South Africa could still attain its target of 6% growth from 2010, despite the “serious power emergency”, the Presidency’s deputy policy head, Alan Hirsch, said at the release of the 2007 annual report for the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgisa) last week.

He added that the power crisis was not a “fundamental impediment” to the attainment of the programme’s stated growth aspirations.

Asgisa, which had been running for two years, sought average growth rates of 4% from 2006 to 2010, to be followed by an average of 6% from 2010 to 2014.

In an earlier address, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka argued that government’s unprecedented R600-billion public-investment programme, which would be deployed over the next five years, would continue to provide growth impetus.

“South Africa is now a construction site,” she quipped, in a speech delivered at a function held on the grounds of the Presidential Guesthouse, in Pretoria.

22 000 STATE PROJECTS UNDER WAY
Infrastructure was also the overarching theme of the annual report itself, dedicating 30 of its 70 pages to the topic.

Crucially, it showed that there was a growing capacity to deliver on infrastructure projects, even at municipal level.

Investment spending by national departments rose 30% in 2006/7 and by 13% for the first two quarters of 2007/8 and there were now some 22 000 investment projects being monitored under the so-called national infrastructure project register, covering everything from bridges and municipal roads to schools and hospitals.

But Mlambo-Ngcuka stressed that creative links had to be found to sustain work opportunities for those currently occupied in the infrastructure projects once they were completed, and called for greater cooperation between the public and private sectors to address the challenge.

Similarly, she called on the business community to support government by back-integrating their procurement strategies into South Africa’s so-called ‘second economy’, so as to help support the creation of small-scale enterprises.

“In the next year of Asgisa, we want to address both poverty and inequality,” she insisted, stressing that the growing gap between rich and poor was “politically and economically” unsustainable.

Hirsch said that, in spite of the expectation that the economy would slow down in 2008, there was no immediate reason for government to change its target of halving poverty and unemployment.

“There are a variety of estimates for growth in 2010, but virtually all of these from the private sector are over 5%. We are talking about growth averaging over 6% for 2010 to 2014, so there is no reason for us to back off from that at this stage . . . it would be the wrong thing to do, as there is no evidence [to suggest] that it is impossible.”

He added that even if the most pessimistic growth targets were accepted, South Africa would still meet its target for the period to 2010, “if we aver- age out the entire period since 2006”.

“Our expectation is that we will get our response correct and that we will remove the key obstacles to medium-term growth,” he added, noting that, while there would be some costs, “the fact that it happens at the same time as an international downturn probably is good fortune for us, as it allows for some time to catch up”.