Deputy chairman of the National Planning Commission, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba, has raised eyebrows with his comments that government is splashing money on expensive cars, instead of prioritising the implementation of the National Development Plan (NDP).
He said the focus on the NDP had been distracted by debate on radical economic transformation and “whether monopoly capital was white or colourless”.
Makgoba – who is also the Health Ombudsman – presided over the investigation into the more than 100 psychiatric patients who died in Gauteng last year.
He was speaking at the annual memorial lecture of black business icon Don Mkhwanazi in Durban this week. In the commission, Makgoba is deputy to Jeff Radebe, minister of planning, monitoring and evaluation, whose department is in charge of overseeing the implementation of the NDP by government departments.
Makgoba told the audience the government had in 2012 adopted the NDP, and five years down the line “we are yet to see the national budget of our country being prioritised to underpin the recommendation of this important national transformation plan”.
“We have a plan, we like it very much, we take it to Parliament, the whole world praises it and we are the ones who don’t implement it. You cannot deliver a plan without resources, and the only resource we have as the government is the national budget, but we have the budget doing something else, either buying cars for ministers or cellphones, but you actually want to transform the country,” he said.
Makgoba said instead of prioritising the NDP, the government had allowed itself to be distracted by “petty and sexy slogans such as white monopoly capital or radical economic transformation.”
“As soon as these words come in they become impotent, and three months down the line another word comes in and we forget that one.
“So we are always chasing things that are a distraction to the main focus of what we should be doing as a nation,” he said.
But KwaZulu-Natal Economic development MEC Sihle Zikalala, who is also ANC provincial chairman, insisted yesterday that radical economic transformation was imperative for growth.
Speaking to The Mercury last night, Radebe said about R1.4 trillion had been allocated for the NDP, and the government, through his planning, monitoring and evaluation department, was working on identifying “priorities that must take centre stage in the allocation of the budget”.
Work
“In the next week or so we are going to be seeing the fruit of the work that government, together with the National Planning Commission is doing.”
Zikalala told Independent Media that only through radical economic transformation would South Africa experience economic growth. He challenged Makgoba to a debate on monopoly capital.
Makgoba said the time for talking was over: “South Africans are good at talking, but very poor at doing. There are dark clouds hovering around us as a nation.” He spoke of “vultures and hyenas” manifesting themselves in “our society in the form of scandals and Gupta leaks”.
Black Management Forum president Mncane Mthunzi said the colour of monopoly capital was irrelevant to challenges facing the economy.
“It is silly to have those debates when we are supposed to be thinking about how do we get out of the recession, how do we avoid (a further) downgrade.”