President Cyril Ramaphosa has again underlined the need for higher levels of economic growth, urging lawmakers not to allow themselves “to be led into a false choice between policies that are supposedly pro-business or pro-worker”.

“In South Africa, growth and transformation are two sides of the same coin. We cannot achieve one without the other,” he said in his reply to the debate on his Opening of Parliament address.

During the debate, Ramaphosa and the African National Congress were accused by some in the opposition benches of turning their back on its progressive ideas and traditions in forming a government of national unity (GNU) with ten other political parties, including the Democratic Alliance (DA).

However, Ramaphosa defended the GNU, which he said was determined to rapidly scale up the pace of efforts to bring development and shared prosperity, agreeing with Rise Mzansi’s leader Songezo Zibi that “urgency is the currency of the times in which we now live”.

“And in this effort, as Minister [John] Steenhuisen says, we need the builders, not the breakers,” he said quoting the leader of the DA, who is now also Agriculture Minister.

“We stand for inclusive growth that creates employment and that enables businesses to emerge, to grow and to achieve sustainable returns,” he added, while also linking the GNU’s inclusive-growth priority to the goal of building a less racially skewed economy and society.

“The task of building a non-racial and a non-sexist society requires that we remove the material barriers that apartheid created to divide South Africans.”

Non-racialism was, thus, not a concession or an act of charity, but “something that we must continue to build so that we can achieve a South Africa that truly belongs to all who live in it”.

“That is why we have placed the task of inclusive growth and job creation at the centre of the work of this administration. That is why we have stressed the relationship between growth and transformation.”

In his Opening of Parliament Speech on July 18, Ramaphosa said the GNU would pursue every action that contributed to sustainable, rapid economic growth and would remove every obstacle that stood in the way of growth.

In his reply, he argued that inclusive growth should enable investment and allow businesses to emerge and grow.

However, he also urged the private sector to open opportunities for unemployed South Africans, while insisting that employment creation be “one of the pillars of our partnership with business”.