By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
ActionSA to table a Draft Resolution in the National Assembly for the creation of an ad-hoc committee to investigate, deliberate, and shape urgent reforms aimed at “genuine and transformative economic justice”.
The party launched the economic transformation agenda at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, on Wednesday.
The party believes South Africa remains the most unequal country and that this reality demands an urgent overhaul of our transformation agenda, toward a renewed drive to empower every South African in unlocking the nation’s full potential.
This must be achieved through meaningful reforms, driven by a departure from archaic partisan ideologies and failed policies, and instead led by bold, pragmatic innovation that embraces diverse perspectives and builds a national consensus on the reforms needed to create a truly prosperous and inclusive South Africa, ActionSA said.
ActionSA President Herman Mashaba, together with Dr. Mbahare Kekana, Michael Beaumont, Lerato Ngobeni MP, Dr. Nasiphi Moya, and Dr. Kgosi Letlape MP were joined by business leaders, academics, civil society, and South Africans from all walks of life.
Mashaba explained that his party embarked on this effort to establish a “dedicated and constitutionally” empowered platform for “real legislative reforms” that advanced economic justice in South Africa.
“The frightening reality is that we can no longer speak about the ‘previously marginalised’, because the marginalisation has not stopped after the end of apartheid. It continues even as I stand before you here, today through sub-standard education, failed economic policy, corruption and the complete failure to manage immigration. In truth, democratic, post-Apartheid administrations had their job cut out for them,” he said.
Mashaba noted that the country had witnessed successive African National Congress (ANC) administrations that were expected to constitute “a government for the people by the people”, noting that these became “governments for the politically connected by their comrades”.
“You needed to be a cadre with ‘struggle credentials’, or connected to one, to seriously benefit from the corrective transformative ANC policies. Those who did not meet this criterion either had peanuts thrown at them or were entirely left out in the cold. This is where the expression ‘It is cold outside the ANC’ comes from,” he noted.
He pointed to the Affirmative Action / Employment Equity Act, and broad based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) laws which were enactment under the ANC, implementation of which he said had proven to be “poor, weakened by all manners of incompetence and selective application”.
The discussion around transformation had stalled in the country through a spectacular failure of imagination that had led people to believe the choice was between either BBBEE or nothing – like an alternative could not exist, he said.
“This cannot be allowed to continue while 60% of young people remain without the prospects of employment or further studies,” Mashaba added.
Letlape explained that the draft resolution aimed to investigate South Africa’s post-1994 legislative framework, which set out to transform the country’s economy, with a specific focus on evaluating the actual outcomes of these laws in relation to their stated objectives.
He said if instituted, the committee would conduct substantive public hearings with ordinary South Africans, relevant experts, business and industry, civil society organisations, and academics regarding South Africa’s persistent structural inequalities and potential interventions.
The draft resolution will allow all political parties in Parliament to make submissions and will also consider these submissions and identify the legislative and policy reforms required to effect economic justice and propose interventions to the National Assembly.
Letlape pointed out that the proposed legislative aimed to build broad-based agreement on the way forward, without imposing a singular viewpoint to the exclusion of others, and ensure that differing perspectives were subject to open and fair deliberation.
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Video Courtesy of ActionSA.