Calls have lately been made from various quarters that South Africa does not have a job creation policy. However, the government does indeed have a job creation policy: to create 4.5 million jobs by 2014. What is lacking, though, is a proper strategy and a programme with specified actions, support programmes, budgets, partners and targets. At present, there are only ad hoc 'interventions' and short-term programmes such as the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP).

Yet Public Works Minister Geoff Doidge says the government is confident that it will create 500 000 "work opportunities" by the end of the year as the basis for the 4.5 million promised jobs. According to Doidge, the latest "verified figures" show that the government created 223 568 work opportunities through the EPWP from 1 April to 31 August.

However, public works programmes are not job creation, hence perhaps the rephrased "work opportunities". These are at best only temporary poverty alleviation measures coupled to limited skills training — once the programme has run its course, the temporarily employed people return to their former misery. In essence, this programme gives only temporary relief and false hope. But Doidge said that today the government used a "complex" definition for 'work opportunities', as defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations.

"We will create 500 000 jobs"

There are many other good job-creation intentions that have no substance to them, no plan, no budget, no targets backing them up or transforming them into action. The easy part was to announce from an election platform that "we will create 500 000 jobs" — but it is not so easy to say exactly how these will be created. It is even more difficult to set about actually doing so.

The government cannot be an unlimited employer itself. It cannot singlehandedly create jobs. It can merely create the conditions and stimuli for job creation and leave actual job creation up to private enterprise and endeavour, which can be rewarded by the government. And it is at present creating only temporary poverty alleviation measures centred around a wishful number of people instead of facilitating the creation of economically viable and sustainable jobs centred around permanent positions that are required and are not merely created as a numbers exercise. Sustainability should be a keyword.

Consider the government's job-creation track record so far (sources: SALDRU, LFS, OHS):

• The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) promised 2.5 million jobs over 10 years (1994 — 2004) — instead, unemployment rose from 13 to 21 percent (narrow definition).
• The Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy promised 400 000 jobs per year (from 1996 onwards) — instead, unemployment rose from 21 percent in 1996 to 30.5 percent in 2002, before dipping to 26.7 percent by 2005.
• President Jacob Zuma's government and the African National Congress promised 4.5 million jobs by 2014, the first 500 000 by the end of 2009 — instead, more than 700 000 jobs were lost in the first nine months of the year, with expectations being that one million jobs will have been lost by December (granted the recession played a role, but if the government did as promised, job losses should have been only half that figure).
• The official third quarter 2009 unemployment rate (narrow definition) stands at 24.5 percent — it is probably considerably higher.

It would seem the only thing the government has got right so far (since 1994), is to realise South Africa is sitting on a jobs and skills time bomb, as Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana reminded the Black Management Forum (BMF) last month. The point is, however, that government is blowing a great deal of hot air, making events organisers rich with all the talk shops, making many unfulfilled or unfullfillable promises, and is doing very little that is really constructive.

Approaches his job like a shop steward

An urgent overhaul is required, and a good place to start is with the Labour ministry. It does not help to have a minister who approaches his job like a shop steward and turns his department into a lunch-hour shop floor meeting. Proper and reliable statistics are required, which Statistics SA fails to supply. A comprehensive skills survey is required. And the myriad 'initiatives', training schemes, sectoral agencies, oversight bodies, and development entities among others have to be reduced, streamlined and simplified.

In addition, the government will have to break the stranglehold of the Left — the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). They are leading the government to expend energy and resources that are far more needed elsewhere on sidetracking issues such as labour brokering, simply because it is an ancient and narrow-minded pet hate of the Left and because temporary workers cannot be organised by Cosatu.

Article courtesy of Leadership Magazine.

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