Address by the Deputy Minister, Mr Buti Manamela, to the 3rd Annual Young Professionals Sustainability Imbizo – Consulting Engineers South Africa, 11 August 2015, Kempton Park, Gauteng
Ms Jeshika Ramchand-Moonsamy, Chairperson of the CESA Young Professionals Forum
Mr Keamogetswe Mmekwa – Deputy Chairperson of the CESA Young Professionals Forum
Mr Khathu Ramukumba – CEO of the NYDA
Invited guests
Young professionals
It is indeed a great honour and privilege for me to address this august gathering of young professionals within the engineering sector.
In 1999, just over 15 years ago, the Indian economist Amartya Sen released his book entitled “Development as Freedom”. Sen explored the relationship between freedom and development. He argued that freedom is both a basic constituent of development and an enabling key to other aspects of development. For Sen, development represents a wider set of freedoms than just the rise of Gross Domestic Product. Sen argues that at the very root of development is the expansion of individual freedoms and capabilities.
South Africa, in an adolescent metaphor, represents a coming of age with twenty one years of democracy. If South Africa was a young person today, he or she would have been given the keys to freedom as a rite of passage. He or she would be old enough to vote, old enough to buy booze, old enough to be tried as an adult and old enough to enter into legal agreements.
Listening to questions and arguments posed by opposition parties to President Jacob Zuma in the National Assembly last week, one could not help but think we are living in a different country. Opposition parties painted South Africa as a child limping along, with desolation all round her, with a chronic and un-curable illness, facing imminent death. These cynics would have us believe that no progress has been made in our twenty years of freedom. These critics would have us believe that doom and gloom are all around and our inevitable fate is to meet the consequences of this doom and gloom and ultimately end in failure.
However South Africa and her people reject this characterisation.
Recently, I had the opportunity to consult the youth of our country on the development of our National Youth Policy 2020. We directly engaged youth in provincial, regional and local consultations across the nine provinces. We went to schools, shebeens, taxi ranks, bus stations and workplaces speaking with young people. We met with key youth formations from across our diverse youth sector. We received over 100 written submissions on the NYP 2020 from varied youth voices across the country. It was a rigorous process of engagement and I was wholly captivated by the depth of insight that our young people have about the South Africa they want and how to overcome the youth development challenges that we face.
Overwhelmingly young people told us that they want a hand up and not a hand out. They told us that they do not want to be passive recipients of government interventions. But rather, they are ready to be active partners in youth development. They are not looking for special favours from government. But instead, they want government to create that enabling environment which creates opportunity for them to grab and take hold off as they steer themselves down the development trajectory. Therefore the outcome of the NYP 2020 is “to produce empowered young people who are able to realise their full potential and understand their roles and responsibilities in making a meaningful contribution to the development of a non-racial, equal, democratic and prosperous South Africa.”
When we consulted the nation in developing the National Development Plan 2030, our citizens in no uncertain terms told us that they envision a South Africa where everyone feels free yet bounded to others. They envision a South Africa where everyone embraces their full potential. They envision a country where opportunity is determined not by birth, but by ability, education and hard work. And that they realise that such a society will require transformation of the economy and focused efforts to build the countries capabilities.
Through the NDP 2030 and the NYP 2020 – our citizens, both young and old, called for developing people’s capabilities in the quest for freedom. They saw themselves as active partners in South Africa’s development and that the process of empowerment would be incomplete without their active role.
Radical economic transformation means that we should move beyond mere inclusion of black people in the economy. In fact, we should speak of direct and majority participation of the whole of our people. This includes using our fiscal policy to get the state to lead in using it’s spend in the economy to support small business and invest in the health and education of the nation. The unashamed pursuance of a radical economic transformation means that we have to turn the ownership figures at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on their head, urgently. This radical economic transformation also includes a targeted programme of supporting black industrialists, using government’s procurement to support women and youth owned businesses and buying of locally produced goods and beneficiation of minerals in order to create much needed jobs.
