The ANC may have to scale down some of its development programmes due to the world financial crisis, SA Communist Party deputy general-secretary Jeremy Cronin warned on Wednesday.

"We need to shepherd public resources with discipline and care," said Cronin, also a National Executive Committee member of the African National Congress.

Addressing the Hani Institute's Joe Slovo memorial lecture, Cronin said public money, "a national asset", had to be used in a "sustainable and intelligent" way, without any "vanity programmes" introduced just before the forthcoming election.

"It could be... that we are forced to scale down on some of our targets."

Although detractors questioned the affordability of a "different development trajectory", there should be no compromise on strategic direction which included land and agrarian reform, health, education and creating jobs.

"Let's not de-focus from them," he said.

There would not be any significant short term recovery from the world financial crisis and nor would the crisis spontaneously give birth to a better world.

There would be fewer fiscal resources available as declining profits hit tax revenue, and this could place the social security net under pressure.

Specific targets of "five million jobs in five years" would not heard. Instead, they were likely to be replaced by the key priorities of creating decent work, preserving jobs and sustainable livelihoods.

He cautioned against "vanity projects" just before the elections -- using that label to describe the Gautrain and the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor.

The recent boom years had been squandered by not taking advantage of high commodity prices, said Cronin.

"We did not use the boom period to drive transformation in our productive economy. And we haven't managed our economy well at all."

The country could have been placed on a different path -- away from the "colonial pattern" of exporting primary commodities and importing consumer goods and luxuries.

Sasol, for example, should have been made to pay a windfall tax on sales from locally produced oil when oil prices were very high, he said, adding that it had been said that it cost the company between US30 to US40 to produce a barrel of oil at its South African operations.

This could have been spent on solar energy projects and windfarms.

There had been too much emphasis on the "mineral-energy" complex with mining houses' needs dominating policy in the second half of the 20th century.

The ANC had also run down the country's public sector.

"We are now realising that as (the) ANC and realise we need to treat them as the key motor forces of the revolution. We have treated them as noisy workers."

It was a myth that the country's financial sector was healthy, he said.

Household debt had quadrupled to more than R1.1 trillion in the last five years, six million South Africans could not pay their debts and 6000 vehicles and 2000 homes were being repossessed every month.

Almost 80 percent of narrow Black Economic Empowerment deals which required complicated loan and share arrangements whose payback was based on upward market predictions, were "out of the water".

This would impact on profitability, the ability to repay the debt on the shares, and be passed on to banks.

Finance Minister Trevor Manuel was credited for resisting the removal of exchange controls as the global crisis spilled into South Africa, but, said Cronin, the Minister of Finance had introduced "no fewer than 26 relaxations of exchange controls over the past eight years".

The questions needed to be asked now about what had gone wrong and what lessons could be learnt, and to "collectively get on the right path".