A copy of that document is available here.

 

Leaders have often paid lip service to youth development matters, with the result that young people are now arguably at more of a disadvantage than ever before. 80% of our schools are considered dysfunctional, 72% of the country’s unemployed people are youth and the scourge of HIV/Aids has hit our young population the hardest.

 

The Zuma administration launched the National Youth Development Agency just over a year ago. Since its inception, with a requested budget of close to R1-billion, it has mostly failed to institute any positive interventions. It has still not established provincial advisory boards, and has indicated no deadline for doing so, despite these boards being essential in order to take youth development initiatives at a ground level.

 

As a result, the DA Youth, in our spirit of addressing challenges constructively, has developed a document called ‘Fixing the Future’ that sets out the key challenges facing young people today and presents comprehensive solutions that we believe, if implemented, will unlock the true potential of our youth.

 

Central to our document is the idea that a fundamentally new approach is needed in South Africa if we are to meet the challenges of the future. We need to radically alter our existing education system, at primary, secondary and tertiary level, and we need to stop thinking inside the box, and start looking at the sorts of ideas that have helped other countries to take major strides in delivering higher standards of education to their own people. We need, most of all, to begin to acknowledge that a society that promotes choice, protects freedoms, and provides opportunities to all, stands a far greater chance of beating poverty, than one that centralises power, marginalises ordinary people and dispenses patronage to the well-connected few.

 

Three areas stand out in our document as particularly critical:

 

  

The high cost of hiring labour in South Africa is the key reason why 4.3 million job seekers, most of whom are young, fail to find work each month. The DA Youth proposes the subsidy of wages of young workers in order to lower the effective cost of employment without adjusting wage levels in order to create hundreds of thousands of jobs without an adjustment of wages or conditions of employment.

 

It is notable, and dismaying, that certain other youth organisations are lobbying against the introduction of wage subsidies – a proposal that is backed by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, and the Harvard Panel that looked at economic policy solutions in South Africa. The DA Youth believes that opposition to the introduction of wage subsidies is opposition to the alleviation of poverty and the expansion of opportunity. South Africa’s youth, as one, need to tell Mr. Gordhan not to be deterred – and to introduce a wage subsidy programme immediately.

 

Our particular wage subsidy proposal is straightforward: Every time a company or person hires a matriculant, the business or individual doing the hiring is eligible to receive a R300 monthly deduction from their monthly PAYE payments (or, for businesses with fewer than 50 workers, from their tax submission to SARS). For every additional matriculant hired, another R300 deduction can be claimed. In short, the policy works as a hiring incentive to companies. And to the extent that it acts as an incentive to hire, it also acts as an incentive for on-the-job training. Firms are rewarded for hiring, and they reward themselves by ensuring that those hired are also adequately skilled. The system acts as a powerful remedy to unemployment, by prioritising labour-intensive production and by getting the market to take care of providing skills, rather than the state (as such, this proposal constitutes a significant and necessary departure from the ANC’s SETA-based approach).

 

 

In an Open, Opportunity Society for All, all South Africans have the right to pursue their dreams and develop their talents, through education. However, while a handful of our schools offer world class education, apartheid has left a terrible legacy in education standards for most young people in this country. Despite the increase in the number of candidates writing matric, the proportion of candidates passing remains far too low – and international studies verify that South Africa lags behind global education trends. In short, we face an education system in crisis.

 

Providing solutions to that crisis lies must stand at the centre of any policy programme that can hope to rid South Africa of poverty in the long run, and turn around the flagging fortunes of our matriculants and young people in the short run. We must strive to deliver quality education for all by nurturing self-reliant, capable citizens, able to compete with the best in the world. And we must achieve this through an effective, functional public school system.

 

The DA Youth would like to see a number of new measures for schooling. We outline each of these in our position paper. Amongst them, are proposals that would see:

 

•    The introduction of per-child pre-school state subsidy, weighted according to parental income.

•    A guarantee of a core minimum of resources for all schools.

•    The creation of a dysfunctional schools task team, new mentoring programmes, and performance targets, aimed at addressing dysfunctional schools.

•    The institution of a nationwide bursary programme, aimed at giving the most academically promising 350 000 children from low-income families the opportunity to receive a better school education. Qualifying pupils will be given a voucher equivalent to R2i500 a year for primary school pupils and R3i500 a year for high school pupils to take to any school of their choice. It may be used for school fees, or for any other education-related expenditure. The bursary will follow the child depending on the resources of the state and sustained performance of the pupil.

 

 

Young South Africans with talent and commitment deserve to be able to take their basic education further, and obtain tertiary education. It is our objective to create a society in which a robust, high quality tertiary education sector is accessible to everyone who deserves the opportunity, not just those with the money to afford a degree or diploma.

 

To this end, the DA Youth believe that a number of new policy programmes and approaches need to be looked, which we have outlined in our document. We believe one particularly urgent step, that can be taken right away, and would immediately begin to assist young South Africans, is a review of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme threshold. Currently, only students from families where parent(s) earn R120,000 or less per year are eligible, which means that many students whose families do not earn enough to send them to tertiary institutions, are nevertheless excluded from receiving financial support through the NSFAS.

 

Last year, universities returned R40 million in unspent bursaries. The money is there in the system, and simply increasing the threshold will release funds to students who have the commitment and ability to perform at tertiary level, but are currently blocked from receiving aid by an arbitrary threshold.