Through the NYP 2020, we will improve public employment schemes such as the EPWP, Youth Brigades and the Community Works Programmes. These programmes provide an important social safety net for young people whilst improving their employability, skills development and getting them on the first rung of the empowerment ladder. Through the NYP 2020 we will scale up public internships with the creation of 60, 000 internship opportunities. We will make public service something to aspire to by attracting the best and brightest. Public service must become a career of choice and not something to do as a last resort.
Through the NYP 2020 we will drive a mass youth entrepreneurship programme encouraging youth to become entrepreneurs. We are creating a value chain of entrepreneurship across the spectrum from start up to black industrialist. Radical economic empowerment does not mean the quickest way to becoming a tenderpreneur. Radical economic empowerment means developing the capabilities of our young people, providing the opportunities and supports that they need, and assisting their entrance into the labour market and formal economy in the quickest possible way.
Education remains a critical pillar for the empowerment of our young people. Through the NYP 2020, second chance programmes for youth to complete their education will be scaled up with career guidance expanded in all levels of schooling. TVET colleges will be expanded to increase the participation rate to 25% and the graduation rate to 75%.
Social cohesion must be advanced by young people as the primary charters of this new generation. The NYP 2020 supports a youth leadership that will develop active citizenry. I have initiated a Task Team that is currently reviewing and amending the policy framework for the National Youth Service programme. NYS remains a powerful weapon in our social cohesion and national building arsenal. We want a better coordinated and simplified implementation of NYS that creates opportunities for all young people to serve their communities and country.
For youth development to succeed, we need effective machinery across government and civil society to drive good policy making and efficient implementation. To this end, we will be amending the NYDA Act to ensure that we have an effective, responsive NYDA particularly in provinces. Already the NYDA has begun to turn itself around. Soon the Auditor General will publicly release a clean audit for the agency as well as a 93% achievement rate of its performance objectives. These are strong measures which indicate that the NYDA is on the right track with good governance and sound management. The establishment of the Presidential Working Group on Youth has taken place as promised in the NYP 2020. Through this mechanism, government will ensure that youth development receives high priority and that implementation of key proposals within the NYP 2020 will be closely monitored.
As the Twenty Year Review has noted: “Democracy has brought freedom of movement and of association, the right to own property, freedom of expression and freedom of the press, the equality of women, religious freedom, workplace freedom and the right to strike and protest, all in an attempt to restore the human dignity that was stripped away from us in our colonial and apartheid past. Much has been done to address the systematic violence and land dispossession that was a characteristic feature of the apartheid era. Even more has been done to actively empower previously disadvantaged people through employment equity, affirmative action, and business empowerment. One of the most active arenas of change has been to shift the programmes of the state towards the reconstruction and development of our country, with a particular focus on the poor and marginalised – to eliminate poverty and provide access to housing, water, electricity, sanitation, education, health, social protection support to the millions deprived of these basic rights under apartheid. Over time, we have received worldwide recognition for our work in tackling poverty. New constitutional institutions have also been put in place, ensuring human rights, public protection, independent monetary policy and independent audit, among others. Simultaneously the economy has grown from an average of about 1.5% per annum in the run-up to democracy to over 3% per annum on average in the democratic era.”
But despite this remarkable progress, much more still needs to be done to address poverty, unemployment and inequality. These challenges are real.
However South Africa is a much better place to live in now than it was in 1994. Indeed, we have a good story to tell. As a country, we have made remarkable progress in dismantling the oppressive apartheid system and we have created a thriving constitutional democracy with well-functioning arms of state – a representative legislature, the executive and an independent judiciary.
Indeed, our people are more empowered today than they ever have been. Our young people’s capabilities are being developed so that they indeed taste and see development as freedom.
I have said to young people and youth formations that they have a key role to play in the implementation and monitoring of youth development. Government will continue to create the enabling environment for youth development. We expect young people and youth organisations to develop these opportunities and turn them into gold. Young people must not depend on the charity of government. Instead they must be resources for their country, working with government as partners to create opportunity. As partners in their own development. This is the depiction of youth development that must prevail. This is real empowerment leading towards enhancing peoples capabilities.
This is development as freedom.
I thank you.
