THENEWSOUTHAFRICA
education or training.I"
This combination
of massive black unemploy-
ment and the unskilling of the labor force was the great economic chal-
lenge confronting South Africa. Meanwhile, the ROP was falling far short
of its targets.
In response to these problems, Mandela abolished the ROP ministry in
March 1996, and three months later the government adopted a new pol-
icy, labeled Growth, Employment, and Redistribution
(GEAR), which fo-
cused on growth rather than on trying, at the same time, to make major,
immediate improvements to the lives of the poor. GEAR, as Jesmond Blu-
menfeld explains, contained "the conventional world-wide policy wisdom
of the 1980s and 1990S: improved macroeconomic
balance, increased
openness to international
flows of goods and capital, and greater liberal-
ization of markets." It committed the government to new investment in-
centives, further tariff reductions, a drastic decrease in public sector em-
ployment, and budgetary reforms; and it set targets for 2000, including a
GOP annual growth rate of 6 percent and the creation of 1.3 million new
formal sector jobs.>?
Those expectations,
too, were not fulfilled. The government was not
able to apply the new policy effectively, due to a lack of administrative