The National Development Plan has not survived its contact with reality

Without a champion, this clear-sighted and pragmatic vision has largely remained the focus of an elitist debate

Helmuth von Moltke was a 19th-century Prussian field marshal who, though a stickler for planning, famously observed that “no plan survives contact with reality”. In other words, plan as much as you can, but you will still need to improvise later. SA’s National Development Plan (NDP) has not survived contact with reality. But it cannot be cast aside; renewed foresight and discipline are still needed to ensure the plan’s successful implementation. This is the first lesson that emerges from the recently released 10-year review (2012-22) of the NDP by the National Planning Commission (NPC).

Comprising more than 500 pages of wellinformed diagnostics and recommendations, the NDP provided a clear-sighted vision of where SA should go and how it should get there by 2030. It outlined a multipronged approach for tackling serious socioeconomic challenges with a view to eventually building a “capable and developmental state”. At the same time, the NDP provided a degree of continuity with other plans that had preceded it, thereby striking a careful balance between continuity and change. It was suffused with much pragmatism, but clearly this was not necessarily going to be enough to offset factors such as ideological resistance.

When the NDP was launched in 2012 the government firmly threw its weight behind it, both inside and outside parliament. “History will judge government leaders and MPs harshly if they fail to implement the NDP”, then planning minister Trevor Manuel told parliament in June 2013. In this appeal he had the full support of former president Jacob Zuma, who told parliament in February 2013 that the NDP would trump all other government plans, which would fall “under the umbrella of the NDP”. Organised business and a wide range of other national stakeholders also gave their full support.

So what has gone wrong? Why has SA reached this point, yet again? Somewhere between planning and implementation lies policy. For a plan to be implemented effectively it needs to be underpinned by policy co-ordination and coherence and, moreover, policy certainty — none of which the NDP has really enjoyed. One negative outcome has been that private and public fixed investment (major growth drivers) as a percentage of GDP is at present only 14%, against the NDP’s 2030 target of 30%.

The NPC gives credit where it is due. It recognises the visible gains SA has made over the past decade in areas such as housing and electricity connections to households, as well as an extensive welfare system that acts as an essential social safety net. However, the NPC criticises the government for generally failing to do enough to implement the NDP’s far-reaching yet fundamental recommendations.

The NPC review remains largely a litany of SA’s current socioeconomic ailments, of which most citizens are painfully aware. The review emphasises that “urgent and co-ordinated interventions are required as the country is significantly off course, with all targets having been missed”. The NPC acknowledges that SA —a small, open economy — has been blown off its economic path from time to time by global events over which it has had no control. One of these was the Covid-19 pandemic, with its high human and economic costs. Yet even before Covid SA was falling well short of most of the key performance targets.

In retrospect, a large part of the problem was that the political leadership did not pay sufficient attention to embedding the NDP in the national psyche. It was not championed in ways that encouraged the nation as a whole to take ownership of it. It therefore largely remained the focus of an elitist debate and hence failed to develop enough traction.

Significantly, too, the NDP lacked the sound political foundations needed to promote widespread support among some key stakeholders. Union federation Cosatu, for example, distanced itself from the macroeconomic framework, while some Cosatu affiliates and senior members of the SA Communist Party rejected the NDP. They saw it as a neoliberal plan that was too closely aligned to the Growth, Employment & Redistribution strategy adopted in 1996.

A salient test of the effective delivery of any ambitious socioeconomic plan is whether it is sustainable, which depends on what people do and their level of commitment. In other words, will they see it through or not? If people do see it through, they will achieve not just sustainability but also irreversibility. The latter means not merely being satisfied with improved outcomes but also ensuring that the right leadership, structures and culture are in place to guarantee a positive continuing trajectory of results.

The key subtext of the NPC’s message is that we do not need any new plans in SA. Instead, we need decisive action to re-establish the long-term path mapped out by the NDP. In this regard the NPC believes that forging effective collaboration between the public and private sectors has been undermined and undervalued by the political leadership in the past and needs to be remedied.

The NPC wants to see the country on a far more pronounced inclusive growth path. The Reserve Bank forecasts a modest growth rate of 0.7% this year and 1% next. Growth will rebound in the medium term, though on present evidence only to about 1.5% a year, with income per capita likely to stagnate. An economic recalibration may be needed. Should SA aim for the more realistic 3% growth rate target implied by the Economic Reconstruction & Recovery Plan instead of the ever-elusive NDP target of 5.4% by 2030?

Unfortunately, the 2020 recovery plan also appears to have fallen off the policy radar, partly because of global factors and partly because of familiar domestic ones. These have included the highly corrosive effects of Eskom load-shedding, inadequate rail and port operations, state capture and corruption, worsening service delivery, poor accountability, excessive public debt and elevated policy uncertainty.

The fact that both the NCP review of the NDP and the Economic Reconstruction & Recovery Plan have traversed well-known territory does not, however, lessen the importance or urgency of the lessons that need to again be conveyed to decision-makers in the public and private sectors.

We need to be relentlessly optimistic about changing SA but brutally realistic about the difficulty of doing so. The broad vision of the NDP has nonetheless stood the test of time. In fact, it remains our best hope for building an economy that is bigger, stronger and better by 2030.