Associated Press

President Jacob Zuma (centre, at the podium) delivers his State of the Nation address during the opening of Parliament in Cape Town.

If the proposals made in the State of the Nation address last week are to bear fruit, two conditions must be met. And they may be beyond the power of President Jacob Zuma to achieve.

The president made infrastructure the centre piece of his speech, announcing a ”massive infrastructure development drive” that will involve national provincial and local governments”, as well as “state-owned enterprises”. This investment in the real economy will involve ports, rail, roads, power stations, and water reticulation among other things.

Investment on this scale is widely seen as the critical catalyst for economic growth, strong enough to reduce the level of unemployment currently at just under 24 percent.

But the president and his plan have a credibility problem.

The first condition, if his latest proposals are to be implemented, is that public sector trade unions must be persuaded that tomorrow is more important than today. In other words, they have to acknowledge that the government cannot continue to pay out wage increases way ahead of inflation and, at the same time, fund the massive infrastructure projects that will allow the economy to grow and create jobs.

The second condition is that the people responsible for getting the president’s initiatives off the ground are willing and able to do their jobs.

For these reasons some critics describe last week’s speech as “promises, promises” and “more of the same”.

This is not quite fair. Though the same themes have run through the State of the Nation addresses, since he assumed the presidency in 2009, Zuma provided more detail this week, listing a range of projects across the country.

The list provides a benchmark against which to measure government’s achievements or lack of them.

Nevertheless, there is a question mark hanging over past proposals. Last year, for instance, Zuma declared the year of job creation. But only 365 000 jobs came on stream – well short of the 500 000 jobs needed to meet the target of the New Growth Path of 5 million jobs by 2020.

Against this backdrop, Azar Jammine, the Econometrix chief economist, expressed doubts about the speech. “It didn’t convince me we have a plan in place that has a chance of succeeding,” he said.

The reason for his doubts is that the president did not address the obstacles to implementing the capital projects – the incapacity of government departments, institutions and public enterprises.

This raises a related problem – one that is at the heart of South Africa’s failure to compete on global markets. Its workforce is poorly equipped for a modern economy.

Zuma spoke with pride of the rising enrolment of children in schools, but he made only a passing reference to the problems, including a general poor culture of learning and teaching in schools.

The outcome of this poor culture is that last year the national pass rate in mathematics decreased to 46.3 percent from 47.4 percent in 2010. In other words nothing has changed – except for the worse.

Jammine noted that Zuma made only a brief reference to the National Development Plan launched in November by National Planning Minister Trevor Manuel. The comprehensive document, which provides a planning blueprint for the next 20 years, has been published for comment.

And Dawie Roodt, the chief economist of the Efficient Group, identified another gap in the speech. “Now that the nationalisation debacle has been laid to rest, the president had the opportunity to address the most recent uncertainty; that of the proposed super taxes on the mining industry.”

The responses highlight the government’s credibility gap.

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan flagged the challenges in his medium-term budget policy statement in October.

On the public sector wage bill, he said: “In real terms, the fastest-growing component of current expenditure over the past decade has been government’s wage bill. Substantial improvements in public service remuneration and increases in employment have raised the wage bill to about 42 percent of government revenue, up from 31 percent four years ago.”

And he spoke of “the need to shift the composition of spending towards the creation of long-term public assets through infrastructure investment. A precondition for this objective to be met is moderation in the growth of the government wage bill and recurrent expenditure generally”.

But Gordhan made a telling point. He said the main challenge was not “budgeting for higher levels of expenditure”.

The major challenge he identified was the absence of capacity to “plan, contract and execute infrastructure budgets”. The challenge he said was “particularly striking in municipalities and state-owned enterprises, both of which have spent below budgeted amounts over the past three years”.

So we return to the heart of the problem. Without an effective education system the country cannot equip itself with the capacity to produce strong growth, nor can it use this capacity even if it did miraculously appear. - Ethel Hazelhurst