President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced an ambitious employment stimulus programme requiring the expenditure of R100bn over the next three years.
This fiscal year alone, just more than R14bn will be spent on creating about 800,000 employment and economic opportunities in a programme that will build on existing public works programmes and create new ones.
The announcement on Thursday was part of the economic recovery plan that Ramaphosa outlined in an address to a joint sitting of the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces.
Fifteen departments, all the metros and all the provinces have been drawn into the mass public employment programme, which aims to address SA’s chronic unemployment rate. In terms of the broader definition, about 10.3-million people are unemployed, or 42% of the economically active population.
The envisaged public employment programme will help address the devastation caused by the Covid-19 lockdown, which saw 2.2-million jobs lost in the second quarter. It will help cushion the effect of the withdrawal of the special Covid-19 grant of R350, which was to end at the end of October but which Ramaphosa announced would be extended for a further three months.
The R14bn to be spent on the employment stimulus will be drawn from the R19.6bn allocated to public employment programmes in the supplementary budget tabled by finance minister Tito Mboweni in June.
The wage rate for the public employment programmes will be R11 an hour. The national minimum wage is R20 an hour.
The programme will provide support for about 75,000 small-scale farmers who were pushed to the brink of survival by Covid-19. They will receive a grant payment.
The major part of the programme will be support for more than 300,000 young assistants to help teachers with basic routine tasks and extra-curricular activities at about 26,000 schools.
A social employment fund will be set up and run by the Industrial Development Corporation and will involve non-governmental organisations in the implementation of the public employment programme.
More than 100,000 early childhood practitioners who were affected by the Covid-19 lockdown will be supported with grants. The cultural, sports and environmental sectors, along with global business services, will also be supported.
About 6,000 community health and nursing assistance workers will be supported as the national health insurance scheme is rolled out.
More than 60,000 jobs will be created for the labour-intensive maintenance and construction of municipal infrastructure, including roads. In addition, more than 40,000 vulnerable teaching posts at schools which have suffered a loss of fees will be supported.
Ramaphosa insisted that recruitment for the jobs would be open, fair and transparent.
Public works programmes are crucial in providing an income and some sort of employment for the unemployed.
The existing expanded public works programme, managed by the department of public works & infrastructure, created about 997,000 work opportunities of varying duration during 2018/19 and 994,699 in 2019/20.
The International Labour Organisation reports that the programme, which was officially launched in 2004, had created more than 8-million job opportunities by 2015/16 through the use of labour-intensive methods in the infrastructure, social, non-state, environmental and cultural sectors.
The chapter on the department of public works & infrastructure in the 2020 estimates of national expenditure stated that the department “will seek to generate a further 3-million work opportunities over the medium-term expenditure framework period through the allocation of R7.9bn for transfers and subsidies mainly to provinces, municipalities and non-profit organisations”. About 290 public bodies implement the programme.
According to the programme’s website, of the 994,699 work opportunities created between April 1 2019 and March 31 2020, 288,000 were in the infrastructure sector, 259,000 in community work programmes, 200,000 in the environmental and culture sector and 177,812 in the social sector. They were employed in 13,407 national projects with R12bn being paid out in wages.
An innovative public works programme is the one initiated by the KwaZulu-Natal department of transport. The Zimbambele programme contracts households to maintain a given section of road.
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