Moneyweb writes that last year when President Cyril Ramaphosa gave the closing address at the Jobs Summit, held to come up with a concrete plan to tackle unemployment, he told critics who said the event would be a talk shop to “eat their words”.  

At the time, stakeholders from government, labour, business and communities had produced an 82-page framework agreement, which outlined 77 commitments across five themed interventions.  The framework provided detailed guidelines with tight timeframes.  Yet, nine months since those sweeping commitments that promised at least 275,000 jobs annually in addition to the jobs that were already being created in the economy, the unemployment rate has increased to 29% – its highest level in a decade.  “The momentum of the implementation was in one way or another disturbed by the political period of the elections, where the focus at some stage became the elections [in May],” said Minister of Employment and Labour Thulas Nxesi at a Nedlac briefing last week on implementation of the summit agreement.  He stated that the most serious constraints that have been raised as hurdles to job creation related to the issue of a reliable supply of electricity.  He added that close to 60% of commitments were government initiatives by different departments, but the state’s bureaucratic processes were an impediment that needed to be dealt with.  Nxesi advised that stakeholders had “now agreed that there is going to be a focus on all the projects of the job summit” to fast-track implementation and create clear timeframes and milestones.

• Read the full original of the above report by Tebogo Tshwane at Moneyweb
• Read too, Latest figures show failure of jobs summit, at Business Times

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