Johannesburg - The ANC emerged from its three-day lekgotla on Wednesday night declaring war on racists and prioritising job creation.
Hours after the DA had led marchers through Joburg on its own platform to highlight the pressing need for employment, as a central focus for its campaign in the upcoming local government elections, the ANC said the opposition was not serious about creating jobs, but rather protecting capital.
“The DA members are not focusing on jobs, they are protecting capital. If they were serious about jobs they would be marching to the Chamber of Mines and Chamber of Commerce,” said ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe.
“They should deal with employment creation holistically and focus on the private sector and say you still have 70 percent of the economy, please come up with clear programmes of employment creation,” said Mantashe.
He said the DA expected the government to create jobs, which was not a sustainable option.
Read: Zuma a jobs wrecking ball - DA
“If the issue at the end of the day is that the government must create jobs, then the government would be bloated. They must join us in the call that the private sector must be serious about employment creation.”
He said the lekgotla had resolved that there was a need to avoid another credit ratings downgrade and that more needed to be done to create an enabling environment for more jobs, decent work and sustainable livelihoods.
The outcomes of the lekgotla are expected to give directives to the cabinet lekgotla which will take place before President Jacob Zuma delivers the State of the Nation address in three weeks.
The ANC has emphasised that it will continue investing in infrastructure development, but would not cut down on social spending either.
“It is the right time to invest heavily in infrastructure, which is not a cost but an investment. It becomes a problem if you increase consumers’ spending when there is a downturn,” Mantashe said.
The lekgotla also resolved that consensus between stakeholders was necessary to stabilise the economy, save jobs and restore fiscal sustainability.
“We need to deal with the threat of state capture, resolve governance problems in SOEs, implement stringent cost-cutting measures and consolidate the implementation of sound fiscal practices to strengthen the people’s confidence in the South African economy.
“State capture is when people outside the state have heavy influence on the state and its institutions. The lekgotla has warned us to work against that and ensure that those institution operate as state institutions, and they must be protected from outside influence,” he said.
Despite what appears to be an implosion of the ANC process to select candidates for local government elections, Mantashe insisted on Wednesday that the process was not chaotic.
“You don't generalise until there is a trend. You can't say on the basis of one incident in Tshwane and another in Durban that you have lost control and there's collapse of the process. That is totally unscientific.
“All the cases are being attended to. In some provinces, they are already at about 70 percent of completed BGMs (branch general meetings) and community meetings. So let’s not generalise,” he said.
The party said it was confident of retaining the current metros that it governs and also winning Cape Town back from the DA.
It also vowed to use institutions like the Equality Court to take current and former DA members Dianne Kohler Barnard, Chris Roberts and Penny Sparrow to court.
Mantashe said the party invited all South Africans to create a united coalition against the “scourge of attempts to uphold white privilege at the expense of the black majority”.
The Star