Introducing entrepreneurial subjects ‘not enough’ to deal with unemployment

While SA has continued to be battered by unemployment among the youth, ANC health and education committee chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said the ruling party wanted to introduce a curriculum in schools to encourage young people to create jobs.

Dlamini-Zuma said while SA was a country which vastly lacked skills, the education system needed a curriculum which could allow pupils to “get into entrepreneurship, instead of being job seekers” – as their discussions also centred around whether the education children were getting was preparing them for the type of economy in which the country found itself.

However, education expert Wayne Hugo said this was not enough to deal with unemployment, which was set to be declared a national crisis.

Hugo said while entrepreneurial subjects were a good proposal to improve SA’s education system, it should also be coupled with basic life skills, otherwise the subject would not meet its required purpose.

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“You can’t just be an entrepreneur; it’s not like you are an entrepreneur and you make money. The reason why entrepreneurs make money is because they’ve got some sort of skill or some set of abilities,” he said.

“And then they work out ways in the longer run to make money, or to use those abilities to make money.

“So it’s a very empty thing to say, we’ve got to teach them in entrepreneurship skills, because basically you guarantee joblessness even more, because what you’re doing is you’re taking away the time you could have spent on a valuable skill which doesn’t have a skillset behind it.”

Hugo said the proposal showed a failure within the way the SA economy and political system was working at the moment – where the economy wasn’t thriving because of all the terrible inefficiencies and waste in the system.

“There’s huge waste and inefficiency at the moment,” he said. “And that money, when it gets wasted, effectively what is happening is the parts of the economy that could be functioning properly aren’t. “And that means you’re losing jobs. Because that’s how you get jobs. You get jobs through economic growth.”

Dlamini-Zuma gave an update on what was discussed during her committee’s deliberations at thesixth national policy conference at Nasrec and said they were dealing with overcrowding in classrooms, which was urgent.

She said there were proposals to relook the role of state-owned entities in teaching and equipping young people.

Meanwhile, One South Africa Movement leader Mmusi Maimane previously told The Citizen that government was masking the real state of the country’s education system and unemployment crisis. He proposed 10 interventions which, “if implemented immediately, would rescue South Africa’s education system and provide a stable foundation for progressive development in the coming years”.

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za