POLITICS

Signing of NYP a blow to youth employment - Phumzile Van Damme

DA MP says policy will effectively make state the primary employer of the youth

Signing of NYP a blow to youth employment

12 August 2015

Today the Minister in the Presidency responsible for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, Jeff Radebe, officially signed the National Youth Policy (NYP) 2015-2020 that will further compound the responsibilities of an already overburdened state. 

The policy – which puts the state at the centre of alleviating youth unemployment - will effectively make the state the primary employer of South Africa’s youth. This is unsustainable.

After making substantial submissions on this policy, while still in draft form, the DA is concerned that Minister Radebe is going ahead with this policy which will do little to incentivise public-private partnerships or to provide areal and meaningful Youth Wage Subsidy to create the necessary jobs the South African youth so desperately need.

For instance, the NYP trumpets public employment schemes in the form of “youth brigades”, a state-run “mass youth enterprise creation programme”, continued support for the hopeless, fiscal black hole that is the state-funded National Youth Development Agency (NYDA), and a variety of measures that are likely to undermine job-creating economic growth.

The DA believes that, rather than adopting a state-centric policy direction, the strategy should prioritise a concrete, measurable, and time-bound plan to promote jobs and expand opportunities for youth by:

Introducing a real Youth Wage Subsidy, not fiddling with the watered-down Employment Tax Incentive (ETI); and

Creating incentives for (rather than imposing penalties on) the private sector to take on first time-employees and get more involved in skills development and training.

The policy, in its current incarnation, is short-sighted because it preoccupies itself with interventionist measures and does not promote long-term, sustainable job creation. It will do little to dent our youth unemployment rate of 36% or provide opportunities for youth who account for 67% of the unemployed.

This policy amounts to nothing more than an ANC tinkering with an experiment that is destined to fail to the detriment of both the state and the millions of youths who so desperately seek a better life through dignified employment.

Statement issued by Phumzile van Damme MP, DA Shadow Deputy Minister in the Presidency, August 12 2015