[Marxism] Who's Zumaing who?

[glparramatta]

www.mg.co.za

TOP STORY
Zuma takes charm offensive to the JSE
Michael Hamlyn | Cape Town, South Africa    
31 January 2007 12:00

Continuing his charm offensive to reassure businessmen and the 
investment community that his ascent to the leadership of the ruling 
party signifies no threat to the economy, Jacob Zuma on Thursday faced 
the bulls, bears and stags of the Johannesburg Securities Exchange.

He spoke at a luncheon organised by Jayendra Naidoo, chairperson of 
Macquarie First South, and spoke about job creation, the fight against 
crime, skilled immigration and the electricity crisis.

The African National Congress (ANC) president said that based on the 
current economic forecasts, South Africa could expect to continue to 
create many jobs, particularly for skilled workers.

"Thousands however, will remain unemployed, and this is the group we 
must focus on," he said.

He told his audience that the ANC conference in Polokwane confirmed that 
the creation of jobs must be the primary focus of economic policy 
through targeted and direct interventions.

"Our development finance institutions and regulatory bodies need to be 
sensitive to this objective," he said.

"In government procurement policies, industrial and trade policy 
reforms, and in our macroeconomic policy stance, we need to be alive to 
these goals."

He also spoke of the need to consider fresh ideas to improve job 
creation, for example, by the state helping young people to get their 
first formal-sector job.

"By creating the right incentives for young people to be employed by 
companies, young people can gain vital workplace skills, experience and 
networks necessary for formal-sector employment," he said.

On skilled immigration, he said that South Africans had to come to terms 
with the fact that the more skills in the economy, the more jobs could 
be created.

"While we do the hard work to improve our education and skills outcomes, 
which will take many years to accomplish, our government needs to ensure 
that the economy has sufficient skills to expand," he said.

Business Against Crime lauded

Zuma said there was consensus that the level of crime in South Africa 
was simply unacceptable. The Polokwane conference resolved to sharpen 
the anti-crime campaign this year, Zuma said, and he praised the 
business community for demonstrating what a difference concrete action 
could make.

"The achievements of Business Against Crime, in its support for the 
criminal justice system, are remarkable," he said.

"There are many innovations that have been introduced in prisons and 
other criminal justice centres, through the work of Business Against 
Crime. We applaud such patriotic duty."

He agreed that South Africans were concerned about the supply of 
electricity. And he said, grimly, that there was no doubt that 
investment in the sector should have been made earlier, and the reasons 
for this failure would have to be addressed at a later stage.

But, he said, the investments were being made now. "Our government is 
developing a national response plan which will introduce short-term 
measures to balance the demand for energy with the supply, and this 
while the work to bring more supply is fast-tracked as much as possible."

He said the electricity crisis was a turning point. "There will no doubt 
be a cost to the economy in the short term," he said.

"But let us make this a positive turning point for South Africa's use of 
electricity in the longer term. We have become accustomed to using 
electricity very inefficiently and in a manner that is environmentally 
damaging."

Zuma said the need for an effective planning centre within government 
was made even clearer by the electricity failure, as this problem was 
clearly a failure of planning in the late 1990s, and he noted that the 
ANC had called for the creation of an institutional centre for 
government-wide economic planning, and uniform and high entrance 
requirements for the recruitment of public servants. - I-Net Bridge

***

Business Report

Zuma's WEF statements raise alarms for the Left
February 1, 2008

By Terry Bell

That ANC president Jacob Zuma used the opportunity of the annual World 
Economic Forum (WEF) - which he described as "fabulous" - to underline 
yet again that there would be no change in the government's economic 
policy orientation, has caused considerable consternation in the ranks 
of his supporters in Cosatu.

This is because the WEF was the forum where the ANC's long-held 
interventionist and demand-led policies were first fudged in 1994.

The original macroeconomic framework, designed by the ANC's 
macroeconomic research group, was dumped by then president Nelson 
Mandela in the Swiss resort of Davos.

But the unions picked it up and, in 1996, produced their social equity 
document months ahead of the government's supply-side, "trickle down" 
macroeconomic strategy proposals made within Gear.

There seems to have existed some perhaps naive hope that Zuma, perceived 
by many as a harbinger of a "turn to the Left" in the ANC, would at 
least hint at a change in Gear when speaking in Davos.

But his praise for finance minister Trevor Manual and the claimed 
economic achievements of government policies have seriously undermined 
such hope.

Zuma made his "no change" statements in Davos at a time when the 
International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), to which South Africa's 
union federations are affiliated, issued a scathing attack on such 
policies. To ITUC president Sharon Burrow these statements, and their 
consequences, were "the gorilla in the living room of globalisation".

She noted: "A massive rip-off of wealth is taking place, with a tiny 
cohort of the world's richest people creaming off vast amounts of money 
while incomes for the great bulk of the world's population are 
stagnating or falling."

That "tiny cohort", of course, is made up of the members of the WEF. 
According to its own literature, members of the forum comprise 1 000 of 
the world's top companies "across all sectors".

Set up in 1971 by Swiss billionaire Klaus Schwab, it is a club of the 
super-rich, which stages an annual circus where governments, politicians 
and other leaders may be bribed, bullied and flattered into pursuing 
policies that favour big business.

To quote economist John Maynard Keynes, this is a venue that seems to 
promote the "extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the 
nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of us all".

But that is hardly how it appears. Under the slogan of "improving the 
state of the world", media personalities, film and pop stars decorate 
the event, ostensibly to deal with crises that unions maintain are 
caused largely by the event's very sponsors.

However, it says something about the state of the world that a club of 
the super-rich has come to be regarded as the prime venue for discussing 
and deciding the shape of global, regional and industrial agendas.

At this year's WEF, the ITUC issued an official statement bewailing the 
fact that the losers in the global marketplace were "the workers ... and 
not the bailed-out bankers and financiers who triggered the crisis".

What the statement could have said, but did not, was that the very 
bankers, financiers and companies the ITUC blamed for creating the 
current economic crisis were its hosts: the members of the WEF. But 
then, perhaps, it did not wish to seem churlish by biting the hands that 
fed it so lavishly at Davos.

This seems to be the only hope - and a faint one at that - for concerned 
Zuma supporters to cling to.