Through you Chair, let me thank hon Londt very much for the question. I should indicate to hon Londt that the comments he has made sounds very similar to the comments that were made by delegates at the 54th National Conference of a particular political party that is represented here where in fact many delegates said that they want the more broad-based system of empowerment. So, I'm sure there is space with the permission of Deputy Chair for crossover here. [Laughter.]
But on a more serious note, I think we recognise that we must deepen and broaden the empowerment programmes, the programmes where a few people are given the opportunity, is just not good enough. Now, I want to distinguish between two elements of our approach. The one approach is to support black industrialists. That will attend to one or two people in a company, they are the industrialists. They drive that. That's not the same as our broad programme.
So, our focus now which is the focus that the government has adopted is to promote a much more active broad-based system. Now, how do we do that? One clear way, is to promote worker ownership in companies, and again that political party that I have spoken about in the in the 54th National Conference's resolution and in their manifesto
they said that we should do more of that. So, I'm really pleased that we've got a cross party support for that idea.
Also, I'm sure that even the EFF would strongly support that we build, in fact, examples and opportunities for all South Africans to benefit, for workers and for young people to benefit. So, for me, that's not an issue that I think we have any hesitation on. We need to do many much more to deepen the impact of our policies. Having said that, I must also make a point that, I have recently looked at the statistics of employment growth between 1996 and today.
I looked at 1996 because it was a first time to conduct census here in the new democracy. So, we had a baseline of data that was available. If you take total job growth in that period, it was 82,6%, and if you take the growth of jobs among the black South Africans which is 101%, it has doubled. We have seen in the democracy a much greater growth of jobs among black South Africans, and of course, I make this point to indicate that, while there are some successes, the point that is made by hon Londt makes is a fair point.
We have even more of those. We need to get more jobs growth, we need to get more empowerment and we need to reduce poverty and inequality
levels in our economy. So, that brings us then to, how? The first area that I have indicated is that we will work in worker empowerment schemes. We have now changed the law in the Competition Law, it now has a specific reference to employee ownership and in public interest conditions.
We've also asked the team on the BEE programme of government to see where the examples of successful employee are stock ownership plans, ESOPs, and worker ownership schemes. We are also looking to the organisations like the Industrial Development Corporation, IDC, and others, to further promote efforts to get workers involved in their own companies. There's an economic dividend and there's equity dividend. Thank you very much.