Insight: Zuma must sell practical way to correct inequality

Brendan Boyle. Picture: ALAN EASON

IF WE exclude election year replays  when we are treated to two state-of- the-nation speeches a few weeks  apart, tomorrow’s address to a joint sitting of the national assembly and the national council of provinces will be the  20th of our still young democracy.

Ask any woman or man in the street  what they would like President Jacob  Zuma to focus on in this Valentine’s Day  speech, and many, if not most, would say  “jobs, education and inequality”. Or they  may just say “inequality” which is the  consequence of failure in the other two  areas.

These have become the acknowledged  priorities as we prepare to enter our  third decade of freedom from apartheid.
It is becoming common cause that  without an evident narrowing of the gap  between the richest and the poorest  among us, South Africa is doomed to  erupt one day into the sort of violence  that is tearing the Middle East apart.

Without better education to make  them employable, the majority of young  men and women leaving school will continue to face a lifetime on the outside,  looking in at those who have the things  a wage pays for – and the threat of  inequality will continue to grow.

So however he phrases it, it is safe to  bet that jobs, education and inequality  will feature strongly in Zuma’s speech.

They should have been priorities since  the day the last “Whites Only” sign was  burned, but we have been slow to put  them front and centre of government  policy, where they have belonged all  along.

When Nelson Mandela launched us  down this democratic road with the first  state of the nation address on May 24  1994, he and his government had everything to do and the optimism of the  world at their backs.

He could pick which among the myriad of challenges he would focus on. The  phrase he left ringing in our ears that  day was “reconstruction and development”. It even had its own minister, Jay  Naidoo.

Optimism buoyed the poor for the  next few years as they watched the  grey-shoed apartheid mandarins make  way for liberators with names like Sisulu, Tambo, Mbeki and Slovo. They accepted that the South African nirvana  could not be built in a year or two and  they were willing to wait.

The problem is that those who have  missed the empowerment bus – or  should it be train – are still waiting.

Mandela said the word “employment”  once in that historic speech, “jobs” twice  and “education” three times.

“We must invest substantial amounts  in education and training and meet our  commitment to introduce free and compulsory education for a period of at least  nine years. Everywhere we must re-inculcate the culture of learning and of  teaching and make it possible for this  culture to thrive,” he said.

Employment was mentioned only in  the context of encouraging tourism.
“We must also be clear that we must  pay increased attention to tourism. The  jobs and foreign currency which tourism  generates will strongly influence our  economy. The government is determined  forcefully to confront the scourge of unemployment, not by way of handouts but  by the creation of work opportunities,”  Mandela said.
When Thabo Mbeki gave his first  State of the Nation speech in 1999, “employment” got two mentions, “jobs” one  and “education” three. Inequality still  did not get a specific mention.

“Consistent with our concentration on  this objective, including the critical importance of jobs, the government remains preoccupied with the issue of  gold sales and their impact on gold mining, employment and export earnings,  both in our own country and the rest of  our continent,” Mbeki said.

All that has changed now, as the  apartheid legacy of black unemployment  becomes, if anything, even more entrenched.

In his speech last year, Zuma acknowledged the virtuous circle: jobs will promote equality; education will promote  jobs. He mentioned employment and education 10 times each and jobs five  times. Inequality got eight mentions.

But that was still the Zuma of largely  empty rhetoric. He said the right things  but didn’t follow up with the necessary  action.

In the weeks since his Mangaung victory, Zuma has appeared a little more  presidential and a little more forceful  about governance issues than we have  come to expect of him. The improvement  has been off a low base and it has been  nothing extraordinary, but there has  been a change of tone.

This week’s speech gives him another  opportunity to show this new side of  himself, to convince the electorate that  Mangaung has given him the courage to  say “no” to those amongst his supporters who would put their self interest,  which usually translates into self-enrichment, ahead of the national interest.

Credibility will be a challenge when  he speaks tomorrow because none of the  programmes he has announced in the  past two years have gathered much momentum. He has to get behind them  again with an evident will to smash the  mainly union-created logjams, and he  has to pitch some new ideas to an  audience understandably jaundiced  about big ideas that never happen.

Amid the policy uncertainty the Zuma  government created during its first  three years there has been little incentive to commit to long term investment  projects. He needs to make good on the  promise to create an enabling environment for business to thrive. The private  sector has billions in cash looking for a  safe and productive investment.
Now that Zuma and the ANC have  embraced Trevor Manuel’s National Development Plan (NDP), he needs to sell  it to the remaining doubters in his government – and they are not just a few –  and to convince the investment community that the commitment is unequivocal and long term.

The NDP has answers to the education crisis. It has plans to use the skills  which an improved education system  will create and, with those two factors in  place, the wealth gap will begin, albeit it  slowly, to close.

Then we won’t need a South African  spring to match the Arab one. We will  all be basking in our own summer sun.

• Brendan Boyle is the editor of the Daily  Dispatch