New struggle is struggle for jobs - Maimane

While the struggle pre-1994 was to secure workers’ rights, the struggle post-1994 is the struggle for jobs, DA leader Mmusi Maimane said.

Cape Town -While the struggle pre-1994 was to secure workers’ rights, the struggle post-1994 is the struggle for jobs and employment, Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane said on Sunday.

“Political freedom has been attained; yet economic freedom is still a pipedream for the 8.2 million jobless South Africans,” he told a Workers’ Day event in Cape Town.

One in every three people in South Africa currently could not find work.

“Amid job-killing national government policy, where we govern, the DA has taken huge strides towards creating an enabling environment for entrepreneurs and small business to thrive so that new jobs can be created. At a time when 8.2 million South Africans are without a job we can no longer afford to have poorly thought-out laws that make finding a job even harder,” he said.

Small businesses and entrepreneurs had the potential to be the engine for job creation, but South Africa had one of the highest failure rates for start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Making it easier for entrepreneurs to start up and grow their small businesses, by cutting unnecessary red tape and regulation, was vitally important to ensure real jobs were created.

Research showed that millions of new small businesses was the only sustainable way to beat unemployment. Small businesses already employed the huge majority of new workers in the economy. The DA believed that to create five million new jobs, one million new small businesses were needed.

“Since we began governing in 2006, the DA-run City of Cape Town has successfully implemented a programme of action to identify and repeal legislation, policies, and by-laws and cut red tape in the city. The purpose of this project has been to make it easier for small businesses and entrepreneurs to start and thrive in Cape Town, thereby making it easier to create jobs in Cape Town,” Maimane said.

Over 300 outdated by-laws, policies, and plans had been repealed since 2006 by the city of Cape Town. Many previous policies were predicted on old apartheid laws that had never been repealed when the metro was run by the African National Congress. These by-laws, policies, and regulations, many from the apartheid era, still existed in other metros and acted as a hindrance to entrepreneurs who wanted to start up small businesses in these cities.

The results were there for all to see. There had been a small business boom in Cape Town that had led to the creation of many shared working spaces. Most importantly, unemployment in the Western Cape was now at 19 percent, the lowest in the country. Investment in the city had increased, while it was dropping nationally, in turn creating new jobs.

“However, the benefits are not just economic. The repealing of these pieces of legislation and policy also seeks to redress the economic exclusion which was a legacy of apartheid,” he said.

Also included in the repealing process were old informal trading laws, which had fallen away and been replaced by a new policy that provided more trading spaces and the security of tenure that came with permits for new trading spaces. This impacted positively on a large number of people, as a total of 161 000 people in Cape Town were employed in the informal sector, making up at least 11.3 percent of the total workforce of the city.

“This is just one of the many steps DA governments take to ensure that real jobs are created where we govern. We also provide access to a small business support office established to promote entrepreneurship and business-driven job placements. We help business people to find the most appropriate support service from a network of over 90 business development organisations that are located in the city.

“Moreover, the DA has created a comprehensive expanded public works programme (EPWP), which allocates job opportunities on a fair basis. Cape Town is currently the only metro that has implemented an impartial EPWP jobs allocation database, which has eliminated corruption by officials and councillors who hand out jobs to friends and family.

“We paid out a total of R176 million in wages to EPWP jobs in 2014/15 alone - more than any other metro in the country,” he said.

Cape Town now had the lowest unemployment rate of all of the metro’s across the country, showing that where the DA governed, there was the best hope of finding a job.

– African News Agency