The Economics of change
The shift in power is certain to bring about some sort of economic policy change with South Africa. This is true if the alliance partners within the ANC have anything to do with it. President Motlanthe, is simply and interim position, a political solution to try and stop the prosecution of Jacob Zuma.
The effect that the alliance partners are going to have in terms of the future of this country, will only be determined over the next coming weeks and months leading to the elections. What will happen is that the ideals of these partners will be used by the ANC to win the election, once again speaking to the broader populace about a more inclusive economic system.
This I am afraid means that once again, a massive number of people are going to be disappointed, this may not be an immediate disappointment, but it will come. The fact that we are a democracy, and and active player within world economic circles, means that Capitalistic intent will always prevail.
We need to wake up and see that the reason we have such a high unemployment rate is that, as a country we are expensive, when compared to other developing nations. If we change our economic policies to be even more people friendly (I am not saying we must exploit people) then we face the very real challenge that we are going to make ourselves even more expensive. This in turn will lead to us being less competitive and therefore shedding even more jobs.
Building on the back of this we also have weak opposition politics, as a result of ego’s. This I am afraid is probably the single biggest draw back. If we united the opposition politics of this country to bring into play a party that in some way was an effective opposition, we would create the climate for people to join it. This would effectively provide further alternatives to undecided voters and would weaken the hold that the ANC has on the country.
This said, we are going to enter some really interesting times for the country with political pressures coming to bear on the ruling party as many of their previous electorate seek to vote elsewhere. The people of this country are bigger than the ANC, and using false promises to hook votes is so 1994 that people are beginning to see through this.
We need aggressive economic policy to ensure that we are competitive in the global marker, this will make us prosperous from an economic point of view, which in turn should trickle down through the economy to create a better home for all.
