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A file image of youth behind an unemployment sign.
There have been more than 53 000 job losses in Mpumalanga between January and March this year. The province’s unemployment rate has increased to 36.3% from 32.3% in the previous quarter.
The expanded unemployment rate is now sitting at 49.6%.
Labour Federation Cosatu has called on government to develop an urgent jobs turn around strategy.
COSATU Provincial Secretary, Thabo Mokoena says, “We are saying that the government must create concrete, measurable measures to create employment and decent work for all. Government must create jobs for the youth through training programmes, internship programme, we need qualitative turn around approaches that can be used to ensure that we can address the challenges of unemployment.”
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Meanwhile, Mpumalanga University Development Studies lecturer, Dr Nsizwazonke Yende says young people should acquire skills training and become job creators than job seekers.
“They should be an issue of the entrepreneur programme; government should be able to support, in terms of the entrepreneur programme in the province, in terms of agriculture, the issue of land reform. That would enable an increase in the number of people who are in agriculture, especially young people, because there has always been a stigma around young people being in agriculture. So we need to remove that stigma to ensure that agriculture is seen as one of the things that can be used in order to mitigate the issue of rising unemployment, especially amongst young people.”
Yende says sectors with a potential for job creation in the province of Mpumalanga is agriculture and mining and they could be used for job creation.
“One of the things that the government could do is to reinvest in infrastructure and agri-processing, because we have a lot of agricultural farms in the province that we could use to help address the issue of unemployment. The government should also relook the issue of transport in Mpumalanga. The N2 could be a corridor, the N4 could be a corridor, and the N1 as well. These corridors position us as a gateway to Africa. I believe that there is a lot that the government could do by exploiting the opportunities of intercontinental free trade.”
Job seekers say enough is enough with promises they want employment- with the unemployment rate rising sharply this paint a bleak picture for the province.
