This week, the ANC released a third plan to address the country’s “economic emergency” since Cyril Ramaphosa became president in 2018.
The first was Ramaphosa’s economic stimulus and recovery plan, released in September 2018. Then there was the economic recovery and reconstruction plan of October 2020. This week, after a meeting of the ANC’s national executive committee, he unveiled a 10-point economic action plan.
It was announced as an ANC plan, rather than a government one. The three plans are similar, though this week’s had a heavy focus on manufacturing and reindustrialisation.
Importantly, Ramaphosa emphasised that the focus this time would be on “implementation, implementation, implementation”.
Of course a plan means nothing without execution — and this is why the first two barely shifted the needle; there was no urgency in proper implementation and therefore no meaningful results.
The action plan includes using electricity tariffs and investment in transmission infrastructure to drive economic activity, accelerating the recovery of the freight and logistics sector, rebuilding the country’s chrome and manganese industries, bolstering the capacity of the state to manage major projects, driving local economic development and investing in local infrastructure, boosting public employment, expanding SME support, enabling the growth of provincial economies, diversifying the country’s trade networks and partnerships (likely to offset potential failures in trade talks with the US) and ensuring effective budget and macroeconomic co-ordination.
There is little new in the plan. Yet Ramaphosa was adamant that this time things would be different..
“The persistence of low economic growth, severe unemployment and the impact of global trade instability requires that we take action. We must therefore accelerate the pace and massively scale up the efforts that we need to take.
“We will focus on implementation and delivery. So it is going to be implementation, implementation, implementation,” he said.
The FM understands that Ramaphosa has also pushed his cabinet ministers to ensure that clear targets are met for their respective departments by February, when he will assess their performance against those targets.
An “economic war room” will be established in the presidency to “co-ordinate cross-government performance monitoring and publish regular scorecards on progress”, he said on Monday.
“We will want to focus on this at all layers of government — at national, provincial and especially at local government level. We need to rebuild and reform state-owned enterprises [SOEs] to be effective developmental instruments. We are already seeing quite a lot of progress in a number of our SOEs as they are regaining their own capability and attracting experienced and well-qualified people to come and work there.
“Efficient and well-governed SOEs are vital to economic growth and vital to our national competitiveness. Corruption corrodes competitiveness. We therefore insist on consequence management, lifestyle audits and enforcement of integrity standards across the public sector.”
Civil society sees the legislation as key to …limiting the often insidious effects of political interference on the public service
Then Ramaphosa got to the nub of it — the real reason plans have failed time and time again. Plans can work only if the state, across all three levels, functions.
“Fundamental to the success of these efforts will be sound institutional governance. Professionalisation and merit-based appointments are going to be non-negotiable,” he said.
“The ANC supports the implementation of the public service professionalisation framework, ensuring that the public administration is skilled, ethical and insulated from professional politics. The capacity of the state to deliver on projects requires serious engineering, financial and project management capabilities that need to be rebuilt.”
The cabinet adopted the National Implementation Framework for the Professionalisation of the Public Service in 2022, but getting it institutionalised to make a real difference in the ability of the state to implement policy effectively and efficiently has been slow.
Legislation that will go a long way towards professionalising and depoliticising the state is set to come before the National Assembly in mid-October.
Whether the ANC votes in favour of the Public Service Amendment Bill will be a test of its political resolve to professionalise the state and enable it to deliver on crucial reforms.
The bill’s amendments include key provisions to clarify roles and responsibilities of government leadership and make clear distinctions between political and administrative leaders. According to the Public Affairs Research Institute, the bill shifts authority and responsibility for the administration, appointments and human resource management from the executive authority (read: politician) of a national or provincial department to the departmental or administrative head, for example directors-general. Critically, the legislation will bar senior public servants from holding political office.
Civil society sees the legislation as key to bringing the civil service in line with the goals expressed in the National Development Plan and to limiting the often insidious effects of political interference on the public service; the aim is for a more stable relationship between the political and administrative spheres of the state.
The ANC’s push for greater professionalism and speedier implementation of key economic reforms requires a public service able to execute such a plan — but will it vote in favour of amendments that push the public service further from the effects of political interference? Time will tell.
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