Note to Editors: The following speech was delivered in Parliament today by DA Shadow Deputy Minister in the Presidency, Yusuf Cassim MP, during the Budget Vote on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Honourable Chairperson
The National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) remains exactly what it has been created to be – an employment agency and a means to dispense patronage for the elite within the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) and its alliance partners.
It represents everything you need to know about the ANC of today. A proud liberation movement reduced to the struggle between factions for the control of bloated bureaucracies to be the arbiters of dispensing patronage.
As I warned this House before, the flawed NYDA board appointment process serviced exactly these ends, and low and behold, everything I warned was confirmed by the Young Communist League of South Africa (YCLSA) whose secretary, Mluleki Dlelanga, reckons, and I quote, “the YCLSA’s conclusion is that the President, based on the appointment of this board took, the decision under factional lines…if you behave in a factional way, you’re factional”.
Mr Dlelanga continues to begrudge, and again I quote, “we went further and checked who these new candidates are. We found out that the new chairperson, with due respect to him, is just a mere guy with a driver’s license, matric certificate and a pawn being used in factional politics.” These are hardly shocking revelations as I detailed all of this and more to this House before.
How much longer are you going to defend the indefensible?
1 in every 2 young people are unemployed. Over 15 million young people will be entering the job market over the next decade. The ANC must wake up and stop defending their obvious abuse of power! The futures of an entire generation is being stolen and this is your answer?
This crisis will never be solved by the NYDA type approach. Besides all of the above, its programmes are small and piecemeal and the veracity of it success unverifiable.
Despite a resolution by the portfolio committee in February for a detailed breakdown of its beneficiaries and their success rate, none has been provided. They were given another deadline for last week Friday, still nothing.
With a proposed R432.8 million to be transferred to them, most of it is to be used for staffing and operational costs. R135 million for employee costs, R8.5 million to train its own employees, R8.8 million for Monitoring and Evaluation, R11.8 million for inventory, R8.4 million for its lease, R17 million for travel and subsistence and R35 million for its ICT. All amounting to over 52% of its budget.
Either you streamline government towards skilling young people, supporting young entrepreneurs and creating the environment for job creation. Or, you create bloated bureaucracies like these and others for factions to fight over and use to benefit the winning faction. You cannot do both.
A DA-led national government will scrap these and other entities and departments which exist to dispense patronage. We will instead streamline government towards ensuring that opportunities for young people are offered comprehensively and directly so as to address the greatest crisis facing our generation.