ASGISA PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION REVIEW

The Democratic Alliance presents the second in its series of documents reviewing the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative-South Africa (AsgiSA). Whereas our first document took issue with how AsgiSA was conceptualised, this document accepts it as a fait accompli and looks at how it can be improved in terms of its planning and implementation.

The DA believes that the objectives of AsgiSA are laudable and that the approach of addressing key growth constraints is correct. Unfortunately, however, AsgiSA at its launch existed in concept form only, without any proper implementation plans in place. To compensate for this shortcoming government, seemingly, treated AsgiSA as no more than a large-scale umbrella campaign through which to rebrand existing economic policy initiatives.

The consequences of this approach are the following:

• the fact that AsgiSA has thus far tended to exacerbate rather than reign in South Africa's trade deficit;
• infrastructure projects continue to flounder;
• more ineffective attempts at the envisaged skills revolution in South Africa;
• the pursuit of an over-complicated and highly interventionist customised sector programmes that are costly, capacity hungry and not likely to yield results swiftly;
• no discernible integration between the first and second economies; and,
• a lack of progress on governance and state capacity issues.

These consequences have resulted because of seven distinct problems related to the planning and implementation approach followed by government with AsgiSA.

1. There is a lack of understanding by stakeholders both in and outside of government, of what their role is in the execution of AsgiSA.
2. There is a lack of buy-in and co-operation between government, and public sector role players and private sector role players alike.
3. Implementation inertia and disparities in planning characterise the relationship between what is envisaged under AsgiSA for government, and what is envisaged by each department or entity of government for itself.
4. State capacity problems hamper the implementation of various projects to a significant degree.
5. Project targets and programme goals often take no heed of the "hard realities" - with respect to the size of the problem, the state's capacity to deliver and the prevailing situation in the economy.
6. Progress reporting is done on an insufficient and irregular basis.
7. The lines of accountability are often not clear and political leadership is often lacking.

To address these problems at their roots, the Democratic Alliance proposes the following solutions:

All necessary research and fact-finding missions should be completed prior to the introduction of interventions under AsgiSA.

Programme goals should be realistic.

Specific interventions and programme goals should be co-ordinated and prioritised for implementation.

A clear, objective-linked implementation plan is essential for every intervention and for AsgiSA as a whole

The necessary resource allocations should be in place and role-players should be prepared prior to the introduction of new interventions.

Relevant measurable performance and compliance indicators should be in place.

Proper monitoring and evaluation should be done on an ongoing basis.

Accountability should be built into the process by placing ultimate responsibility for long-term economic planning and the enforcement of economic policy implementation squarely at the feet of a specific executive authority.

Download supporting documents (ASGISA Review 2 2.doc)