DURBAN - Indlulamithi has taken the South African political economy discourse a step further.
In July, Indlulamithi convened a session to look at what was emerging from the public discourse. Six documents were looked into. The Indlulamithi scenarios were conceived in 2015 and launched in 2018 by President Cyril Ramaphosa in the presence of his predecessors, Kgalema Motlanthe and Thabo Mbeki.
One of the six Indlulamithi scenarios is isibujwa – a “business as usual” situation of the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer. The other is gwara-gwara where the country loses direction with mounting corruption, lawlessness and wanton acts of violence.
Then there is nayi le walk, where the country experiences a high growth rate, poverty reduction and a decline in inequality. Under this scenario, South Africa will have a social contract in which it holds its head high.
At the launch, Ramaphosa made a number of observations, but two stood out: that we perhaps needed an additional scenario that is worse than gwara-gwara and that these scenarios are not left in the hands of the government but rather in the hands of citizens for their own human agency.
Perhaps he knew something, because just at the beginning of the year, the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) tanked for the third quarter in a row. Ratings agencies relegated us to junk status and Covid-19 buried us. Ramaphosa perhaps envisaged that the worst was yet to come – a corruption scandal where the dying and the dead become fodder for the living.
Vultures are hovering around to pounce on the carcass of the elephant. The aroma of the R500 billion stimulus package is attracting more vultures. South Africa is not new to government and private sector scenarios. Since 2002, the government has worked on a long-range view on the possible outcomes.
At our meeting recently, three institutions ventured that by 2030, South Africa could achieve above 5 percent growth with unemployment dropping below 20 percent and debt-to-GDP ratio hovering around 60 percent. It would be foolhardy not to applaud and say that the coronavirus has placed on our collective psyche an existential threat.
What we need to do is to define and work on a robust road map that takes us there. We need modelling and planning tools to ensure that we meet our targets and South Africa gets out of the morass of unemployment, poverty and inequality.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the former statisticiangeneral and the former head of Statistics South Africa.
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August 16, 2020 at 07:20AM
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