Page 118 - Afrika Must Unite

RECONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT IO3

initiative and responsibility which develops in a freer society.
As living conditions grow better under the improvements which
the government is pledged to effect, and indeed has already
made to some extent, as unemployment lessens and the mo­
m entum of development gathers speed, a quickening of pro­
ductive output throughout the economy must follow. Productive
increase will also respond to encouraging incentives, which need
not always be of a financial nature. For a productivity increase
which is completely eaten up through expanded consumption
will defeat the development programme, whose investment
capital must come from surpluses. Some austerity is imperative
and our new controls are aimed at this. At the same time, we
are trying to eliminate, by party discipline and other means,
wide gaps between the lower and higher income groups. We are
setting our hands as firmly as we can against the growth of a
privileged section.
There must also be guards against the danger of spiralling
inflation, which too often attends a constructing economy, such
as ours is rapidly becoming. Careful planning can and must
keep inflation within limits so that the advantages of economic
development shall not be dissipated in an ever-soaring cost of
living and building.
But the building of a new state requires more than the pre­
paration of programmes, the design of plans and the issue of
instructions for their implementation. It requires the whole­
hearted support and self-identification of the people, and the
widest possible response to the call for voluntary service. A war
on illiteracy has to be waged; and a country-wide self-help
programme of community development arranged, to promote
the building of schools, roads, drains, clinics, post offices, houses
and community centres.
The effects of self-help schemes, valuable in themselves and
the incentive they give to initiative, are, however, local in com­
pass and limited in purpose. Rapid development on a national
scale and the attainm ent of economic independence dem and a
more intensive and wider application of ability and inventive­
ness, the speedy acquisition of technical knowledge and skills, a
vast acceleration of productivity as a prerequisite to accumu­
lation of savings for re-investment in industrial expansion. In