Focus on lowering living costs: Ramaphosa
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa has called for a discussion on lowering the cost of living to help the poor.
|||Pretoria - Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa called for a discussion on lowering the cost of living to help the poor on Friday at the Nedlac summit.
Ramaphosa said the forum, which groups government, labour, business, and civil society had discussed the cost of energy but there was a need for a broader discussion about soaring everyday costs faced by ordinary South Africans.
“For me, the one important issue is how we can ensure the lives of all South Africans are affordable. Our energy costs are extremely high. It is also our food costs, transport costs. Just the cost of living in our country is quite high. Many countries around the world are moving in the direction of lowering costs.
“It is a national issue which, hopefully, we should discuss more pointedly. We must address the costs that beset our people, particularly, poor people. Today we discussed the issue of energy costs, but we need to broaden it. How can we bring those costs down?”
Ramaphosa said the one-day summit of the National Economic Development and Labour Council in Pretoria had also also discussed ways of encouraging private sector investment.
“We should create a very good climate for them to continue investing.”
He added that economic hardship and electricity constraints should not intimidate South Africans but spur them to find creative solutions to the country’s problems.
“The important thing that has come up is that: necessity should be utilised as a mother of invention. We should be able to be innovative. We should be able to find solutions out of the crisis and the challenges that we have,” Ramaphosa told delegates at the close of the summit.
“I think the best approach to a crisis is that you must never never waste a good crisis. We have a crisis now (but) let not waste it. Let’s find a good way of utilising the crisis to come up with solutions, rather than be terrified and hide our heads in the sand. This is a crisis that we should use to come up with solutions,” he said.
Earlier on Friday Ramaphosa, castigated South Africans for being too negative, suggesting they had turned it into a national sport.
Regarding perennially struggling state-owned enterprises, he said there was a discussion at top government echelons on how the entities can be reformed.
“How are we going to reform our state-owned enterprises so that they perform at the best level. How are we going to introduce efficiency? How are we going to improve the governance of our state-owned enterprises and have top class, crème-de-la-crème type of managers and executives? Quite a lot of work is already going ahead on that,” he said.
He said the summit had taken place in a cordial atmosphere.
“This has been a really good dialogue today. I would like to thank you all for participating in this dialogue. I think we have done extremely well. This has been one of the better summits I have attended in Nedlac and I’m hoping that as we attend more summits, we will inject quite a lot of creativity and energy so that we deal with really serious issues that affect the future of our nation,” he said.
ANA