President Cyril Ramaphosa said that unemployment is one of the major issues the government is looking to better in 2025, but experts argued that the president needs to do more and fell short in his State of the Nation Address (SONA).
The president said that South Africa will invest around R940 billion in infrastructure, and this will be the driving force that will create employment. This investment of close to a trillion rand will be divested over three years.
According to Nkosinathi Mahlangu, a youth employment expert at Momentum, Ramaphosa succeeded in laying out government’s commitments to addressing unemployment, but he said that South Africa needs defined timelines and measurable outcomes.
Ramaphosa also said that the Medium-Term Development Plan will help advance inclusive growth and job creation.
“Our most urgent task is to grow our economy so that we can create jobs, reduce poverty and improve the lives of all South Africans,” he said.
To achieve these objectives, government will introduce a graduate recruitment scheme to attract the “best and the brightest" into the public service, the president added.
Mahlangu said that the scheme is welcomed but called for a concrete plan of how this can be achieved.
He said that government’s commitment to investing in digital public infrastructure presents an opportunity to leverage the expertise of local technology graduates and professionals, ensuring an inclusive approach that nurtures homegrown talent.
The president also said that in order to help address the unemployment issue in SA, GDP needs to grow by 3% in the coming years.
Mahlangu said that this push for more economic growth is ambitious but achieving it will require clear execution strategies from government in order to enable job creation.
“The R900 billion infrastructure investment is a major opportunity, but it must be ring-fenced to benefit unemployed South Africans, with at least a 60/40 split prioritising youth employment,” he added.
“Only where skills gaps exist should expertise be imported, and even then, it should be structured around skills transfer initiatives,” the employment expert explained.
Promises but no action
Support for youth, black-owned, women-led and disabled-owned businesses was reiterated in the speech by Ramaphosa, but Mahlangu said that South Africans have heard this before.
He said that it was now time to move from words to concrete action.
Mahlangu posed a question to Ramaphosa and asked if there are specific sectors that can serve as low-hanging fruit for transformation.
Over 200,000 new jobs
President Ramaphosa said that in the past year, young South Africans secured 235,000 work opportunities through the National Pathway Management Network, which is underpinned by the SAYouth.mobi platform.
Mahlangu argued that the creation of these work opportunities through SAYouth.mobi is promising on paper, but key questions remain.
“Do these jobs pay a living wage? Are they in high-growth sectors? Are they sustainable?”
These questions need to be addressed by government, he noted. Lastly, Mahlangu said that as South Africa takes the global stage with the G20 presidency, we have a unique opportunity to position African youth employment, entrepreneurship and financial inclusion as priorities on the international agenda.
“We need the kind of bold action that shifts policy into real, measurable change for young South Africans,” he added.
A point of pride?
The Foundation for Rights of Expression and Equality (Free SA) also responded to Ramaphosa's address and said that the president only presented public employment programmes as a solution to joblessness.
He ignored the reality that real job creation comes from a thriving private sector, not more government-run initiatives, the foundation said.
"The notion that the government must create jobs rather than enable businesses to do so is a fundamental misunderstanding of how economies grow," Free SA said.
The organisation argued that Ramaphosa should instead reduce red tape, ease labour laws, and encourage entrepreneurship, but yet again the president and government remained "fixated on expanding its own role in employment".
Lastly, Free SA said that Ramaphosa boasted about the fact that government provided social assistance to more than 28 million people.
"This should not be a point of pride, but rather a wake-up call that economic policies have failed to lift people out of dependence on the state. A growing welfare state is not a sign of progress, it is a sign of stagnation," the foundation said.
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