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Rhodes University academic Professor Owen Skae writes that the recent Jobs Summit, anchored by President Cyril Ramaphosa, promised a lot but delivered very little substance.
In his view, the summit failed to deliver substantive conclusions that could dent the country’s high unemployment rate because it did not ask the right questions and shied away from difficult debates. He also reckons that that it was intellectually lax. For instance, Ramaphosa referenced the National Development Plan, but the plan has been dead as a functioning blueprint for a while. And the country is way off the trajectory that informed that plan. In addition, the summit ignored the great chasms that exist between stakeholders on approaches of how to create jobs. In not providing the hard evidence of what the country faces, and by not addressing deep seated differences among the main players, the summit was in Skae’s view flawed from the outset. And, while the 275,000 direct jobs to be created a year from the five themed interventions in the framework agreement was a start, “frankly, these won’t have any major impact.” Moreover, it said to be difficult to understand how the interventions all fit together. In Skae’s assessment, the summit never got to outlining a grand objective. Nor did it identify where the impetus would come from or how contradictory policies would fit together. “My impression is that the summit wanted to create some goodwill and positive sentiment. But the reality is that it will not jolt anybody out of the zone of “business as usual”.
- Read this article in full at TimesLive
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