AfriForum challenges Zuma’s state of the nation address
Address root of agriculture issue, says AfriForum.
IT seems as if the President would like to apply radical intervention in all the wrong places, while areas that demand radical intervention, are largely ignored.
This was the reaction of AfriForum’s Deputy CEO Ernst Roets to President Jacob Zuma’s seventh state of the nation address at Parliament in Cape Town on Tuesday night.
The civil rights organisation said the speech was just a ‘series of agreeable promises, most of which cannot be realised’.
Regarding the creation of employment, Zuma said the agricultural sector will be expected to create a million employment opportunities by 2030 as a ‘key job driver’.
‘Government will provide comprehensive support to smallholder farmers by speeding up land reform and providing technical, infrastructural and financial support,’ he said.
‘We will accelerate the settlement of remaining land claims submitted before the cut-off date of 1998.’
However, Roets stated these plans do not take care of core problems pestering the sector.
‘No acknowledgement is given to the fact that the creators of employment on farms are being plagued by a wave of violence and, as a result, are forced to abandon the sector in growing numbers.’
Undoing unemployment
Roets added another misguided statement in the speech was the opinion that it is government’s duty to create employment opportunities.
‘Unemployment indeed is one of the country’s most serious crises but, to a large extent, the root of the problem actually is to be found in state interference, and not in the lack of state regulation.
‘Youth unemployment was identified as a priority, while StatsSA recently announced that levels of unemployment among the youth have reached an all-time high.
‘Unemployment among young South Africans cannot be addressed sustainably if no intervention takes place in the dysfunctional Department of Basic Education – a department still praised by the President, amazingly as that may seem.
‘The undertaking that the number of matriculants with exemption will be increased to a quarter of a million, cannot be achieved unless education standards are lowered to an even greater extent.
‘In the first place, no plan of action is provided for this target and secondly, the focus is on attaining numbers, instead of improving on the quality of the education provided,’ Roets said.
