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The SA Institute of Race Relations says government's National Development Plan is doomed to fail.
The Institute says the NDP is fatally flawed and will fail to achieve its social and economic aims.
The Institute's Deputy CEO, Frans Cronje, says they conducted detailed analysis, spending several months testing the goals of the National Development Plan and the strategies to achieve them.
"The NDP has been hailed by the media, business, the government, and the political opposition. However, our analysis has uncovered a quagmire of ideological dyslexia, economic confusion, and conflicting ideas. The plan is thus set to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions," he said
"Far from heralding a great economic reformation, the NDP at best seeks to tinker with current failed policy interventions. It is non-committal on labour market regulation, proposes increased racial policy requirements for investors, contradicts itself on property rights, and offers no serious reforms on schooling and education policy. In fact, it proposes even more state intervention in the economy, despite all the evidence that such intervention has done more harm than good."
Cronje said very few of the NDP's proposals have been costed which means they are wish-lists, rather than serious policy recommendations."
"The NDP also betrays the poor. Its focus on very low-wage labour and subsistence activity will deny most (black) South Africans the chance of attaining a middle-class lifestyle over the next twenty years."
"Here, the plan sets the bar too low - mostly because it is not prepared to go against current political wisdom and propose the dramatic reforms necessary for South Africa to reach its full economic potential," said Cronje
"Ironically, we thus largely agree with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) that the NDP is flawed and will fail. Of course, we reach that diagnosis by different methods, while our prescription for what must instead be done is very different."
He said "what South Africa needs instead of the NDP is fundamental and dramatic policy reform.
"This must include the deregulation of labour markets to free the poor to find work, the abandonment of racial policy to boost investment and entrepreneurship, effective steps to improve the quality of teaching and learning, and the introduction of a constituency-based electoral system to compel government accountability downwards towards communities."
"Such a reform strategy will also be single-minded in its pursuit of investment-driven, rapid economic growth as the only means of driving unemployment down to the NDP goal of 6% by 2030," Cronje said.
