1. Hon.Members, The issue of the demographic dividend and how we care for our youth begs the bigger question we need to answer, how much do we focus on demographic studies, population growth or staggering and methods to achieve this.
2. How do we curb an increasing young population for a time period eg, 2030, so that, SA can achieve NDP 2030 targets and through population control, improve on the triple challenges
3. The opposing argument would be, what we are doing differently to grow youth employment.
4. I remind this HON. House of a motion I put around 2013 to produce a specific youth employment bill. This may be worth looking at?
5. The next argument is based on Ricardo Hausmann’s recommendations to the then president, Thabo Mbeki between 2004 and 2008, which were not implemented, by the way. The centre for development and enterprise spoke about practical ways to spur economic growth, all of which I agree with, as follows:
6. Know-how is the secret sauce of productivity and prosperity.
7. Know-how is the key to developing complex goods and services.
8. Know-how is collective know how, therefore today I call again for the scrapping of affirmative action, the sunset clause was 2014, now we need to save ourselves and everybody’s contribution is important.
9. Remember, the fastest growing countries do more in addition to education, i.e. Laws and policies are progressive in nature.
10. Research the “scrabble theory” because complex goods and services need diverse skills which needs teams of people
11. Finally, Hon.Members, and MEC of finance, please check on adverts placed from now on by departments and ensure that now we need qualifications with experience. This means, our youth must be given learnerships, which should now be mandatory in all sectors, at least 1 to 3 years before new worker entrants can be left in jobs unsupervised, to work independently and constructively.
12. I have always advocated that it is important to prepare our youth for the future and not the future for our youth.

Thank you

Shameen Thakur-Rajbansi

Minority Front  MPL KZN Legislature