The ANC-led government is beginning to see the light on a left-of-centre approach for South African policy, the South African Communist Party (SACP) General secretary Blade Nzimande argues.

Writing in the SACP’s Umsebenzi Online yesterday, Nzimande continued the ongoing commentary on the government’s decision not to privatise major State-owned enterprises such as Transnet, Eskom and Denel within the next five years.

The vigorous debate was sparked on the issues, as well as the role of the State, following President Thabo Mbeki’s budget vote address on June 23, 2004, wherein he drew on columnist and former-editor-in-chief of the British newspaper, ‘The Observer’, Will Hutton’s book about the struggle of the public sector in British society.

Mbeki quoted extensively from the book that argues citizens should not be divided into mere individuals and thus ‘denigrate the state’.

“There can be no doubt about where we stand with regard to this great divide. It is to pursue the goals contained in what Hutton calls the ‘broad family of ideas that might be called left’ that we seek to build the system of governance we indicated today and in previous addresses,” Mbeki said.

“The obligations of the democratic state to the masses of our people do not allow that we should join those who ‘celebrate individualism and denigrate the state.’”

In his article, Nzimande said that government ministers have spoken with increasing confidence about the importance of an active and strategic public sector.

“These policy indicators were given a more general ideological underpinning by President Mbeki when he spoke in the parliamentary debate on the Presidency’s budget vote. Mbeki’s views were entirely reasonable and pertinent, articulating a set of broad left social values,” he said.

“Yes, there has been a growing conviction, from the side of senior ANC leadership and from government, that the developmental challenges of our country require an active and strategic public sector. This growing conviction has, in part, been born of frustration and disappointment with the private sector, and its blatant inability to lead economic transformation over the last decade, notwithstanding many ‘investor friendly’ macro and micropolicies.”

However, he added that, while the shift was welcome, it should not be exaggerated, citing two main reasons.

“They neither represent something totally new within ANC politics, nor are they as extreme as some pretend to make them,” he added.

Nzimande then went on to criticise Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon’s comment on Mbeki’s budget speech.

Leon said: “The Democratic Alliance is convinced that some of these problems are the direct result of the contradictions that lie at the heart of government policy. For example, four years ago, the government promised rapid privatisation. Today, it has made a U-turn and has announced that it will not privatise major State-owned enterprises such as Transnet, Eskom and Denel.”

Nzimande said the idea that there has been a dramatic ‘U-turn’ in policy comes mainly from those who, over the last decade, have attempted from the outside to put words into the mouths of senior ANC leaders.

“Liberals (and, indeed, various anti-ANC ultra-left groups) have portrayed government policies as uncomplicatedly ‘free market capitalism’. The same quarters present our democracy as inherently ‘bourgeois’. Our Constitution (in the words of Tony Leon) is ‘essentially liberal democratic’,” he said.

“Leon and others like him are also quite wrong to reduce our Constitution to liberalism. Like the Freedom Charter before it, our Constitution embodies and goes beyond the progressive content of liberalism, and then transcends the individualistic, imperialism-blind, race-blind, gender-blind, class-blind, and under-development-blind limitations of classical liberalism.”

At the close of the budget debate, Mbeki attacked Leon and his ‘Thatcherite’ notion that society is composed of individuals and not groups.

“If this has any meaning, it constitutes a vain attempt to eradicate our history,” Mbeki said.

“Africans, as a national group, did not and do not exist. What we had and have are merely individual Africans, who were oppressed as individuals and who suffer from the legacy of racism as individuals. They did not come together as a national group to fight oppression . . . And since there are no classes, only individuals, the workers are also wrong to have combined in trade unions.”

Nzimande praised Mbeki’s stance, saying the SACP warmly endorsed this approach.

“We have always held that, while the ANC has never been a socialist organisation, it certainly is not antisocialist either. The ANC is, quite properly, a broad left formation, home to a variety of progressive ideological currents. The ANC, with its 70% electoral majority, is at the very centre of South African politics. But, as we have also long maintained, in South Africa the centre is (it has to be) left.”