Plans can’t fix the problem

The National Planning Commission’s 10-year review this week was a real blast from the past. Many may not have realised that the commission, set up in the early days of Jacob Zuma’s presidency, still exists.

Those were days of some optimism, when it was possible to imagine that SA could lift its growth rate to 5% and halve its unemployment rate, in line with targets set by the commission.

It did some excellent diagnostics on SA’s social and economic challenges. But far from implementing its recommendations, the Zuma administration allowed state capture to wreck state institutions, taking the economy backwards into a decade of stagnation instead of onto the growth path the commission envisaged.

Of course, the government is to blame, as the commission this week said it was, for not championing the vast document that was the National Development Plan (NDP) of 2012. But it’s no good going back to the plan or its targets in 2023.

Since the NDP, the government has generated laudable plans to fix the economy, including President Cyril Ramaphosa’s own 2020 Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan, as well as a string of initiatives to put the necessary reforms in place — all of which featured in that long-ago NDP. What’s missing is a state capable and willing to do its part, and a governing party that can agree on and support the growth-boosting, private sector enabling reforms that are urgently needed. Plans can’t fix that.