Thank you for joining us here today. It is good to be here with the people of Ikageng, Tlokwe, a municipality where the DA continues to grow ahead of the 2016 elections.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been spending time with South Africans to get a sense of the people’s views on the real state of the nation.

While it has been an inspiring experience to meet hardworking South Africans, I have also heard many stories of people who are struggling to find jobs and who cannot support themselves and their loved ones.

I would like to focus my attention on the young people among you today, given the youth unemployment crisis South Africa faces.

I look at the youth in this room and see future leaders, doctors, businessmen and entrepreneurs.

The youth are being robbed of their economic power by a government that is not doing enough to create the opportunities we need for skills training and work experience.

In 2011 President Zuma promised that over the next 10 years he would create 5 million jobs. The truth is that since the President took office in 2009, the number of unemployed has grown by 2 million. The youth have suffered the most from this lack of jobs and comprise 67.5% of the number of unemployed.

Last year, over 500,000 matriculants passed the National Senior Certificate and will also be seeking employment in the years to come.

This is why we need a real Youth Wage Subsidy and not the Employment Tax Incentive (ETI). With youth unemployment unacceptably high, the results of government’s weak compromise with COSATU are becoming clear. We need stronger policies to bring about a significant decrease in youth unemployment.

While the ETI intended to create 178,000 new youth jobs over three years, data from the quarterly labour force survey in fact shows that overall the number of unemployed youth grew by more than 200,000 from 2013 to 2014.

In addition to the ineffective ETI, we now have Deputy Minister in the Presidency, Buti Manamela proposing that all government tenders worth R10 million or more are awarded exclusively to companies with a minimum of 50% youth representation.

Manamela’s proposal will not empower a broad number of our youth. It will only serve to extend the current circle of elite who are awarded government tenders via their political connections.

We need policies that empower young people to find jobs, not policies that benefit the powerful and politically-connected.

The issue of rising youth unemployment must be at the top of the Parliamentary agenda.

That is why I will be calling on Parliament to debate the need for a real Youth Wage Subsidy to address the ETI’s shortcomings.

The R5 billion allocated to the ETI is simply not enough to bring youth unemployment down given the large scale of the problem.

We want to see more money put behind a real Youth Wage Subsidy. We want this subsidy to include the small businesses that the ETI currently excludes from benefitting.

And we want to see policy changes to prevent labour brokers from profiting without passing on the benefit to businesses who employ young people.

The future of our country is in the hands of the young people like those gathered here today.
 
Power to the People! Amandla!

Issued by the DA