. The other domains of the RDP such as building the economy in particular are continually reported upon through economic indicators. The measurement on meeting basic needs and developing our human resources, provides an objective assessment of the performance of the country, on the extent to which it has made progress or failed to make progress. By comparing information gathered over the last 13 years such assessment can be made.
"The results are based on objective enumeration of those things that can be visibly seen such as the number of households that have access to a particular form of energy and to what end they deploy such energy. It is not anecdote, but it is what South Africans say about their living conditions. It is therefore appropriately titled 'The RDP commitment: what South Africans say'."
What the people say
What then do the South Africans say? Among other things they say:
Tomorrow will be better than today
In the RDP, addressing the challenge of Meeting Basic Needs, we said: "Poverty is the single greatest burden of South Africa's people, and is the direct result of the apartheid system and the grossly skewed nature of business and industrial development which accompanied it. Poverty affects millions of people, the majority of whom live in the rural areas and are women. It is estimated that there are at least 17 million people surviving below the Minimum Living Level in South Africa, and of these at least 11 million live in rural areas. For those intent on fomenting violence, these conditions provide fertile ground.
"It is not merely the lack of income which determines poverty. An enormous proportion of very basic needs are presently unmet. In attacking poverty and deprivation, the RDP aims to set South Africa firmly on the road to eliminating hunger, providing land and housing to all our people, providing access to safe water and sanitation for all, ensuring the availability of affordable and sustainable energy sources, eliminating illiteracy, raising the quality of education and training for children and adults, protecting the environment, and improving our health services and making them accessible to all."
The Community Survey 2007 sought to hear the views of our people about what progress we have made to meet the basic needs of our people as identified by the RDP. It concludes by posing the question - "What do South Africans say in 2007?" It answers this question thus:
"The report tables what South Africans say. They say in these areas of delivery of Meeting Basic Needs, 2007 is better than 2001 and indeed 2001 was better than 1996. Today is better than yesterday."
This is an outcome of which our movement must be proud. However, it also constitutes the challenge that we must also make the commitment to the masses of our people that tomorrow will be better than today.
This page was last updated on Friday 26 October, 2007