Mbeki to push fight on poverty at 'lekgotla'

from The Independent On Line

By Moshoeshoe Monare

President Thabo Mbeki is expected to urge his colleagues to tackle the country's massive poverty problems.

This follows in the wake of the ANC national policy conference, with further impetus provided by the fact that Mbeki's presidential days are numbered.

His ministers, their deputies, premiers and directors-general should expect a no-nonsense and impatient president waiting for them at his guesthouse in Pretoria, where the July lekgotla is being held.

The waning of his patience has been prodded by the scale of poverty, criticism from the opposition and from the alliance about the insignificant dent his government has made on reducing poverty and unemployment. He is also anxious to preserve his legacy when he leaves office in 2009.

The July lekgotla is a week-long meeting to review the government's progress in its service-delivery programme. The ANC was given the mandate to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014.

It is believed that the main concern is the economic prosperity of the middle class while attempts to reduce poverty among the working class are not conspicuously successful.

Therefore, a comprehensive poverty programme and a direct intervention in the second economy, co-ordinated from the Presidency, are likely to take priority.

While the government and ANC rejected the Basic Income Grant, supported by Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mbeki's policy unit is spending sleepless nights trying to come up with a workable social security programme that will pull the unemployed and the poor into the mainstream economy.

Mbeki has since announced a R400-billion government outlay - aimed at infrastructure improvement and creating labour-intensive employment - at the launch of the ANC's elections manifesto last year.

However, so far Mbeki is frustrated by the hurdles that prevent his generous spending translating into prosperity and economic growth being shared particularly with the poor.

He has already shown his unhappiness with telecommunications parastatal Telkom, which has not moved much on reducing the cost of telephony, the main impediment to attracting investment and reducing the cost of doing business in South Africa.

And the performance of the department of trade and industry - crucial to the implementation of policies that would nudge shared growth - has not been too impressive.

Mbeki also expressed his unhappiness at last year's July lekgotla that the public works department, which is responsible for the labour-intensive infrastructure programme, was not effectively driving this programme and demanded a restructuring of the department.

This is crucial to his pet project announced in 2005, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative, which is aimed at impacting on all economic activities to ensure that the targeted 6 percent GDP growth trickles down to the so-called second economy.