Minister Lindiwe Zulu
Deputy Minister Z Kota
Deputy Minister Buti Manamela
Ambassador Carlos Fernandez de Cossio from Cuba
MECs
Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee, Hon N Mafu
HODs
CEOs of our public institutions
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Introduction
We assembled all of you here today because we want to achieve two things out of this. The first is to indicate to you that our priority in job creation in the human settlements environment is yourselves, the youth. In you we look forward to harnessing the necessary energy and eagerness to get both yourselves and the elderly out of the cycle of poverty and employment that has become such a worrying factor in our economy. Our job creation, in short, is aimed at you. We wish to empower you, mentor you and monitor you as you take up opportunities that will be outlined for you today.
From you we hope to get your buy-in, cooperation, determination and discipline to make this effort succeed.
In 1994 we inherited a country that was on the brink of collapse given its marginalisation by the world and the imposition of punitive sanctions. We inherited a country that was regarded as a pariah in the eyes of the world with vast and disproportionate treatment of its people based on colour and gender. Twenty years later we are still reeling from the full import and full extent of the deep systematic and historical imbalances of the apartheid system that we have to address. We are earnestly hard at work, strenuously unravelling the mess of this junk state as we seek, by all means possible, to restore back to every citizen their humanity and dignity.
We opted for a developmental state as opposed to a welfare state model. Our view of a developmental state is one that avails all manner of opportunities to its people to be capacitated, skilled and properly trained in order to take full charge of their own lives and those of their immediate families. On the other hand, our view of the welfare state is one where the citizenry rely on the state for their sustenance through a battery of social welfare interventions. Given the realities of our recent and painful past, it behove us to seek a strategic balance between welfare interventions aimed at redressing the past and developmental interventions aimed at creating a sustainable future for our people.
The concept of Youth Brigade is based on the quest to create an age cohort of vast well trained regiment of young people who will constitute a sustainable pool and skills base in the construction sector. The concept of a Youth Brigade cuts across political affinities and includes all young people irrespective of gender and geographic location. Any young person who desires to craft a career for themself in the construction sector qualifies to be part of this Youth Brigade.
The idea of a Youth Brigade does not just seek to avail opportunities to youth in the construction sector, of critical importance is that it seek to engender a certain form of work discipline, work ethic and an appreciation of doing things for oneself. In other words, the Youth Brigade can be viewed as some form of work conscription method intended to produce citizens who are in their prime age and who are fully empowered to assist in the delivery of 1.5 million housing opportunities in the next five years.
Young people are not our priority candidates for welfare and free housing. What our young people have which not even Apartheid could take away is their youth. You have the rest of your lives ahead of you. Our responsibility as the government is to empower you, educate you, provide you with work experience and opportunities and to the extent that we can provide you with jobs.
When we fought for you to be free, we intended to ensure that you are truly free and nothing could assure you of that than that we care- we are here for you and we would rather teach you to fish and provide you with fishing rods than give you a fish. In essence, we rather sufficiently empower you to build houses for the state and to build your own houses. The Youth Brigade will complement an assortment of other policy interventions that are intended to support the youth such as youth wage subsidy initiative.
Since 1994 there have been a number of policy interventions that were intended to redress the injustices of apartheid. Apart from those intervention intended for the youth there are many that deal with poverty and unemployment. But in order to ensure that there are sustainable resources to address these historical imbalances and to make the strategic welfare and social security interventions, the tax collection system had to be professionalised and improved. The crop of Youth Construction Brigade will too add to the increasing tax base that in turn will assist in supporting other social security interventions.
For example, 1, 7 million people were paying tax in 1994 as compared to 13, 7 million in 2012. Tax payers have substantially increased from 114 billion from 814 billion 2012. The frugal and efficient tax collection system has enabled and empowered the state to dispense resources for social welfare and social security. The new government sought to introduce new approaches to social welfare based on helping the poor and vulnerable to become self-reliant. This would include both social assistance programmes as well as welfare services aimed at empowering people.
