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Using the warped notion of a "job opportunity", the ANC government has tried to pull the wool over the eyes of the South African public. But figures released today in response to a DA parliamentary question reveal just how disingenuous the ANC has been in terms of its real record on Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) job creation.

We know for a fact that 870,000 jobs were lost last year. However, the Zuma administration has harped on about creating 483,700 "job opportunities". The figures released now show, in fact, that the equivalent of only about 87,000 jobs was created.

The parliamentary reply from the minister of public works confirms that the average number of days of employment in a "job opportunity" is 45. It also confirms that any worker that is employed in more than one "job opportunity" is counted more than once. This means that the notion that 483,700 "job opportunities" were created is intangible and meaningless - it does not reflect the number of those employed, and a 45 day job is something very different to full time work.

The best way, then, of evaluating what 487,000 "job opportunities" equates to in real terms, is to calculate the number of working days created by the EPWP programme, and then calculate what this would mean in terms of real, full-time jobs. At 45 days per "job opportunity", and assuming a working year of 250 days in a full time job, the EPWP in fact created the equivalent of 87,066 full time jobs.

In other words, this parliamentary reply reveals that the EPWP created, in real terms, just one-tenth of the number of jobs that were lost in 2009.

This demonstrates just how wrongheaded it is for the ANC to continue to think that the EPWP, instead of the market, can be responsible for tackling unemployment in South Africa. In fact, it is the broader conditions that affect the market, the labour legislation that currently restricts small and medium sized businesses from taking on employees, and the inflows of fixed foreign investment, that will determine whether South Africa can tackle its unemployment problem.

The ANC government is not there to create jobs, it is there to create the environment in which jobs can be created. The sooner this fact is acknowledged, the sooner we can effectively create jobs in South Africa.