Deputy Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces and the commander in chief of the economic emancipation movement, part of the reasons why the progressive forces in 1917 pursued the Great Socialist October Revolution was because of the decisive and truthful honest leadership of Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin. He said, after the first round of the revolution in 1905, in a perspective called No Falsehood! Our strength lies in stating the truth!, "We must speak the truth:
therein lies our strength, and the masses, the people, the multitude will decide in actual practice, after the struggle, whether we have strength."
This was affirmed by another Marxist Leninist, Amilca Cabral, the great agricultural engineer from Guinean-Bissau who said: "Hide nothing from the truth and nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories."
That is the context within which we want to expose some of the issues that were being dealt with here. The theme of the state of the nation address by the President was on dreams. The synonyms of dreams are, in the first category, illusions and hallucinations and in the second category are imaginations and aspirations. We will determine in which category these dreams of the President fall in - is it in the first category or the second category?
I am a bit worried because when he announced the task team which is going to be dealing with the private-public growth initiative
he mentioned a Van Zyl Slabbert. You must go and check on YouTube. He said that we are going to have a Van Zyl Slabbert as part of that committee. Now, Van Zyl Slabbert is dead. He died in 2010. He was part of the elite pact that got us where we are now of economic servitude.
It looks like you draw inspiration even from white ancestors. I thought you are inspired only by those still alive. You even mentioned them there. Wittingly or unwittingly, it is part of that which defines your character in terms if these issues. What are the truths that we have to deal with?
Firstly, the National Development Plan, NDP, is off the rail. If it was the illusionary train that you speak about, it is not a bullet train but actually a coal train going on an opposite direction. The projection that all NDP aspirations are based on is that the economy must grow by an average of 5%-6% annually up until 2020 and later on to 2030. None of that is happening. The economy is growing in a negative.
You had said that you are going to create jobs. Actually, in terms of the objectives in the current print of the NDP is that unemployment next year 2020 must be 14%. Next year there won't be unemployment of 14% but it will be worse. It will be the 10 million people who will be looking for jobs, are capable of working and cannot find those jobs. Those will be the realities of next year.
This NDP that you want to impose on us is off the rail. It is a coal train that is going on a different direction and you still want to impose that as an agenda that must guide the whole of South Africa towards 2030. It is one of the things that we have to expose and it is one of the things that we are dealing with.
Secondly, South Africa's debt to gross domestic product, GDP, ratio is approaching 60%. So, the state collectively owes more than R3 trillion. One of the biggest expenditure items in the budget currently is debt services. More than R200 billion out of the little limited resources that we have has to service the debt and it is just paying the interests.
We have an existing budget deficit, meaning that there are expenditure items that have been allocated for but the money is not there which means that we must go back to the market and borrow the money. Maybe that is the reason why you cannot say boldly here that you are going to build the bullet train because there is no money to do so. You cannot say here that you are going to build a city because there is no money to do so.
Now, Minister of Finance, if we are to make a thorough analysis of revenue growth from 1994 up until now, there is no foreseeable future that, even in the next 20 years if the revenue grows in the same pattern it has in the past 25 years, we will be able to deal with these dreams. Let's call them hallucinations that were given by the President. It will never happen. There is no plan in terms of how we are going to deal with the revenue growth.
The revenue sources are shrinking because the economy is not growing and jobs are being lost. It means that the number of people who contribute to the revenue is going to decline. Now, what must be done, what is to be done, what must happen in terms
of moving forward? I think you need to write faster now because we are going to give you the clearest perspective.
First is that you must stabilise energy supply, and that is not going to happen through the unbundling of Eskom in the manner that has been conceptualised by Investec. The unbundling of chief restructuring officers is an Investec document - part of the contributors to the R400 million that was utilised for the Nasrec conference. It comes from there. Go to the annual report of Investec you will see chief restructuring officer unbundling shed 20 000 jobs in Eskom. That is what we are supposed to be dealing with. You cannot unbundle Eskom in the current crisis that it is experiencing.
If there is any unbundling that should happen in Eskom, it should be to a state-owned renewable company; a state renewable energy component of Eskom that is going to harvest the wind and the sun to create sustainable and renewable energy.
The second thing should be to focus separately on the construction of a nuclear power station in a fiscally neutral
way, Minister of Finance. You can have a built operate transformer model that can be able to stabilise the energy supply from Eskom without affecting fiscus in a manner in which is being proposed.
You also need industrialise South Africa, not in the form of special economic zones that are being attempted currently. Collectively, we have special economic zones in Coega, Atlantis, East London, one has been declared now in Mpumalanga in Komatipoort and in Musina, I know there is an intention to declare another one in Tshwane, and there is one in OR Tambo. All of those special economic zones have not, for the past 25 years, created more than 10 000 jobs. Their contribution to the GDP is less than 1%.