In 1994 when we took over the reins of government through the support of our people, we vowed to correct the apartheid wrongs that have been visited on our people. We resolved to establish a developmental state where our people will be empowered with all opportunities to be self -sustainable. We also acknowledged the fact that a measure of welfare interventions were needed in order to assist the vulnerable, desperately needy, child headed families and the indigent.
To this end, we aligned deliberate policy interventions to attain the above objective through a regime of laws intended to address both social welfare and social security needs of our people.
There include inter alia:
We introduced the Child Support Grant in 1998 and initially targeted children aged 0 to 7 years. The age limit of this grant was gradually raised to 18 years;
In the provision of houses we acknowledged the following in relation to the youth;
- that young people too have housing needs that must be met and supported;
- that a big chunk of young people constitute back-dwellers with no access to government supported houses schemes;
- that young people who are in their prime and are able bodied must not be reduced to a welfare cases where they will be trapped for the rest of their lives;
- that young people must be capacitated to realise that they are the fulcrum that will ensure that the dream of a developmental state is realised.
- that a plethora of training interventions, skilling, re-skilling initiatives must constantly be afforded to young people who are poor and needy so that they exit from the welfare and social security net;
- that there is a serious deficit of young skilled construction workers in South Africa such that we mostly rely on workers from Lesotho ad Mozambique;
- that the deficit of skill in the construction industry includes areas such as property evaluators, conveyances and engineers;
- that because 63% of South Africans now live in urban areas as compared to 50% in 1994 imply that there will be a growing market for housing;
- rbanisation has thus resulted in a huge increase in demand for housing, social services, employment opportunities and infrastructure demands.
- South African cities are struggling to keep up with the demand for housing, social and economic infrastructure for a growing population of poor households, many of which are in informal settlements.
- that since 1994 the government has delivered approximately 3,7million subsidised housing opportunities for the poor giving a home to approximately 2, 5 million people.
Youth Brigade‘s strategic intervention and rational:
- to create a sustainable reservoir of sufficiently skilled young people who will sustain the construction sector beyond the 5th Administration;
- to ensure that this crop of builders and construction workers is well supported and sustained through mentorship and other professional support;
- to ensure that such a crop of construction workers inspire other young people to take up the task of re-building their country;
- to avail to South Africa a highly skill, dependable and effective group of construction workers who are conscious of the imperatives and demands of the NDP;
- to deliberately ring-fence a chunk of construction opportunities to this youth brigade in order to sustain them and ensure their continued reskilling;
- to devise exit mechanisms so that these Youth Construction Brigade are able to graduate to more higher skilled levels where they can compete in the open marker;
- to provide access to the growing housing value chain by young people. For example the formal housing market has increased 13 fold from R321 billion in 1994, reaching a collective value of about R4.036 trillion by 2014. Huge job opportunities have been created as a result;
- to fulfil the Housing Indaba’s resolution of partnering with the private and public sector to deliver 1,5 million housing opportunities.
Conclusion
Frantz Fanon famously said; “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission – fulfil it or betray it.”
This discovery of a mission is in addition to the general expectation that society has on the Youth. Those with a history as ours can boldly state that the kind of mission that Fanon speaks is already imposed by history on us.
My generation, and the generations before us had an unenviable task of having to fight for the liberation of our people. This was not an historical obligation that we have begrudgingly or reluctantly accepted. No, far from that, we embraced both the mission and the challenge enthusiastically and participated in a course higher than ourselves and our immediate interests.
Indeed, as part of the ongoing struggle for a full liberation and emancipation, our people and the young ones in particular have declared that economic emancipation would occur in their life time. We agree fully with these sentiments and ambition.
Economic emancipation includes many other things – such as self-empowerment, access to skills that enable one to participate in the economy. In this, access to shelter is important.
