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The Congress of South African Trade Unions welcomes the cabinet’s decision to set up an infrastructure commission, to be chaired by President Jacob Zuma and a job creation commission, to be chaired by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe.
COSATU agrees with the cabinet that infrastructure development and job creation are the key to dealing with poverty and inequality, and that there is a need to elevate the management of the two priorities to the presidency.
There are however two serious problems which the government will have to confront if these two commissions are to start to reduce unemployment and poverty.
One is the problem of employing too many public officials who lack the capacity to implement government’s existing policies, which often leads to money budgeted for projects which could have created employment being unspent and to the non-filling of vacant positions in government. This plays onto the hands of opposition parties, who can argue that the government is incapable of implementing its own policies
Unless this problem is resolved, new projects initiated by the new commissions may meet the same fate. Part of the solution must be a crash programme of training managers and developing their project management and human resource development skills.
The more fundamental problem is that even if all the money budgeted for job creation projects is well spent, this will not resolve the deep structural problems which underlie our unemployment and poverty crisis.
These have been identified by both COSATU and in the government’s New Growth Path document, as the economic structure we inherited from colonialism and apartheid, which is over-dependent on the export of raw materials rather than on manufacturing industry.
This problem has been made worse by the conservative macroeconomic policies of successive governments which have maintained high interest rates, which are a major disincentive to investment in job-creating projects, and premature abolition of tariff barriers, which has led to the loss of jobs and manufacturing capacity in industries such as clothing and textiles.