SA's National Development Plan 2030 — a laudable, but naive vision that's far from fruition

Daily Maverick

29-05-2025

We are five years from the South Africa imagined in the National Development Plan (NDP) that was presented to Parliament in August 2012. The NDP was accepted unanimously by legislators and endorsed by the executive.
Disclosure: I left the secretariat of the National Planning Commission (NPC) 10 years and a couple of months ago. I played a minuscule role in its formulation. I think 10 years is long enough for a self-imposed gardening leave.
I have a lot of respect for most of the people who put together that first NDP under the leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa and Trevor Manuel.
I write now as a complete outsider, and wilfully emerge from a veil of ignorance; I write as if I know little to nothing (which is about right in almost every aspect).
There are very many parts of the plan that are open for questioning, scrutiny and evaluation. The thing that has struck me most about the NDP and the NPC in general is how little most of us know about the workings of the commission.
Perhaps I have not paid enough attention, but I don't recall any public service announcement or statement about progress with implementation. I want to believe that the woman in Cofimvaba has seen a marked improvement in the lives of her family.
The NPC needs to come out and provide an honest appraisal of their work; their successes and failures…
They might not convince everyone of any successes. Do it, and they'll regret it. Don't do it, and they will also regret it. So do it, anyway.
Among our compatriots are people who are unwilling to accept that two things can be true at the same time, and remind me of the Orwellian observation, 'However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.'
Never mind. Let me start this discussion with the easy part: the Vision Statement. I'm probably opening up space for vitriol and vituperation, mantric claims, rhetoric and cant about corruption, incompetence, State Capture, Phala Phala — which are all valid, mind you, but very often stem from a cruel gloating and dancing on South Africa's grave.
The vision part is important. I previously discussed the lack of vision (on the part, first of colonists in the late 19th century, settler-colonists in the 20th century, and African nationalists after 1994) in the context of Johannesburg's crumbling inner city.
The vision stated in the NDP 2030 is laudable, but as I have come to learn, it's naive and has counted too much on goodwill and trust among the population.
Of all the things that have gone wrong or turned sour in South Africa, trust is our greatest loss. Whenever I write about these things, I should always remind the reader that I am profoundly pessimistic — not just about South Africa.
To paraphrase Dante, each day starts, at least for me, with accepting that I have to abandon all hope.
2030: A country remade
The vision statement is a lengthy and prosaic declaration. At the lowest point of my day, I think of it as verging on mythopoetic because it relies so heavily on myth, hypothesis and romantic-utopianism. Utopianism can be good. It is dangerous when it is coupled with romanticism…
Anyway, the opening passage of the Vision Statement reads:
'Now in 2030 we live in a country which we have remade. We have created a home where everybody feels free yet bounded to others; where everyone embraces their full potential. We are proud to be a community that cares.'
Fifty million of us, infants and toddlers included, would probably like to be happy and prosper in that society.
But the political-economic part is where our wish-dreams, kind of, fall apart:
' Through our service we show our solidarity. We enjoy the same quality of service. We are connected through our caring. The beating heart of our country is a community that has all the enablers of modern life:
We have water.
We use a toilet.
We have food on the table.
We fall asleep without fear.
We listen to the rain on the roof.
We gather together in front of heat.
'What we contribute in our taxes, we get back through the high quality of our public services. That is why we have:
Good clinics and hospitals with well trained, caring doctors, administrators, nurses who rush to our aid with empathy and expertise;
Affordable effective medicines, because they were made for all of us;
Good schools with well educated, trained and caring teachers.'
I don't believe that these latter, especially political matters and matters of professionalism and caring, have moved the length of a single breath towards Vision 2030.
From Mitchells Plain to Diepkloof, from Shoshanguve, KwaZakhele, Zwide, Inanda to KwaMashu, you would be hard pressed to find a teacher who is well qualified (these data are a bit outdated, but things have become worse) or a nurse who takes care of a patient with empathy.
I had major surgery a year ago, and was terrified by the lack of empathy and professionalism of the nursing staff. I remember having very major surgery at the old Coronationville Hospital (Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital) in 1979, and at night the nurses (all black) would do rounds, quietly, with care and a sense of responsibility, checking on patients.
Last year, while I was recuperating from surgery, nurses held conversations, loud and across 20m spaces, dropping needles and trays of instruments. Air bubbles in sacks of intravenous fluids and tubes were probably harmless, but frightening nonetheless… I was more scared of the nursing care than I was of the major surgery I had had.
That was a personal experience, but recall the patient abuse at Tonga Hospital in Nkomazi, Mpumalanga, reported by the SABC in March. Nurses also get abused by patients.
What incidents like these suggest is a lack of caring, of empathy and of respect and trust. We don't trust the police, we don't trust teachers, we don't trust nurses. Doctors and nurses are simply packing up and leaving the country.
The data show the extent of the emigration. Data from Statistics Canada show that between January 2020 and July 2024, that country issued 7,781 temporary work permits to South Africans, 600 of whom were healthcare professionals, with around 350 being specialists like cardiologists, neurologists and emergency physicians. That was data from only one source.
So much, then, for the 'good clinics and hospitals with well trained, caring doctors, administrators, nurses who rush to our aid with empathy and expertise' or 'good schools with well educated, trained and caring teachers'.
There are many more elements of the vision that can be weighed up against the life world (the entirety of the experienced world of people across society) of South Africans.
We must, necessarily, wait for two things. First, we have to ask the NPC to sit down and tell the public, not in the closed confines of Parliamentary committees where braskap and tall poppy syndrome are the rules of engagement.
Second, we have to wait for 2030, five years from now, to reach what the NPC vision stated. It is worth presenting it here, more fully:
'The welfare of each of us is the welfare of all. Everybody lives longer. We experience fulfilment in life, living it in the successful society we are creating. We feel prosperous. Our connectedness across time and distance is the central principle of our nationhood. We are a people who have come together and shared extraordinarily to remake our society.'
And
'We know our leaders as we have elected them and pledged them into office:
They are wise in the use of our wealth;
Wise in knowing and understanding our wishes and needs;
Wise in expecting us to express ourselves to them in any appropriate manner we have agreed to be allowable;
Wise in not silencing those who criticise, but enable them, through our rules of engagement, to be even more rigorous in supporting a just society.
'Our leaders' wisdom is ours, because we sense our wisdom in theirs.
Someone who is better qualified than me should try to explain all of that. The only good thing that can be said today is that we have another five years to get much of this vision to come to fruition. DM