Chairperson, R174 million is budgeted to improve government service delivery through performance monitoring and evaluation. A further R376 million is budgeted for the National Youth Development Agency. To test whether previous allocations of the people's money to these functions have been wisely spent, we need to ask whether service delivery is improving and youth unemployment is decreasing. Unfortunately, the answers are no.
The DA agrees with the National Planning Commission that we require urgent measures to address our most pressing needs, particularly the high levels of unemployment, especially among the youth. The DA's 8% growth project will soon set out how economic activity in South Africa can be accelerated, so that there is an open opportunity for all of our youth to find a place in our economy.
With 70% of our population aged under 35, we have an enormous competitive advantage to harness if we make the right policy choices. The National Youth Development Agency isn't one of them. Youth unemployment continues to increase. More than 50% of young people aged between 18 and 25 are unemployed, and 73% of the unemployed in South Africa are below the age of 35, the worst statistic among comparable economies. This pattern must and can be broken.
In the Western Cape, the DA government has implemented a youth apprenticeship scheme that will kick-start the economic activity of thousands of previously unemployed young people who would otherwise remain on the sidelines, trapped in the ideological minefield that prevents the National Treasury from implementing a youth wage subsidy scheme, and that will throw open the doors to employment opportunities for 423 000 young South Africans.
Instead of funding a bloated bureaucracy, in which 46% of the budget is paid to overvalued and underperforming cadres in the National Youth Development Agency, the people's money could be better spent on extending a youth wage subsidy and adding value to the lives of youth on whose behalf they claim to be operating.
Instead of funding drunken parties under the pretext of social cohesion, the people's money could be better spent on bursaries for deserving students and on educational facilities for learners still emerging from an education system fundamentally damaged by apartheid and which has still not been fixed, as mentioned by the Minister.
The DA Youth have championed the implementation of a national youth wage subsidy, and yesterday marched legally and peacefully to highlight Cosatu's opposition to a youth wage subsidy that has paralysed government's action on its promised implementation. The Congress of SA Trade Unions, Cosatu, yesterday demonstrated its disdain for democracy. Freedom of expression and freedom to protest peacefully did not reign yesterday. Instead, it rained rocks, like this one ...[Interjections.] ... thrown by Cosatu's thugs that I picked up next to an injured and bleeding young man after it had struck him in the face, a young man who dared to exercise his rights that the apartheid police would have crushed in the past. [Interjections.]
Now, it is Cosatu that tries, illegally and shamefully, with rocks, to crush the rights to which we are all entitled. [Interjections.] Cosatu yesterday assaulted every South African ...