Latest news with #socioeconomiccrisis
News24
22-06-2025
- Business
- News24
New unity government, same old habits
The government of national unity is struggling to address South Africa's deep socioeconomic crises as it buckles under a toxic mix of ideological divisions, chronic indecision, and the ANC's reluctance to make tough policy choices. Further decline is inevitable unless immediate reforms are prioritised over more endless consultation, writes Khaya Sithole. Over the past 12 months, South Africa's political landscape has been buttressed between two difficult conversations regarding the nation's future. The first was ignited by the lack of a decisive victory for any single party in the general election. The consequence of the lack of a majority, forced various parties to cobble together a government of national unity (GNU) whose working mechanics remain – even to this day – dubious at best. President Cyril Ramaphosa – as the leader of the coalition – has presided over a house divided by perpetual ideological orientations and chronically overwhelmed by the scale of the problem they have been elected to solve. The scale and spectrum of the nation's problems are plenty. From poor governance across different facets of government, to a wholly inept crime and security cluster, to the persistence of unemployment and infrastructure decay, the national canvas of things that must be addressed is wide and unwieldy. Since the beginning of the year, internal divergences between the GNU have that led to litigation, delayed budgets and threats of walkouts, have only been matched by the truly bizarre fixation that a certain Donald Trump has had with the country's social and economic policy orientation. The state of the GNU today is that it is an alliance learning to work whilst the country at large is not working. In recent weeks, the publication of labour force statistics have reiterated perhaps more cogently than any other metric – the scale of the problem. From a working age population of 41.7 million and a labour force of 25 million, the ability to find employment for just over 16.8 million citizens illustrates the structural fractures of the country's economy. The consequential effects of these low employment numbers, is the reduced scope for tax revenues and the inevitable squeeze on spending priorities. The longstanding solution that the ANC has preferred over the past 15 years – borrowing to obscurity – has created concomitant effects on the intensity of spending squeezes. Debt service costs have outpaced key priority areas and, left unchecked, will keep displacing other priorities that are already squeezed for resource allocation. The boring answer to these problems – getting the right economic blueprint for the sociopolitical and socioeconomic canvas that we have – eluded the ANC until South Africans lost faith in its ability to unilaterally solve the problem. Over the past year, the question has moved to whether an alliance, armed with additional political persuasions and orientations, can turn the ship around. The importance of this deliberation is the simple – yet sometimes bizarrely unpopular fact – that decision-making about national resources, policies and strategies – comes with often painful tradeoffs. The tradeoffs required to address South Africa's unique problems, have often proved difficult for the ANC to countenance and rather than biting the bullet at critical decision-making points, the party preferred to defer to the future. Examples of this perpetual planning and consultation loop include the unresolved questions around the SRD grant versus the basic income grant; private sector liberalisation versus creating new state banks and state pharmaceutical institutions; and the long-term plight of state enterprises. In between the episodes on lethargy, public institutions declined, public resources were mismanaged and inefficiently managed; and the public purse was squeezed. The budget showdown in 2025, which led to three versions of the budget being drafted, was highly influenced by the need to start dealing with difficult and long-deferred questions about the right model that balances revenue generation and resource allocation in light of the state of the economy in its current form. The difficult reality is that in its current form – the economy is ill-suited to address these intersectional facets. The focus on the budget season was on the extraction of more resources from the current model. The problem evident in that, is that the primary canvas is one that is no longer suitable for the problems we seek to address. Whilst the finance minister was forced to abandon his preferred method of addressing longstanding issues with a once-off injection of pain through a VAT increase – or so he wanted us to believe – the difficulties that created the issue remain unresolved. The wide cleavage between the resources we can marshal and the priorities we wish to fund, is only getting wider. Options at narrowing it – from repurposing the state bureaucracy through incentivised attritions or simply spending less than necessary on frontline services – come with consequences that very few have mapped out yet and since they are issues that require difficult choices; they are issues that fall within the scope of the decisions that the ANC is historically reluctant to confront. And for as long as the ANC is at the heart of the GNU and remains fixated on its old habits of perpetual consultation and peripheral implementation, it is unclear how its fellow bedfellows can get it to accelerate the pace of addressing difficult issues. The one-year anniversary of the GNU has coincided with the decision of the president