Robust and decisive plans are required to mitigate the risk posed by the lack of skills and jobs among the youth of this country. On Thursday President Jacob Zuma will open Parliament and deliver his fourth State of the Nation address since he took the helm in 2009.
The address is generally a platform through which the head of state takes stock of the government’s performance, announces commitments and priorities for the year ahead while articulating the strategic imperatives that should guide government spending.
Over the past three years, Zuma’s emphasis has correctly centred on five key priorities, namely job creation, education, health, safety and rural development. This meant that all government programmes and expenditure had to be aligned with these priorities.
While some will be looking forward to this week’s speech with great anticipation, it is also possible that the address will not contain anything extraordinary.
Since taking over as president, Zuma has reshuffled his cabinet twice and suspended the chief of police. It is assumed that these drastic measures were meant to demonstrate the president’s decisiveness on issues of service delivery. While it is possible that the State of the Nation address will sets the tone for Zuma’s political strategy to retain a second term as the ANC president, it is arguable whether the government has in fact achieved its targets in these priority areas.
Although major institutional announcements such as the creation of the jobs fund, the youth subsidy scheme for companies and the New Growth Path became a prominent feature of the past three years, one doubts if they have translated into meaningful interventions that have alleviated the plight of the unemployed and the youth. This needs to change.
Characterised by a widening gap between the rich and poor, increasing levels of corruption, violent crime and the increasing rate of unemployment, South Africa has not recorded any significant percentage of economic growth in the past three years and as such cannot create any decent jobs and employment opportunities for the semi-skilled people of our country.
Early this year, the numbers of young people who joined the unemployed ranks and are not connected to any tertiary or further education institutions increased to more than 3.2 million. These are telling signs of a ticking time bomb. It is this sector that has the legitimate and reasonable expectation for decisive announcements from the president’s address.
Because the youth is the future and Zuma is on record as emphasising the importance of education and the extent to which young people are unemployed, the president owes it to young people to make extraordinary announcements at the opening of Parliament.
On Thursday, the country should be less worried about the excuses as to why jobs were not created, and more concerned with the extent to which measures and a policy framework have been put in place to create an enabling environment for jobs and economic participation of black people, who are in the majority.
In Polokwane a year ago, Zuma mentioned that “the creation of decent jobs must be the central focus of all economic policies of the government”. The president stressed that “the comprehensive drive to enhance social equity and competitiveness, systemic changes to mobilise domestic investment around activities that can create sustainable employment and strong social dialogue to focus all stakeholders on encouraging growth in employment-creating activities” must be the emphasis.
Although the monitoring and planning capacity has been created in the president’s office, very few programmes have come out of government departments and institutions directed towards this.
The desperate situation facing unemployed youth is out of control. The gravity of this dire situation manifests itself in growing levels of anger and violent conduct by young people who find themselves resorting to crime as a means of survival. Others are compelled to turn to tenderpreneurship to survive. This has even prompted the ANC Youth League in Gauteng to campaign for the scrapping of tenders as a means of mitigating this.
As he faces the nation, Zuma must shy away from the procrastination that has so far characterised his term of office. He needs to announce robust and radical interventions that are drastically needed to address the plight of young people in the townships and rural areas. He owes it to the nation.
Last year Defence Minister Lindiwe Sisulu correctly intimated measures to mitigate this by absorbing these youth into army barracks and training camps.
The president needs to make use of the opportunity to announce, among other things, the following drastic measures:
n Introducing a basic, across-the-board military “conscription” programme for all young people between the ages of 16 and 25 who are neither connected with any school, tertiary or further education institution nor gainfully employed.
This type of compulsory militarisation of the youth will be nothing like apartheid-style conscription. Instead, it will focus on real and meaningful training, on a positive lifestyle, industrial skills, as well as job-relevant and entrepreneurial training that will prepare young people to become positive, contributing citizens.
Young people in South Africa need more than jobs and training. They need inspiration, mentorship and moral motivation. They need institutional and leadership mentorship that will help them to contribute positively to society. This will be an opportunity to guide, motivate and coach them, especially around the skills that are required by the economy.
n Depending on available resources and fiscal capacity, the duration of this programme will be negotiable and may last between two and three years. During their stay in such camps, these young people would be allocated a reasonable stipend and allowance that they can use to sustain themselves and supplement their destitute families who they have left behind and where possible, pay something towards their studies in preparation for leaving the programme.
n Properly conceptualised, the programmes can be co-financed through public-private partnerships, with the private-sector funding used to recognise and reward the contributing company’s skills and enterprise development initiatives.
With the support of the National Treasury, which must allocate minimally to this, the Departments of Labour and Higher Education must urgently design ways of re-engineering and improving the efficiency of the sector education and training authorities (Setas) to align them to outcome-based, practical training.
This will ensure that those young people who are enrolled at Setas, unlike in the current status quo, are significantly absorbed into the job market with relevant skills. The constitutionality and morality of this compulsory programme will be debated later.
While this intervention may not necessarily be a long-lasting solution, it will in the immediate and medium term, help to drastically reduce the backlog while long-term solutions are being sought.
* Attorney Thabo Masombuka is an economic transformation adviser and director at Siyakha Consulting, an empowerment advisory consultancy firm based in Bryanston.