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19 March 2008

Programme director, Mr Elroy Africa
Members of the National Youth Commission
Representatives of professional organisations
Members of community based youth organisations here present
Honourable Councillors and traditional leaders of our people
Students from Bedfordview High School

Allow me to join the programme director in welcoming you all to this consultative conference. Initially I was told it's a summit and now I am told it is a consultative conference and I don't know what the difference is, maybe it's the same.

This National Youth Summit is a brainchild of the Department of Provincial and Local Government (dplg), the South African Local Government Association (Salga) and the National Youth Commission. By organising this summit, we aim to bring into fruition the undertaking we made when we introduced the new system of local government in the year 2000.

We said then that the system of local government as we were introducing it, will bring democracy to your area, we said it will bring development opportunities where you live and we said this mindful of the immerse challenges we face in particular the challenge to reverse the legacy of marginalisation suffered by our young people, who happened to recite in predominantly rural provinces.

This particular summit places at the centre of our attention young people from Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and North West province. This will certainly enhance the nationwide momentum aimed at placing all municipal areas on a common platform.

Last week cabinet received the results of 2007 Community Survey, which was conducted by Statistics South Africa. Amongst other things ,the survey finds that 52 percent of the African youth population has become urbanised, which explains why many of the young people who stood up claimed to be from provinces, other than the ones I've mentioned earlier.

The Eastern Cape and Limpopo, according to the survey, experienced the greatest outflow of youth migrating to other provinces; this was in fact, a finding made in an earlier survey done in 2006. As we know, more than half of our country's gross value of industrial output is concentrated in the six metropolitan municipalities and less than 15 secondary cities.

Now given the scarcity of job opportunities in the rest of the country, we must expect more of this kind of trans-provincial migrations. People will not allow themselves to remain spatially entrapped within municipal areas that are without meaningful prospects for a better life and so they will move out to other areas of the country, to other provinces in search of the better life. However, experiences show that, this migration only serves to make the problem worse, it adds to the growing problem of the urbanisation of poverty. So increasingly we have our urbanised spaces becoming areas where the over concentration of wealth co-exists with grinding poverty. It bears emphasising that the youth constitute a social group which has the lowest employment rates. I'm told that the 60,7 percent of youth who are not employed are between the ages of 15 and 24. The reason for this is that they are still studying.

The Statistics South Africa survey, which I referred to earlier, provides useful information on living conditions in literally every municipal area. Whilst it does give us usefully new insights, some of its findings confirm what was established through studies previously conducted by the Department of Provincial and Local Government. The findings remind us that while we pursue the agenda for poverty eradication, we must bear in mind that our institutional capacity for pursuing this agenda is horribly inadequate. Professional organisations who are helping us to tackle the skills shortage have indicated to us that 74 out of 231 local municipalities have no engineers, technologists and technicians. Four out of 47 district municipalities have no civil engineers, technologists or technician. Forty-five local municipalities and four out of 47 district municipalities have only one civilian technician each.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) uses the notion of capability poverty to describe a situation such as this one that we are in. This situation calls for the kind of evidence based policy intervention measures of the kind that the Department of Provincial and Local Government (dplg), SALGA and the National Youth Commission are proposing to make, the idea of a dedicated Municipal Engineering Graduate Bursary Fund.

This approach will correctly place the institutions of higher learning as pipelines, which are there to boost our national efforts, towards building human infrastructure and enhance the functional efficiency of our municipalities. What limited progress we have made in some of these municipal areas has largely been the results of such ad hoc interventions as the mobilisation of externally based expects to come and help.

Welcome as this interventions are, they suffer a serious deficiency problem of unsustainability, because those who come to help come for a limited time after which they go and they are gone forever. Sustainability considerations therefore dictate that we are taking the route we are taking today, we are highlighting to the youth of our country opportunities which exist in local government. We are encouraging them to equip themselves in order to take advantage of these opportunities. As they take these opportunities, they place their own municipalities in a position sustainable to change the life of the people for the better. I must also say that this initiative has profound implications, which go beyond considerations of creating jobs for a few graduates and solving the skills shortage in the few municipalities.

Lets take the example of at least one of the provinces that are being targeted here, the example of Limpopo. In Limpopo, government is the single biggest employer and the reason for that is that province was built on foundations of three Bantustan administrations and the Transvaal provincial administration.

Last year, I had occasion to interact with students who are members of a student organisation, which is organising students in some of the tertiary institutions within Limpopo. In that interaction many things where discussed, it was in their context of their provincial general council where they asked me to come and talk to them.

In the course of that discussion, looking at some of the problems that exist in the province, some of which I referred to earlier, some amongst the members of the student organisation were calling for the nationalisation of the mines as a solution to the problem as they see it. I knew that there was a good basis for them to talk about the mines as a sector which needs to be nationalised in order to solve the problem of poverty in the province, because you just have to look around that province and you will see a lot of mining operations taking place.

In Tubatse, mining of platinum and chrome, in Thabazimbi (platinum), Lepelengkumpi (platinum) and Liphalale (coal). Now if you put these mines together and look at them together with the mines that exist in other provinces, you will then understand that as a country we have this geological profile which not many other countries in the world have. It is this endowment, which makes South Africa a country with the biggest platinum deposits in the world.

