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It is an outrage that National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) chairperson Andile Lungisa thinks that his agency should have been provided with a R1-billion annual budget, and that the R385-million grant from Pravin Gordhan for 2011/12 is such a paltry amount that it would reduce the NYDA to “existing only by name”.

In actual fact, with its short history dominated by cronyism, poor administration and chronic under-delivery, it is Lungisa and the NYDA’s management themselves that have eroded the entity of any credibility and reduced it to existing in name only.

An annual grant of R385-million would be enough to zero-rate VAT on books. It would be sufficient to build more than 7,000 RDP houses, or pay for 2,800 new nurses. Mr Lungisa is sorely mistaken if he thinks the state can afford to allocate a billion rand annually to an institution like the NYDA, that has proven itself to be ineffective and has effectively become a vehicle for party interests to be served using public funds.

The NYDA met just 23 of its 68 targets over the last financial year. Insufficient funding and the global financial crisis were largely used to explain the entity’s poor delivery. However, despite these alleged financial constraints, Mr Lungisa is paid an annual salary of R800,000 for doing part-time work with NYDA and the agency’s ANC Youth League-dominated executive earns a combined income of R11-million per annum. Furthermore, the NYDA was responsible for arranging the funding for the ANC Youth League’s R100-million World Festival of Youth and Students held in December last year.

Far from regarding the NYDA as in need of more funds, the DA is deeply concerned that the Treasury has decided to allocate R1.22 billion to the agency over the next three years. While the DA fully supports the decision of both President Jacob Zuma and Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, to acknowledge job creation as the seminal challenge facing our country, dedicating billions of rands of public money to a poorly managed and ineffective entity – which has essentially been hijacked by the ANC Youth League – is an entirely misguided approach to promoting the economic involvement of our country’s youth.

We reiterate the call made by the DA Youth for the NYDA to be disbanded, and for its sizeable budget allocation to be channeled into initiatives that will make a meaningful contribution to the development of young South Africans.