EFF WELCOMES RAMAPHOSA'S ADMISSION THAT THE STATE HAS A DUTY TO CREATE JOBS

Wednesday, 16 February 2022

The EFF welcomes President Ramaphosa's admission that the state has a role in creating jobs. In his SONA Reply today, the President admitted that the "state has a clear role to play in job creation — through state owned enterprises, public employment programmes, industrial policy, competition policy, infrastructure investment and indeed through the employment of the public service itself."

During his 2022 SONA Ramaphosa had said that "we all know that government does not create jobs. Business creates jobs." He continued to add that "the key task of government is to create the conditions that will enable the private sector — both big and small — to emerge, to grow, to access new markets, to create new products, and to hire more employees." However, today, the President has corrected this dangerous and openly reactionary statement.

This correction is following a robust, scientific and fact based critique of the world history of economic development by the Commander in Chief Julius Malema. In his reply to the SONA, the CIC called on Ramaphosa to retract the idea that the state does not create jobs.

He told him that it was not only factually incorrect, but a explosive discouragement of millions of young people who look up to the democratic state for economic emancipation.

The CIC correctly characterised Ramaphosa's earlier statement as surrendering these hopes of the black majority to a racist white-dominated private sector that has failed for 28 years to create jobs for black people, but also to racially and patriarchally transform its pattens of property ownership.

We therefore welcome the change of his perspective as a concession to EFF's superior logic. The democratic state has a direct role to play on the development of productive forces, and must impose guidance on the colonially structured private economy of South Africa.

Society must never accept to put its collective destiny in the hand of the speculative, profit driven anarchy of the market. There must be at all times be an economic plan, produced and led by a democratic state to lead production and distribution of goods and services.

South Africa's chronic unemployment will only be resolved by a corrupt free democratic state that actively leads in creating jobs both in the public and private spheres.

Ramaphosa must also acknowledge that development of Chinese private sector was itself a creation of the state. This was not only protectionism (imposition of high tariffs to protect infant industries), but also state sponsorship through state owned finance institutions and banks.

If our country is to break out of the colonial economic inertia, it has to accept the large role of government in the creation of the private sector itself through state owned finance institutions and banks.

Accordingly, we reiterate our call for a state owned bank that will create new industries owned by workers and communities.

Statement issued by EFF, 16 February 2022