The South African government’s free market economic policies have been “disastrous” for the country under President Thabo Mbeki’s rule, the head of South Africa’s most powerful union movement and a close ally of presidential contender Jacob Zuma, said on Wednesday.
Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Cosatu, accused Mr Mbeki’s government of having lost sight of the concerns of the poor and unemployed during his eight years in power.
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“If the world belonged to me, everything stops now,” he told the Financial Times, adding that new policies should be the result of a broad, national debate.
Business people will seize on his comments, as Mr Vavi has been a force behind Mr Zuma’s increasingly confident campaign to replace Mr Mbeki as the ANC leader at the party’s five-yearly elections starting this weekend.
Mr Zuma, the party’s populist deputy leader, is the frontrunner who has capitalised on disillusion among the party’s grassroots with Mr Mbeki’s aloof style and perceptions that he is too close to business. While Mr Zuma has courted investors and suggested that policy would not be changed radically, business remains wary of his close links to the unions and the left.
Speaking in Cosatu’s Johannesburg headquarters, Mr Vavi argued the ANC had rushed too quickly to open the economy after the end of white rule in 1994.
“We allowed the marketers to take charge of important departments and all they knew was that South Africa must be open to chilly winds of competition.” The focus should have been on labour intensive, rather than capital intensive sectors. “We have had this flirtation with neo-liberal policies that have been absolutely disastrous for our development.”
Mr Mbeki and his finance minister, Trevor Manuel, have won plaudits abroad for their macroeconomic policies, which have led to the most sustained period of economic growth.
Mr Vavi said he liked Mr Manuel “as a friend” and for having disproved the sceptics who suspected that the ANC would wreck the economy on taking power. But, he added, that he had failed the poor. Mr Zuma was right, he added, to reassure investors that policy would not be set on the whims of the president but by the party, and to say, “I do not have horns and a tail.”
At the same time he said, “you need to reassure the marginalised . . . that their plight will be made the priority, that someone will listen to their cry”.
Mr Vavi was scathing about the culture of Mr Mbeki’s government, which he accused of failing to listen to alternative voices.
“People are afraid to express their views without attracting a counter-punch that says you are a racist, an extreme leftist or told you have infantile disorders.”
He said that Mr Mbeki’s allies liked to suggest the union movement was seeking to lead South Africa into Zimbabwe-style chaos. But “we are not asking for hyper inflation, we don’t ask for high deficits, we say that money ought to be spent and invested correctly”.
Unemployment, officially at 25 per cent, but informally estimated to be near 40 per cent, was a “national emergency”, Mr Vavi said.