Deputy Minister Nzuza concludes a two-day visit to Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality
The Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Njabulo Nzuza has concluded a two-day visit to the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality where he interacted with a wide range of stakeholders including students, traditional leaders, local government leaders as well as members of the community.
On Friday, 09 September 2022, Deputy Minister Nzuza addressed the 5th Nelson Mandela Annual Youth Convention held at the Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, highlighting government’s responsibility in the economic empowerment of young people as well as the responsibility to advance a youth agenda that speaks not only to an active but an innovative youth which is able to become active agents of change. He explained that government holds the responsibility to invest in young people through skills development which will not only benefit the recipients but the state as the institution that will ultimately absorb or source these skilled young people.
“It takes a certain level of skills and knowledge to play a critical role in shaping the strategic vision of government. We need to ensure that we change our outlook on skills being an out of university exercise as we are confronted with the reality of young South Africans who remain largely unskilled. We must build a youth force that is able to produce products and services needed by the economy in order for them to participate in the economy. We need to build a skilled youth base that is able to compete and rise above skilled labour from our neighbours”, he said.
On Saturday, 10 September 2022, Deputy Minister Nzuza accompanied by Eastern Cape COGTA MEC Zolile Williams as well as the Executive Mayor of the municipality, Ms Eugene Johnson, held an Imbizo with community members from Motherwell and surrounding areas. The Departments of Home Affairs, Labour, Health, Social Development as well as SASSA had deployed mobile units to provide services to approximately 2000 clients who were in attendance.
MEC Williams said it was imperative for COGTA to form part of the event, as a government department tasked with the responsibility to improve cooperative governance across the three spheres of government, in partnership with institutions of traditional leadership, to ensure that provinces and municipalities carry out their service delivery and development functions effectively.
“We are very pleased to be present here today alongside the Department of Home Affairs as led by Deputy Minister Nzuza. This programme is crucial for it brings services to the people. Our strategic vision as Eastern Cape COGTA is to build an effective intergovernmental relations pipeline whose key thrust is coordinated delivery of meaningful services to the people. This initiative of a Services Imbizo augers well with that vision.”
Addressing community members, Deputy Minister Nzuza said government bears the responsibility to interact, on a regular basis, with community members through various avenues including Izimbizo which provide a platform where issues could be raised in an unmediated fashion with a view to finding lasting solutions.
“Of great importance to us is that we undertake this visit during the Public Service month which serves as a reminder of what it means to serve communities and to also look at the impact the government has, especially around issues of service delivery. As a Department, we have invested a lot of financial resources to improve our services to our clients. In this regard, we have introduced various interventions including the Branch Appointment Booking System to eradicate queues; as well as the Digitisation Project which seeks to convert paper documents to electronic by scanning them for ease of retrieval and storage”, he said.
The Deputy Minister has underlined the Home Affairs mobile units as a flagship intervention that will play a major role in attaining the Department’s vision to expand its footprint.
“This financial year, we will be procuring fifteen (15) additional mobile units to complement the 110 that are already deployed across the country to provide services where clients have no access to our offices”, explained Deputy Minister Nzuza.
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