I posed the question to our learned friends from the South African Student Congress (Sasco). I asked them how deeply have we reflected about this? We are talking about nationalising the mines and indeed Limpopo has become the epicentre of the mining industry in the country along with the North West. So, I said maybe you know certain things which I do not know but let me tell you other things that I know which you may well know as well. One is that of the nine provinces, the Premier's Office in Limpopo has the highest vacancy rate. We are not able to find the type of person we need in Limpopo to fill certain posts that from the point of view of overcoming the legacy of underdevelopment are critical. Never mind the fact that three Bantustans have given us more government employees than any other province. Where will the capacity to manage nationalised mines in Limpopo come from?

If we are saying that the Premier's Office has the highest vacancy rate compared to the other provinces, it also means that the province has insufficient capacity to support municipalities within its jurisdiction. So, when we talk about the mining districts, the municipalities within the province in which there are these mining operations; some of these municipalities are those that I referred to earlier, municipalities without engineers, artisans and technicians. Of course they do not have a shortage of other types of people, they do not have a shortage for instance of people of my type. The political class is over subscribed in the province. And in a situation like that, you have a potential for a big threat to development. I have seen it in other situations, where, when you don't have a diversity of opportunities then people start fighting over the limited opportunities that exist.

That is why each time you had elections in Lesotho, the results would be disputed because everybody wants to be in Parliament and as I say, the threshold of being a politician is very low. You do not have to be politically minded or astute in order to be a political leader. But what we are talking about here is different. So what challenge exactly do we face in a province like the one I have just described? There are all these endowments that we have but the challenge is to optimise the benefit to be derived from this endowments. The existence of all these mines means that we have a big potential to create value within Limpopo and to create value within the North West province. But also, every other province has its own comparative advantages, which are not being developed to the full because of this problem of a weak skills base.

Now, the initiative that we are taking today is a very important initiative but it must also be situated within a broader context of the other challenges, which we seek to address as a nation. We are not just about creating jobs; we are in essence about creating opportunities. We want to make sure that this value that is being created in a province like Limpopo, as much of that value as is possible, can be retained within the province. We should be able to say we have got a conscious programme that we are unfolding to produce geologists who are going to play an important role in the development of those mines. So the skills base that we are looking at must not be limited to those skills that are immediately relevant to the day-to-day running of our municipalities or maintenance of municipal infrastructure.

I said earlier, that the bulk of the gross value of our industrial output manufactured goods is taking place in a few municipal areas. Why should all this platinum which is being mined in Limpopo, North West and elsewhere in the country, be taken out of the country unprocessed when in fact we can make sure that our institutions of higher learning are positioned in such a way that they can make a contribution in helping us to retain this value that I am talking about; so that as much of our product, as is possible, can be value added before we talk about shipping it around in search of value.

In other words, we should be able to look at these economic activities that are taking place in a province like that in these previously marginalised provinces and be able to say: in addition to creating jobs, how do we equip some of our young people to take advantage of the existence of this business enterprises to start their own which are related to what already exists. So, we should also be thinking about encouraging our young people not just to define themselves as job seekers but as seekers of opportunities which have the possibility to make them meaningful participants in the economy of their country. But also which have the possibility to improve the comparative advantages, which these areas actually have.

Someone was telling me that one of the benefits of the 1994 democratic breakthrough has been that the terms on which we are participating as a country in the global economy have changed for the better. In other words, whereas we had this problem which is not uniquely ours, because of our underdeveloped countries in the world suffer from this, of exporting minerals around the world unbeneficiated; we are beginning to trade in more value added manufactured goods. The one example that was cited was that of platinum that since 1995, one of our biggest exports has become platinum-based catalytic converters which go into cars some of which are cars that are manufactured in other countries. I am made to understand that as a matter of fact, in 13 years, we have captured 14 percent of the world market for catalytic converters.

But if you look at who exactly is using this platinum to create catalytic converters, all of them are foreign companies. We have had to attract them into South Africa because in the first place we lacked the technological know-how to do it but secondly, we generally have this problem of a weak skills base. Shouldn't we as a matter of fact be able to say one of the things that we are aiming to do is to make sure that some of the catalytic converters manufacturing companies will actually be started by these students that we give bursaries to?

In order words, I am saying that this initiative that we are starting today, on its own will not take us as far as we would want to go. So the question that arises is: where is the Department of Trade and Industry in this? If we pull some of these resources together, some of which are resources that are being administered by Umsobomvu Youth Fund, and so on, we may well find that we are creating a bigger capacity for ourselves to address the sorts of challenges that I was referring to earlier. Now, to sum up, I am saying that there are many opportunities that lie untapped, in part, because all of us are doing a lot of things but in our little isolated corners.

It is crucially important that we pull all our resources in the manner that we are trying to do today, the Youth Commission, Umsobomvu, Salga, the dplg but also make a call to other government departments and the private sector to come to the party.

If we do not have the type of engineering skills that we need as municipalities, it means that people doing business in these municipal areas do not have the benefit of relying on well-maintained infrastructure some of which is important for the businesses' operations. So, I am saying it is important that all of us come to the party; nobody should want to define for themselves the role of a free rider. Let us all pull our resources for the common good. We are going to be together here for today and tomorrow, I am certain that at the end of these two days, we shall have so benefited out of this interaction that when we go back to our respective areas, we will be able to know how to plough back into our communities.

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Provincial and Local Government
19 March 2008
Source: Department of Provincial and Local Government (http://www.dplg.gov.za)