Next year's change of government should not be allowed to break South Africa's economic momentum, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel urged in an interview with Business Times this week.

Senior officials in the Treasury and other government departments, including public works and trade and industry, confirmed this week that Manuel was coming under increasing pressure to justify the strict fiscal discipline he enforces and for the hard line he has taken on the funding of public utilities, such as Eskom.

As the ANC, the Cosatu labour federation and the SA Communist Party prepare for an economic policy summit that will define the platform on which they will campaign for next year's general election, Manuel is building the argument for continuity rather than radical change.

After the release earlier this month of a report by an international growth advisory panel appointed by the Treasury, he spent this week punting the report of a World Bank commission on growth and development.

Manuel was part of the two-year inquiry into the secrets of the success of 13 developing countries that have grown by an average of more than seven percent over a decade.

The report underlines the conventional wisdom that only growth can defeat poverty and emphasised the importance of manufactured exports in the pursuit of employment, but it does not endorse all the tenets of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policy.

"What's refreshing is that the report says forget about the orthodoxies," Manuel said.

"None of the countries that have grown at a sustainably high rate have been rabid free-marketeers. Almost all of them have had capital controls, for example. It hasn't been Chicago textbook stuff."

While it urges public debate about economic policy, the report cautions that populists can sound plausible.

"Debates help clarify good ideas. But debates can also be infected by bad ideas. Specious proposals can often sound promising," it says.

Rules of orthodoxy need to be broken

But the growth commission does allow that the rules of orthodoxy need to be broken sometimes to meet short-term challenges.

It condemns price controls, make work schemes and protective tariffs, but allows that all of these can be used to get through a crisis.

The point, Manuel said, was that such interventions had to be justified, clearly explained and for the shortest possible duration.

He said the economic summit announced after a recent meeting of alliance party leaders should address the details and not the foundations of economic policy.

"I'd like to believe that all of this work will be as important after the elections next year as it is now.

"It is part of our message, not just to each other in little workshops, but to all South Africans, that we take these issues seriously because people's lives matter and because that's what the constitution and democracy require of us.

"It doesn't matter if some decisions are taken now and others after the election, if some are taken by Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and others by another finance minister, whoever she may be.

"What matters is that there has to be a sense of continuity," he said.

Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin told Parliament last week that the Treasury was too powerful and needed to have its wings clipped.

This week, Trade and Industry Chief Director Nimrod Zalk complained to MPs that Manuel set the bar too high for public expenditure.

National policy debate

With the near total change of ANC leadership at the party's December conference in Polokwane and the election of Jacob Zuma as ANC president, many on the left wing of the ruling alliance hope to reopen fundamental debate about the foundations of national economic policy.

Manuel said debate and analysis were important and should include fresh approaches to old problems.

But he said it needed to remain focused on leadership and delivery.

"What matters in the lives of people is not policy, it's the effect of that policy on their lives the sense of satisfaction they feel.

"It's not how many green or white papers you have about police, it's about how improved policing impacts on your life. Do you feel safer?"

Citing the report of the Treasury's own growth panel, he said the first focus should be on employment.

"The report said 19-million South Africans should be working, but that only 13-million had jobs of some sort. I'm saying get into the detailed analysis. We've got to keep asking the brutally frank and honest questions."

The analysis should be based on sound research and measurement, however, and not emotion.

"If we lose, in the course of this, our humanity, our dignity, our respect for each other and our knowledge of how people behave, then, I think, we have lost everything," Manuel said.

Business Times