R485m is just R15m short of half a billion. I’m going to round it off to half a billion rands — which is the price tag for sitting down to talk about what’s wrong with this country. Actually, the amount would have been closer to R1bn had the legacy foundations gotten their way. Most sulked and withdrew when National Treasury wisely revised the bill downwards.
Do we really need a national dialogue? To be honest, we are overdue a collective therapy session because SA can be eerily dystopian. It doesn’t make sense, for example, that we have the highest concentration of contract killers per capita. It makes no sense whatsoever that our murder rate is higher than that of Ukraine, a country actively at war.
Right now, we have a police minister on leave of absence for alleged ties to organised criminals. Does that make sense to you?
Ours is a country where a top military commander goes on a state-sponsored junket to Iran to declare allegiance to that government when we are at the sensitive state of trade talks with a superpower that considers Iran at the top of the axis of evil. Then we have the president tell the nation — without blinking — that the trip was “ill-advised”.
Scary stuff, ain’t it?
Anyway, I’m not sure how talking about our problems instead of fixing them helps. But this is what I would do with half a billion rands at my disposal.
A Trade Economics graph comparing the rate of youth unemployment in the major economies has been circulating online. It makes for grossly depressing reading. At 62.4%, our youth unemployment rate is three times that of the next country — ironically, defence force chief Gen Rudzani Maphwanya’s new BFFs, Iran, at 20.2%. The rest of the developing and developed world hovers under the 20% mark.
Youth unemployment is a powder keg. A crisis of gigantic proportions. No society can withstand two-thirds of its young people idling without jobs and not explode.
If I had that half a billion, I would set up a national Dragon’s Den. It’s a BBC production, my favourite show on television. I watch episodes and repeats endlessly when I’m not being abused by football teams in Orlando East and the blue side of Manchester.
The concept is simple. Budding entrepreneurs appear before a panel of five serial entrepreneurs asking for money and mentorship for their own startups. The panel is ruthless and brilliant. They don’t just dole out cash, but thoroughly interrogate the startup’s business model, viability, and dissect its financials to make a business case for funding.
I would break the R500m up into a thousand cash advancements of R500,000 each, and stage a series of Dragon’s Dens across the country where young aspiring entrepreneurs present their business ideas and models to a panel of proven and successful businesspeople who interrogate them for viability, scale and sustainability
Chancers, and those who are not ready get caught off guard by the incisive probing, and by the time they are done, the entrepreneur either gets the money to scale with a great shareholder by their side, or their business model gets torn to shreds. Not for the fainthearted.
I would break the R500m up into a thousand cash advancements of R500,000 each, and stage a series of Dragon’s Dens across the country where young aspiring entrepreneurs present their business ideas and models to a panel of proven and successful businesspeople who interrogate them for viability, scale and sustainability.
For an enterprise to qualify for funding, it must present a solid business case that is easily scalable and, crucially, prove it can create 10 jobs or more in its first year of operation.
The successful business doesn’t get an immediate cash grant but is placed in a national incubator, managed independently, and overseen by a board of highly professional business mentors chosen by the private sector and government.
Successful enterprises get housed in special economic zones and receive minimum advances in tranches, based on successful implementation of each promised deliverable. I would then ask the private sector to match the government’s half-a-billion contribution.
More or less the same concept as the highly successful Youth Employment Service (YES), but this time funding new business ventures. More than half of the successfully funded start-ups would be female-led, and the money geographically spread to represent each province proportionally.
Let me do the simple math for you: with R1-trillion in the kitty, it would translate to 2,000 new youth-led enterprises supported; each creating a minimum of 10 new jobs. It wouldn’t be without its problems. Even if a third of the business ventures were to fall off, it would still be a significant enterprise support initiative.
Mine is just an idea that can be refined or rejected, but I can still think of a dozen more ways to effectively utilise half a billion rands than blowing it on a talkshop. Our national problems will still be there when the national dialogue is done.
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