REMEMBER those games we played at school when we were asked what we would do if we were the president of the country? We all came up with grandiose schemes with little thought to where the funds would come from or how practical our wildest dreams would be to implement.
Listening to our president make promises at the launch of the ANC’s election manifesto, one gets the unnerving feeling that we have been transported back to the classroom where, fortunately, castles in the air didn’t impact on the country and on people’s lives.
But Mr Zuma’s words do impact on society and give hope to the thousands of young people who do not have jobs. At present about 25 per cent of South Africans do not have work and of those almost half are young people.
In Mpumalanga on Saturday, Jacob Zuma told 90 000 ANC supporters that the government would create 6 million “work opportunities” in the next five years and build 5 million houses.
We’ve heard these words before. At his first State of the Nation address in June 2009 the president promised the creation of 500 000 jobs by the end of that year. In 2011 he repeated this promise claiming the ANC government planned to create 5 million jobs over the next ten years, which was 500 000 jobs a year. To date government has made good on half those figures since 2011, blaming the world’s economic uncertainty for the job crisis in South Africa.
However it would appear that the government is its own worst enemy. Analysts claimed in November that the employment indexes showed slight gains in employment for the first time in the past 15 months, with 10901 jobs being added. Over the festive season almost 6000 temporary jobs were created. Although miniscule in extent it is a step forward. However the ANC announced this week that it would push for a minimal national wage. Now is not the time to give investors even more reason to look elsewhere.
Our fellow BRIC countries offer a far more enticing package than sunny South Africa. Our comparatively high labour costs and labour laws slanted in favour of employees are not appealing to investors. In fact recent labour unrest has caused some industrialists to take their factories elsewhere.
We know it’s election time and there’s a whole lot of baby kissing going on, but promising young people that there will be lots of jobs for them is immoral, because we know that is not true. Empty promises have been the hallmark of this government. We need realistic figures and projections and analysts who tell it like it is.
Telling young people that their futures look rosy when, in fact, there is little indication that the promised jobs will materialise soon, is a sure way to light the powder keg of the mounting anger of our unemployed youth.
