Poverty Eradication versus Economic Development

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.