The NYDA in the Eastern Cape places less than 5 young people a month in jobs. This in the province with the highest unemployment rate in the country where every second young person is jobless.
This was uncovered when I conducted oversight inspections to both of its offices housed in East London and Nelson Mandela Bay (see pictures here and here) on Monday and Tuesday. At the East London office I learned that only 3 to 5 people per month are being placed in jobs whilst in Nelson Mandela we discovered that no-one is being placed despite thousands of young people applying for placement.
Whilst job placement is part and parcel of the NYDA’s stated product offering, this discovery confirms why an NYDA approach to youth empowerment is folly. Over 60% of its budget is spent on employees and administration instead of empowering young people through properly funding its products like job placement, small business funding and skills training. Ironically their website lists the wrong address and branch manager for their East London office.
Under a DA government jobs and the empowerment of young people would be at the center of the work of government and not tossed into an ANCYL run bloated entity. We would have opportunity centres which would be one stop shops for young people, like we do in the Western Cape. This is evidenced by the fact that 75% of all new jobs in South Africa were created by the Western Cape, a province governed by the DA.
In the DA-led Nelson Mandela Bay, Mayor Athol Trollip is also leading the charge through his Young Graduates Programme, through which people are placed in internships.
I will be writing to the CEO of the NYDA informing him of the failure of his offices in the Eastern Cape to successfully link our young people to opportunities and continue urging the NYDA to cut back on its bureaucracy so that more money can be spent on funding the businesses of our young people and their empowerment.
South Africa needs the kind of change that prioritises job creation and youth empowerment.