DURBAN - GOVERNMENT departments have been given “powers” in the new finance budget to create employment opportunities through infrastructure projects.
Finance MEC Nomusa Dube-Ncube tabled the budget on Wednesday for the 2022-23 financial year. It gave special attention to infrastructure projects, job creation, skills development and entrepreneurship.
Delivering the province’s economic outlook, Dube-Ncube said between June and September last year, many people had lost their jobs. She said while KwaZulu-Natal’s economy had shown positive signs of a full recovery, provincial employment was unacceptably low.
“The number of employed people dropped by 5.1% in the third quarter of 2021,” she said.
Economists said infrastructure projects and tourism were the key to unlocking employment opportunities.
Economist Professor Bonke Dumisa said infrastructure could be the catalyst for job creation, saying the province lost thousands of jobs due to the lockdown and the July riots. He said the hospitality and liquor industry were hit hard.
Dumisa said while it was not the government’s responsibility to create jobs, the focus on infrastructure would lead to some activity in the job market.
He added, however, that these jobs would be temporary and to create jobs that would last, the country needed to look at the quality of education it offered and modify it to develop skills that would allow students to be economically active as soon as they graduated.
A lecturer in economics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Dr Sanele Gumede, said infrastructure projects would create opportunities in construction, but the scope should be extended to technology that would facilitate the creation of jobs and business opportunities. He said the key to creating jobs in the province was the tourism industry.
“We need to identify our key selling point. There was a survey done of the people coming through the entry points in the country. They were asked to consider their top destinations; KZN came third after Gauteng and Cape Town, which is shocking, as this is our key selling point,” he said.
He added that there needed to be more co-ordination in the tourism sector, where tourist areas co-ordinate with each other to offer experiences. He said the programme to revamp small airports to ease travelling between areas was therefore quite important.
Provincial Treasury spokesperson Nathi Olifant said yesterday that while it was difficult to pinpoint where the jobs had been shed in the third quarter of last year, the retail and service sectors had been affected, especially after the looting.
In her budget, Dube-Ncube detailed a number of initiatives to address the jobs situation, including government-sponsored jobs for the Expanded Public Works Programme and the President Employment Initiative that aimed to employ 10 000 people just in eThekwini.
But also part of this, were opportunities for entrepreneurship, she said.
“Our goal is to make young people and the people of KZN capable of sustaining themselves independently, using their skills to survive. We are allocating resources to allow the government to provide on-the-job experience via internship and learnership programmes.”
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