to initiate a National Dialogue whose purpose is said to be 'an opportunity to forge a new social compact for the development of our country, a compact that will unite all South Africans, with clear responsibilities for different stakeholders, government, business, labour, civil society, men and women, communities and citizens.' In addition, the National Dialogue 'is anticipated that the National Dialogue will drive progress towards our Vision 2030 and lay the foundation for the next phase of South Africa's National Development Plan.' Having been instrumental in the development of the current national blueprint – the National Development Plan – the President would be well versed in the mechanics and complications of trying to find any blueprint that speaks to the various persuasions of all stakeholders and maps out the right priorities for the nation. The problem of the National Development Plan, is that the government – led by the ANC – conspired to reduce it to a document whose habit of missing key milestones has become the one aspect of it where there is universal consensus. Given what we know about the limitations we have in managing multi-sectoral and intersectional national projects and priorities, it might be prudent to find the narrow range of issues and priorities that have the greatest multiplier effect on everything else we need to fix. The obvious dilemma is that whatever we end up signing for, will require resources, and we now know that in the absence of an economic fix, none of these resources will materialise. Within the spectrum of priorities, it is time to acknowledge that an economic and skills blueprint are priority issues that will aid in addressing the immediate issues – finding resources to fund everything else – and investing in the future social and economic blueprint of the nation. The old habits of trying to please everyone and turning out a document that is merely an equal opportunity policy of appeasement must for once yield to the difficult questions of what must be done immediately in order to arrest the national decline. Any model that traps us all into another consultation loop and deferral of difficult decisions will not only be a monumental waste of resources but for President Ramaphosa – the possibility of championing a National Development Plan, a government of national unity, and a National Dialogue that still all leave the country in socioeconomic and strategy limbo, will be blight on his legacy that will be hard to ignore.
News.com.au
05-06-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
Burundi votes but with opposition neutered
Burundi votes for a new parliament on Thursday but with little risk of an upset after the main opposition was effectively barred from running. The impoverished, landlocked country in east Africa has seen decades of ethnic violence, civil war and authoritarian rule. The ruling CNDD-FDD party of President Evariste Ndayishimiye is accused of undermining its main opponent, the National Freedom Council (CNL), which came second at the last election in 2020 and claimed it was cheated. In 2023, the interior ministry suspended the CNL over "irregularities" in the way it organised its meetings. Then last year, the CNL ousted its leader, former militia commander-turned-politician Agathon Rwasa, while he was abroad. He was replaced by someone considered close to the ruling party, Nestor Girukwishaka, a former minister and senior executive at a state-owned company -- in what critics described as a government-orchestrated coup. The government then passed new rules that effectively barred Rwasa and his allies from joining other opposition parties or standing as independents. A Burundian analyst, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the ruling party was taking no chances because the elections were taking place amid "a very deep socio-economic crisis". The analyst said the country was facing "all sorts of shortages, galloping inflation of more than 40 percent per month and growing popular discontent". - 'Very difficult for us' - President Ndayishimiye took over following the death of his predecessor, Pierre Nkurunziza, who had isolated the country with his brutal and chaotic rule since 2005. While Ndayishimiye has been seen as relatively less authoritarian, Burundi's human rights record remains poor, with journalists, activists and opposition figures all facing severe repression. One of the candidates for Thursday's election, Patrick Nkurunziza -- no relation to the previous president -- of the opposition coalition Burundi for All, told AFP the campaign had been "very difficult for us". He said his members faced "threats, harassment and sometimes even attacks" from a government-aligned youth league known as the Imbonerakure. A group of media executives last month accused the Imbonerakure of arresting and torturing a journalist while he tried to work at the University of Burundi in the capital Bujumbura. A fuel shortage that has largely paralysed the country for nearly three years also made it difficult for opposition candidates to operate, said Nkurunziza. "In the absence of Agathon Rwasa's CNL, the CNDD-FDD is sure to win," said the analyst. Most of the other candidates are "token candidates, who are there just to show that democracy is still happening in Burundi", they added. Burundi experienced decades of ethnic violence and civil war up to 2005. Under a peace agreement signed in 2000, seats in the parliament are split 60-40 between the two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi. Burundi remains one of the world's poorest countries with almost two-thirds living below the World Bank's poverty line of $2.15 per day.
