CAPE TOWN, May 17 (Xinhua) -- The South African government should urgently convene a job summit in order to solicit a deeper understanding of the unemployment crisis, the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) said on Thursday.
The summit should be inclusive of all stakeholders, namely business, labor, government and civil society, ANCYL national spokesperson Mlondi Mkhize said.
This will represent a "new dawn or shift" in the country to collectively confront the crisis of unemployment, he said.
The ANCYL made the call after Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) released figures on Tuesday which showed that South Africa's official unemployment rate remains at 32.4 percent amongst 15-34 working youth age group, the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, to be followed by Greece (25.2 percent) and Spain (22.2 percent).
In its Quarterly Labor Force Survey, Stats SA said the number of people without jobs rose by a staggering 100,000 to 5.98 million in the first quarter of this year.
The number of job-seekers, meanwhile, has spectacularly risen to 249,000.
The ANCYL "is gutted by the latest employment statistics," Mkhize said.
This effectively means that a large number of young people in rural and urban areas are economically excluded and facing a prospect of a bleak future, he said.
In its National Development Plan (NDP), the government sets the goal of halving youth unemployment to six percent by 2030.
But the latest figures makes the NDP goal "a mockery," Mkhize said.
This is catastrophe and a "ticking time bomb", slowly imploding as evidenced by violent service delivery protests or looting of foreign national shops, mainly led by marginalized or excluded youth, said Mkhize.
"The ANCYL strongly believes that we need a decisive shift or break from neo-liberal instruments or tools prescribed by neoliberal embedded World Bank; International Monetary Fund and rating agencies, and adopt radical policies that deliver much needed jobs for our people, especially for the youth," he said.
In his maiden State of the Nation Address (SONA) in February, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that a jobs summit would be held within the next few months to harness the energies of business, labor and government behind a major job creation initiative.
The president said the most grave and pressing challenge facing the country is youth unemployment.
The job summit is expected to bring together the country's best minds to boost job creation, particularly for the youth.
However, it remains unclear when the summit will be held. Enditem
