The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) has released a list of five priorities for South Africa’s yet-to-be-formed new government and which the think tank also argues should help guide ongoing coalition negotiations.

The priorities have been canvassed with various business, academic and civil-society stakeholders and have been packaged into what CDE has dubbed ‘Agenda 2024’, and include:

• Fixing the State, by reorganisation of the Cabinet and the Presidency such that the “right people” are appointed into senior positions within government, most notably at the level of directors-general;
• Driving growth and development by freeing up markets and competition, including by attracting investors, addressing backlogs in electricity and logistics, tackling criminality on construction sites and using public-private partnerships in a way that does not prop up failing State monopolies;
• Building a new approach to mass inclusion that drives transformation in a manner supportive of mass empowerment rather than elite enrichment by incentivising low-skilled employment and redirecting funds from government to the private sector to expand opportunities for black entrepreneurs;
• Dealing  with the fiscal crisis by eschewing unaffordable programmes such as National Health Insurance and a Basic Income Grant and redirecting spending away from failed or ineffective programmes towards growth enhancing activities; and
• Strengthening the rule of law through the successful prosecution of high-profile corrupt actors and reforming the criminal justice system to strengthen the quality and independence of the judiciary, including by overhauling the Judicial Service Commission.

During a virtual launch, executive director Ann Bernstein described Agenda 2024 as an urgent reform programme for dealing with the country’s most pressing challenges in a way that could arrest South African’s “terminal decline”.

She also argued that the current negotiations for a new governing arrangement should not be only about power, politics and positions.

“These discussions need to go beyond what a new government will look like and include what this new government will do once in office,” she argued.

In a forthright opening address, leading business personality Reuel Khoza also underlined the importance of visionary and ethical leadership in navigating the immediate political perils of coalition building and in driving an agenda in the interest of the common good.

Khoza bemoaned the hijacking of the South African vision of 1994 by corrupt, unethical and incompetent leaders, including “betrayers of our world-acclaimed Constitution and saboteurs of the institutional forms that underpin our democracy”.

“We yearn for a leadership that is visionary, and as passionate as it is compassionate.

South Africa is a political economy in a global context [and] the leadership that we seek should do nothing that will frighten foreign direct investment and cause capital flight.”