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.