So, if you continue in that model of economic zones you must know that you can't achieve anything. What is to be done? You have to pursue what Alice Amsden calls "late industrialisation". The components of those include using borrowed technology. You can't invent now; invention happened with the first wave of industrialisation. We can't innovate now; it happened in the
second wave of industrialisation. Now we must borrow technology, we must use state subsidies and protection of these industries. We must use the buying power of the state to drive local industrial expansion.
The state in its entirety, all its entities and government, expands more than a trillion rands every year on procurement. Who is the ultimate beneficiary of that in buying the cars and electronics because all of them are made outside South Africa? It is the multi-national corporations which in turn are subsidised here in South Africa.
We spend billions of rands giving to Mercedes-Benz, to Toyota, to BMW and all of the others without developing our own capacity to manufacture our own cars. We need to industrialise domestically and utilise the buying power of the state in order to make sure that we have sustainable jobs in all the areas.
We must pursue what we call in the EFF's elections manifesto "inward industrialisation with export capacity". That is one thing that you have to look into.
You made a commitment before that you want to create a sovereign wealth fund and you have not done so. A sovereign wealth fund has to be created so that when some of the foreign direct investment, FDI, which you are chasing come, you match rand per rand in terms of investments. That must happen here in South Africa.
In the current framework this FDI is not going to help you with the developmental challenges that we are confronted with in South Africa. Go and read economic development history. Heterodox economics are writing that the person who is going to sweep on behalf of the ANC today will not understand what heterodox economics is.
You will understand the context that in the history of economic development there has never been an economy that is developed through FDI. That can't be your priority number one. There has to be development of productive forces here in South Africa, and anyone who comes, comes as a reaction to the economic development that is happening domestically. That is what they have to look into.
You must also reconceptualise your understanding of a developmental state because you always throw developmental state and what we have in South Africa is not a developmental state. A developmental state is autonomous from capitalist influences. When the commander in chief says that this imaginary influence that you have on capital is not there he is pointing to the fact that you are not running a developmental state.
A developmental state must be autonomous from capitalist influences. It must be able to direct where investment happens - the content, the form, the pace of investments that happen. But you are not doing so, instead, the capitalists are the ones who are telling you what to do. That is why the minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act was withdrawn, in order to allow Total to continue with the exploration in Mossel Bay.
You are not in control that is why Naspers is going to delist from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The government Employees Pension Fund exposure to Naspers is worth more that R250 billion but they are going to delist from the JSE and they are going to retrench more than 2000 workers. There is government exposure,
you are not in charge and there is no developmental state that is happening under your watch so we must not deal with that in a different form.
Now, the founding manifesto of the EFF has a pillar that speaks to the decentralisation of development and building of new cities. We do not imagine it and we say that this has to be a concurrent effort in different areas. Massive investments in terms of allocation of resources, development of infant industries and protect them, domestically owned industries and have all these cities developing in a manner that is going to deliberately depopulate Gauteng, Cape Town and Durban because in their current spatial framework they cannot accommodate the number of people they have. The infrastructure is going to be clogged in terms of sanitation and a variety of other things. A number of 14 million people in Gauteng in the space that is it has is not sustainable.
How do you achieve a different perspective? We develop the areas where the people who stay in Gauteng are coming from. That can
only happen through a deliberate decentralised development and building of other cities.
In the Sixth Parliament, the EFF as the only socialist Marxist Leninist organisation in South Africa is going to table the following legislations: The South African Reserve Bank Amendment Bill to make sure that we discontinue private ownership of the South African Reserve Bank - joining 90% of central banks in the world. We are going to enact a Bill on the creation of a sovereign wealth fund, model it around the Norwegian sovereign fund which in the current financial year has contributed an equivalent of 500 billion to the fiscus of Norway.
We are going to re-table a proper minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act to put clear conditions in terms of what should be the exposure of the state in terms of ownership of the new petroleum and mineral projects. We are going to table a clear Anti-Tax Avoidance Bill that is going to deal with the question of base erosion and illicit financial flows because commitments have been made here that that is going to be dealt
with and no one seems to be having the courage to come with a clear legislation to deal with base erosion.
We are then going to finalise the process of having a state owned bank. We are going to table a legislation on the in sourcing of all government workers because we need to detenderise the state and give it the capacity to take us forward.
We are the only organisation that can provide leadership in this country. What is happening here are new objectives after new objections - it is directionlessness. The ANC is defined by directionlessness; there is no clarity of what you seek to archive. That is why you come and blow hot air here and then the person who blows the hot air is a clown from the NCOP and then you give him a standing ovation.
That is what you achieve and you are even miseducating these children - the youth. The youth comes here and says that today we are marking the anniversary of the Freedom Charter. The Freedom Charter was adopted on 26 June1955, hon Nompendulo.
Amongst other things it says that the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industries shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole. That is the agenda that we must commonly pursue as the Sixth Parliament. Thank you very much. [Applause.]