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Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel’s plan for the state to hire workers on infrastructure “maintenance” projects will do nothing to stop the job-shedding caused by his own government.

Earlier this week, the Quarterly Labour Force Survey revealed that the number of people who were unemployed increased by 321 000 from 4.9 million to 5.2 million in the first six months of 2015.

The mining and manufacturing sectors are haemorrhaging jobs apace. Yet the best Minister Patel can do in the face of this bloodbath is to suggest that every government department should employ more people to maintain roads, water infrastructure, schools and hospitals.

After the Cabinet Lekgotla on Friday, he said: “When you fix roads and potholes, and [ensure] that broken windows at schools and doors at hospitals are fixed quickly and efficiently, you create an enormous number of jobs”.

This kind of statist sophistry only serves to trumpet the Minister’s economic illiteracy. If he thinks fixing potholes is going to create millions of jobs, he is delusional.

Minister Patel wants to use public money to create jobs artificially. Instead, his government should be empowering the private sector to create real jobs so that there is more public money to be spent on state services.

Minister Patel was also reported as saying that the focus will be on maintenance to ensure that “we don’t just build new infrastructure”.

This marks a change in tune. The Minister is usually at pains to talk up the government’s R4-trillion plan for new infrastructure, even though there is precious little evidence of it. Now there seems to be a shift in emphasis towards maintenance. Perhaps that is a tacit acknowledgement that the new infrastructure plan is floundering.

The time has come for the Government to show some tangible results from its infrastructure spend.

More urgently, it needs to come up with a serious plan to stem the jobs bloodbath, instead of tinkering at the edges with potholes and broken windows.

Issued by DA