Now in the realm of the possible: teams of formerly unemployed youth creating parks and soccer fields to replace squatter camps. Local authority home-care programmes providing support to the chronically ill in small towns, caring for orphans, allowing children to attend school. Building works maintaining and repairing roads, bridges and dams in previously neglected areas — and contracts to black enterprises to plant trees; school, street and church beautification projects beyond routine maintenance. Nutrition projects. Play schools. Dance groups…
All of this is paid for by the government’s prosaically named Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP), which allocates about R20-billion over the next five years. Physical infrastructure — roads, bridges and dams — gets R15-billion.
But the EPWP is also intended to target social and cultural infrastructure and the environment. Environmental and cultural projects are allocated R4-billion and social projects “at least” R600-million, not only to generate jobs, but also contracts and subcontracts awarded according to the new broad-based black economic empowerment scorecard.
Together with this scorecard and a mass learnership programme, the EPWP is the third element of a strategy that is capable of changing the economic power structure over the next decade.
This is a watershed opportunity for local authorities to plan job-creating programmes that build local social services, but the imme-diate question is: How many municipalities are up to this task?
The gap in capability between the big metros and small, new and often divided municipalities is large.
The way to go, given the low capa-city of local governments, is to establish joint ventures or public-private partnerships with NGOs and the private sector in the areas.
Emerging municipalities should set up an EPWP implementation advisory task team, bringing together people of integrity and managerial experience, as well as of dignity and concern. Higher-education institutions, NGOs and community-based organisations have a great role to play.
They need to be brought into the partnership framework so that a coordinated attack on poverty can be launched.
There is also a challenge to the media here. With so many resources available and so little time for the EPWP, there are bound to be instances of inertia, chaos and corruption. Local media must also be part of the EPWP task team system; with editors on committees, publicising and criticising, minimising abuse and maximising projects’ public impact.
Social infrastructure is critical, in particular, for under-served communities that need both the services and the jobs. And social facilities, local amenities and small business development have been neglected in under-serviced areas. There is a lot of catching up to do, and economic bases to be built. Public pressure and specific proposals are valid ways of getting projects moving.
The Department of Public Works is to oversee, while other national departments — education, environment, water, health, and trade and industry — are to act in support.
This is a politically and technically complex challenge, but one in which we dare not fail.
But, as we have learned, “job creation” and “unemployment reduction” are not the same thing. Faster economic growth may well increase the number of employment opportunities, but only for those who have the skills to occupy these positions. This leaves behind those lacking basic skills. In essence, what we face is a skills mismatch in the short term.
Three complementary interventions are suggested.
First, a massive nationwide learnership programme that will propel one million learners from the streets and into the formal economy.
This is a partnership that has already been agreed on by the private sector and the fiscus, through the National Economic Development and Labour Council and the National Treasury. The fiscal resources are available. But it has not been championed, and it has not been marketed, and business in particular has not caught on. It is time to get on with it.
Businesses can, and should, become learner sponsors — at the expense of the government. It works like this: a company makes an agreement with learners to put them through an accredited educational programme. Apart from the cost of management oversight and logistics, the fiscus picks up the bill.
From the corner café to the big groups, it is time to move on this. The great advantage is that this is the most powerful single means of black economic empowerment. It is the most practical way of integrating unused human resources into society, bringing people into the formal economy. Young people learn how the formal economy works, and will influence their peers and their families.
The staircase between South Africa’s two economies could well be this learnership programme. Participation in it deserves to be integrated into all forthcoming sector charters.
Practical debate around this tends to centre around the inability of the education and accreditation systems to cope with anything on this scale. This brings us to our next critical intervention.
To sustain our attack on poverty, we need a fundamental rethink of the institutional and curricular transformation of our schooling system, and its human resource development approach. Its capacity to deliver is grossly unequal. This is partly because of management deficits, but also because the government has failed to fund training bursaries for teachers since the late 1990s, leaving a huge backlog in educator numbers.
Both further and higher-education institutions have to get creative to generate appropriate and accredited training. Sector education and training authorities must, as a matter of urgency, be activated. This, together with creative marketing and some business insight, could make a real difference to the pool of unemployed and underqualified youth.
Finally, we need an urgent relaxation of our self-imposed embargo on the importation of skills to fill the vacant positions in clinics, hospitals, schools and government departments, while the new generation of skilled workers is groomed. This would not deprive any one skilled worker a job, would have a significant positive impact on service delivery and would create immediate and considerable employment for lower-skilled workers.
Iraj Abedian is chief economist at Standard Bank. Sue Brown is political analyst at the Institute forJustice and Reconciliation. They will present further analysis of job creation and learnerhip-programme issues at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business on Wednesday March 10 at 5.50pm