It is two months to the day since Minister of Public Works Geoff Doidge told Parliament that the ANC government would not only meet, but far exceed, its target of creating 500,000 new jobs by the end of the year. Now the President has admitted to the ANC's national executive committee that his administration will come no where near meeting this undertaking, which he first made in his State of the Nation address in June. The President is quoted in this morning's City Press as saying: "Given the manner in which we are shedding jobs, we will welcome any number of job opportunities created during this period. Even 100 000 job opportunities can be considered a success." The fact of the matter is that far from creating jobs, unemployment is spiraling under the Zuma administration. Using the proper definition which includes ‘discouraged job seekers', unemployment increased in the third quarter of 2009 from 29.7% to 31.1%. Third quarter data also shows that 770,000 jobs have been shed by our economy since the same time last year. The Zuma administration said job creation was one of its key priorities, but it is yet to create one single net new job. The Zuma administration badly miscalculated by making this undertaking to the South African people, since they have undertaken absolutely no policy reform that could possibly have helped to achieve this target. Indeed, the only new economic policy being touted by the Zuma administration that would have any significant effect on the labour market is its plan to ban temporary employment services. The problem is that this will cut about 500,000 jobs, rather than create them. The president's failure to make good on this undertaking offered in his State of the Nation address is only the latest in a long line of such failures on his watch. For instance, the minister of health recently conceded that South Africa would not meet its target of providing ARVs to 80 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS by 2011, because of lack of trained personnel and various other logistical issues. The president also pledged in his state of the nation to redouble efforts to ensure that government "act[s] prudently", with "every cent" being spent "wisely and fruitfully". Instead, the DA has already tracked over R320-million in fruitless and wasteful expenditure under the Zuma administration, including nearly R50-million spent on luxury vehicles. It is becoming increasingly apparent that this administration is more concerned with creating the impression of something being done than actually getting anything done. In order to create jobs the Zuma administration needs to acknowledge the dire problem with skills development, and act to address it right away. As recently as two weeks ago the minister of higher education deemed SETAs "the best possible vehicle [for skills development] that we have". This is in spite of the fact that all the evidence shows categorically that SETAs are costly, wasteful, overly bureaucratic, grossly mismanaged and almost entirely ineffective. More broadly, the SETA system rests of the untenable notion that governments are better at identifying skills needed in the market place than markets are. The role of the state should be to help businesses to train their own employees - through, for instance, state-funded wage subsidies, and by creating an incentive for on-the-job training by allowing employers to claim back money spent on training costs from the skills development levy. We also need to urgently remove legislated obstacles to job creation, particularly with respect to SMMEs. Research shows quite clearly that simplifying labour regulations will help to create new job opportunities. The unions don't want to make it easy for firms to hire or fire workers, since they have an incentive to make sure that unionised workers stay in employment (and thus keep paying their union membership fees), and that nonunionised unemployed jobseekers don't take their jobs from them. This approach is anti-poor, and to the detriment of the majority of South Africans. But Jacob Zuma was elected on the coattails of the largest interest group of this kind, Cosatu, so naturally he has done little in the way to remove such obstacles to job creation. The Zuma administration needs to take stock of its failure to tackle unemployment and the skills deficit. It needs to consider instituting policies that economic research suggests will help to create jobs, even where doing so will not be well received by unions and other lobby groups. It needs to do away with plans to ban labour broking, and instead look at instituting improved regulations of that industry. And it needs to consider reforms of the labour market that expand job opportunities for all South Africans.