This speech was delivered by Geordin Hill-Lewis in the National Assembly during the Parliamentary Debate on Solutions to Address Job Losses and declining GDP growth in South Africa.
Chairperson,
In this election, 10 million unemployed South Africans face a life-changing choice: which of the parties is going to give them the best chance of finding work over the next 5 years?
Everything else is noise. The whole election boils down to that question. Which party is the jobs party?
So let’s look at the evidence, and at the manifestos.
One party in this House, the Democratic Alliance, has left every other party in the dust in delivering job-creating economic growth.
On every measure – unemployment, new jobs created, numbers of discouraged job seekers, new investment attracted, ease of doing business – on every score there is only one party that knows how to get the job done. The Democratic Alliance.
There is only one party that has actually delivered 640 000 new jobs in 10 years. Not the national government. Not the government of 8 provinces.
Only the DA has done that.
There is only one party that has delivered an unemployment rate 14% points lower than the national average, and the only province in the country with an unemployment rate below 20% for the first time.
Only the DA has delivered that.
In 2009, the ANC’s President Jacob Zuma, lest we forget, promised 5 million jobs by 2020.
Only the DA has actually contributed to delivering on this promise. If every ANC governed province had done as well as the one DA governed province, we would have achieved this goal.
Or alternatively, if every other province were governed by the DA, we would have achieved that goal long ago.
That is the choice.
That is our offer in this election. Everything else is noise.
We will do for South Africa what we have done where we govern.
We will deliver job-creating economic growth.
We will deliver a one-year paid internship for school leavers, to get them in the door of their first job.
We will attract investment and cut red tape.
We will stop corruption and throw corrupt politicians in jail.
We will make sure that jobs are available fairly, not only to the well connected or the corrupt.
And voters can trust we will do these things because we have already done them.
That’s what we do. We get things done.
That is our offer, that is our record.
Now, our opponents say that voters should trust the state to fix our economy and create jobs.
They want less power and less money in the hands of people, and more power and more money in the hands of the state.
That is their offer, and look where it has got us.
We have a state electricity company that cannot keep the lights on.
We have a state railway that doesn’t have enough trains.
We have a state airline that cannot fly.
We have state run ports that cannot unload ships.
We have a state mining company that cannot mine.
We have a state gas company that cannot find any gas.
The party that has brought us all of this is now asking voters to give it control of the health system.
And to pay for it all, this feckless, shameless party has reached deep into the vault of failed economic ideas and is now proposing “prescribed assets”, “nationalisation of the Reserve Bank”, and “expropriation of private property”.
So total is its bankruptcy of ideas, that the ANC has actually resorted to borrowing economic policy from the apartheid government. That’s where “prescribed assets” come from. We’ve “been having it”, as they say.
This is the wicked irony – the ANC has destroyed economic growth, it has destroyed jobs, it has stolen billions, bankrupted the state, and it now wants to take the pensions of ordinary hard working people to pay for it all.
Every teacher, every nurse, doctor, policeman, soldier, every journalist, every professional must know this. This is the policy of the ANC – to take your life-savings to pay for their crimes.
So let us be clearheaded about the choice in this election.
One party promises continuing decline, growing poverty and accelerating misery. That is the ANC.
One party promises to continue what it has already done.
We are the jobs party.
We are the growth party.
We are the party of improving lives, improving opportunities, and beating poverty.
Voters can lend us their vote in this election knowing we will do the same for them.
Our track record leaves everyone else in our dust!
And we are just getting started!