Patel to boost up South Africa's job creation role

Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel to move further for creating job role of the government, telling MP’s yesterday that the country’s economy just created 200 000 jobs in the financial year ending up in March.    

Patel represented his department’s annual report to the National Assembly yesterday acknowledging that that state interruption in industrial funding and the promotion of market competition,can be considered as an advantage within the capacity of a national government.

But the capacity of the national governments including the South African government to drive the domestic economies towards turbo charging jobs growth was restrained by the forces as it has no control over it.

He noted that the SA government could not exactly decide whether the growth rate of its biggest trading partner China has went up or down. And also for its other trading partner US, it could not do much whether US would resolve its existing “fiscal changes”. It also had affected the growth of EU.

Even though the ongoing bad situation some success has been created in the job creation. Patel did not clearly mentioned but his department is to create 500 000 jobs/year.

Among 199 000 jobs created in the last financial year, nearly 20,000 were created by the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), a state owned company. They had partnered with the private companies, by introducing R16 billion in expense.

In May he told the National Council of Provinces that government’s investment of “tens of billions of rand” through industrial and infrastructure finance is to promote industrialisation and manufacturing capacity in SA are set to create over 7800 jobs.”  

He further put weight on his declaration of IDC’s efforts “to speed up the government’s plans to increase job opportunities and develop new industries.”

He said that in previous two years 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 - the IDC had increased up the levels of industrial funding, committing R27bn i.e. 48% increase in comparison to the earlier years. R3bn would be made available for the youth employment through the Small enterprise Finance Agency (SEFA) to boost up the youth employment and entrepreneurship in five years.

Yesterday he approved the fund of R432 million which is double than the one approved in the previous period, were made by SEFA in 2013/13. However the number of jobs created through this funding was not stated.

Also the declaration of the potential for price fixing and the deals made by the state-owned companies were not made by Patel. He added that fines and penalties of R731m were imposed by the competition authorities for anti-competitive actions in the private sector and price-fixing in the economy.

“This will exclude amount of the penalties up to large extent imposed on the construction industry which was finalised after the end of the financial year.”

At last he concluded up without giving any further information that agricultural jobs had increased by 83 000 in the period.