The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) has called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to use Thursday’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) to outline urgent reforms that are aimed at assisting the country to create more jobs.
The organisation says existing policies are not enough to help deal with the crisis the country is currently facing.
In last year’s opening of Parliament address, President Ramaphosa promised to put systems in place to ensure that capable and qualified people are appointed to senior positions in municipalities.
CDE Executive Director, Ann Bernstein says they are looking forward to hearing what progress has been made to achieve this.
“We’re also not seeing sufficient progress in moving the country away from what were the failures of the past. I think everyone has to agree on the facts, which are that investment is down, manufacturing is down, employment is down and that means we need some major policy decisions in a good direction away from protectionism from the DTRC.”
Bernstein says she hopes that the President will address the failure of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to achieve successful prosecutions against officials accused of corruption.
“I am very concerned about how we have a culture of impunity among elites across the board in this country and the way to deal with it is to have a strong National Prosecuting Authority and we don’t have that. We have called and we are hoping, we would love the President to do something like this on Thursday. We’re calling for a retired judge to look into the NPA, the allegations about why it’s not getting successful prosecutions against senior politicians.”
