This is in
response to President Zuma's State of the Nation Address. While many
analysts regurgitated rhetoric and criticized the quality of the
President's speech, I would like to offer a solution to poverty. It is a
conceptual solution with regard to policy formulation and
implementation. In this regard, I propose that the ANC led government's
focus must be poverty eradication and not economic development. Economic
development must be one of the strategies in the fight against poverty eradication.
What I am essentially suggesting is that we rethink the fight against
poverty. The goal so far has been economic development so that it can
reduce poverty and create jobs, and since 1994 we did not get any far.
This simply resulted in some economic growth without significant
reduction in poverty and almost stagnant unemployment figures.
My suggestion is that we make poverty eradication the goal and economic
development as one of the strategies to eradicate poverty. This
approach recognise poverty eradication as multifaceted and not just as a
simple result of the lack of economic growth.
A multifaceted
approach would thus include land reform, agricultural development and
industry reform as poverty reduction strategies.This approach recognises
poverty as the greatest challenge and align resources and effort
accordingly.
This is a new way of thinking and obviously there
would be resistance to this approach because after volumes of rhetoric
and conventional wisdom, it is only the brave that would risk the
unknown.
However, remember not so long ago conventional wisdom
let people to believe that the world was flat and that you if you walked
far enough you will get to the end of the world. Also, not so long ago
it was believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and
that everything orbited around it and those who dare to challenged it
was ridiculed and faced the death penalty.
So, let it begin.
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