The National Development Plan (NDP) has quickly morphed into something of a cat’s paw for a range of political and social groupings, both within the governing alliance of the African National Congress (ANC), the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party and without.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) – which has been somewhat weak on the policy development front over the years, preferring to focus on oppositional politics rather than developing serious policy alternatives in preparation for governance – has even had the audacity to suggest that the plan represents its policy stance rather than the ANC’s.

The DA has selectively used the contents of the NDP to attack other government policies, as was the case recently with its swipe at the Industrial Policy Action Plan, or Ipap, which it described as being too interventionist.

The very fact that the DA, business and an array of other social formations have expressed enthusiasm for the NDP has raised serious suspicion within some sections of the ANC-led alliance about the plan’s intentions, written and unwritten.
To be sure, the contest for ideas within the ANC did not end with the adoption of the NDP in Mangaung last December. Moreover, the contest for the levers of ANC power has also continued unabated, with those who prevailed in Mangaung insisting that the time for dissent has passed, and with others fighting to retain the freedom to criticise and even oppose the ANC from within.

It is fair to say that the NDP has become a proxy for various hot and cold battles unfolding in South Africa’s political theatre. This is nothing new. We saw similar proxy wars in the past, most recently the one fought around the mine nationalisation theme.

What is different this time is that some of the contents of the NDP are starting to be woven into the fabric of government policies and programmes.

I say some, as many of the proposals cannot and will not be implemented, as they are more reflective of the preoccupations of some of the commissioners, than anything that could realistically be pursued by government.

In fact, there are many problems with the NDP and it should, therefore, probably have been positioned as a “framework” of ideas and values around which society could be unified, rather than an implementation plan. Had it been positioned in that way, it would have been far more difficult for the document to be exploited for sectarian ends.