The ANC’s 10-point “plan” for the economy has led to much sniggering and derision. This highlights a range of problems we have in discussing economic policy interventions and particularly attempts to neatly wrap things up into “announcables”.

Yet much of it is quite sensible, focusing wholesale on the Operation Vulindlela agenda, the importance of trade diversification in an uncertain world and sound macroeconomic policies. Indeed, the ANC plan in parts is surely the voice of neoliberalism? The political economy shift over a decade to the ANC backing structural reforms after it realised there were no other options is welcome and clear, making a consensus in the GNU.

The problem comes in the conflicts within the points, in particular between structural reforms and industrial policy.

But the focus should not be on what the ANC is announcing. Indeed, why is there always so much focus on ANC party policy pronouncements when there is such a divorcing of it from what the ANC did in a single-party government, let alone in the GNU now? Instead, the cabinet lekgotla economic “plan” is surely far more interesting but far less exposed, yet in the public domain. This, after all, will be actual policy and something actually being worked on.

The cabinet plan will have many of the same conflicts in it — especially between the Operation Vulindlela agenda and that of the department of trade industry & competition. No-one seems particularly willing to call this out in the GNU, though — with the DA not in the department’s business even when they had a deputy minister there.

The National Treasury is largely sticking to its knitting, not approving any new industrial policy subsidy or incentive spending on fiscus but not standing in the way of the wild goose chase at Amsa with funds of the Industrial Development Corporation and Unemployment Insurance Fund used to delay the inevitable.

The issue we will face in the years ahead is that structural reform by itself is more capital intensive than labour intensive but is then meant to unlock the rest of the economy to create more job-rich growth from there.

This central sequencing problem however, risks being derailed by poorly formed industrial policy scrambling for interventions when they have no cash (of their own) to play with — holding back wider growth as reforms bed in — but the real risk is that the jobs-lite phase of the reform push now actually accelerates the political need for action and creates a negative feedback loop.

It is evident in the outcry from all corners over recent job losses. These are the result of the historical accumulation of policy choices now coming home to roost in the maths of businesses in how they view their operations, particularly global companies, but local ones too.

There is a profoundly weird pushback on many of the recent job loss cases where people say, “Ah, but this was just a global company reorganising, and others are affected too.” Yes, but the point is SA was lined up against many other countries’ operations for said companies and found wanting in comparison.

Overall then, the central question is if we end up stuck in what investors and corporates see as the never-ending two-steps-forward-one-step-back.

A central problem is that the department has not laid out an actual industrial policy as a documented, evidenced and cost-benefit-analysed cohesive whole. While they are working on a “macro” industrial policy intervention document, it is yet to be published, and I am doubtful, given their other policy publications and understanding of the process, if it will cross the bar on evidencing.

We have seen the “solution-first” mindset in the Transformation Fund, but with industrial policy the issue is deeper. It has come up on localisation and other issues too. Regarding the ferrochrome interventions alone there are deep, serious trade-offs that from a policy perspective can be taken by politicians but need to be fully quantified and understood.

Trade & industry minister Parks Tau said at the weekend that everyone had to pay a price for industrialisation — a remarkably fresh and honest view! But what is that price? The impact on prices from export and import restrictions and the costs to everyone else from electricity cross-subsidy to the industry (which, given the scale of energy usage, are huge — this is not some marginal intervention).

The department can take whatever choices it wants but needs to lay out the costs and benefits of each intervention it does clearly in public, to parliament and to Nedlac for an evidence-based discussion.

Doing so is difficult. The department’s capacity was badly eroded under the previous minister, though the new director-general is slowly rebuilding it. Low growth, tight purses across the public and private sectors, and the Treasury’s ongoing spending review add further pressure. Tough questions will be asked about whether more jobs could be created by using cross-subsidy funds for labour activation interventions or red-tape reduction instead, why certain sectors are being prioritised over others with better risk-reward prospects, and whether there is clear evidence that the chosen interventions deliver superior outcomes.

With the GNU leaders’ retreat coming up as well as a cabinet process around the postlekgotla plan and documentation of such a plan, 10-pointism can be the easy retreat when “something must be done” in the face of built-up job loss pressures instead of being forward-looking and evidence-based.

Instead, perhaps, this is an opportunity to see where best the evidence points us in terms of interventions to get the fastest growth from industrial policy change that complements rather than impedes wider structural reform changes of Operation Vulindlela or the strengthening macroeconomic environment on the fiscal and monetary policy side.

This really is the last shoe to drop, and the diagnosis needs to be kept tight lest we get dragged back into the mindset of growth isn’t happening, so let’s double down on what isn’t working that might eventually infect gains on the macroeconomic side unless we are careful (it’s far easier just to open the taps, of course).

This will ultimately be the contrast plain to see with a solid medium-term budget policy statement holding the golden fiscal threads in place versus stumbling through the fog of uncertainty in policy elsewhere without evidence to guide.

• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.

This article first appeared in Business Day.