... draft legislation and hold the governing party accountable for its outcomes. We will speak for the millions of South Africans whose voices have gone unheard in Parliament, and we will sketch for every one of them a picture of a growing and prosperous South Africa under a DA national government.
Siyazi ukuthi sibhekene nezingqinamba eziningi eziqondene nobugebengu, ukungaphephi nezinye zokuhlukumezeka nodlame. Ngiyacabanga ukuthi ngezindlela eziningi lokhu kuhlupheka emphakathini kugxile ekuswelekeni kwamathuba emiphakathini yethu.
Yize noma kunjalo, siyazi ukuthi zikhona ezinye izimbangela zalezi zinkinga. Siyazi ukuthi ngubugebengu obenza imiphakathi yethu ihlalele ovalweni. Lokhu kwenziwa wukungaqini kwezinhlaka ezibekelwe ukusivikela. (Translation of isiZulu paragraphs follows.)
[We know that we are faced with many challenges with regard to crime, such as safety, abuse and violence. I think that in so many ways, this suffering in the community is due to a lack of opportunities for our communities.
Even though it is like that, we know that there are other causes of these problems. We know that it is crime that makes our communities live in fear. This is caused by the weak structures that are meant to protect us.]
We cannot hope to keep our streets safe when the shadow of corruption stalks the highest levels of our Police Service. We cannot take the fights to the criminals that plague us when we lack experienced management at all levels of our Police Service. And we cannot hope to have an effective service that complements an open and free democracy when our police are militarised in name and in their actions.
South Africans will not feel safe until they hear an honest discussion about crime at the highest levels of government, nor will they have confidence in our health system, let alone a National Health Insurance scheme, until we face the fundamental problems that threaten it. This is because the problem in health is not the principle of access. The problem in health in South Africa is that our existing network of care is not adequately managed. What we need are competent and professional hospital managers who are not accountable to a bureaucracy, but to the hospitals themselves.
Real accountability and professionalism will go a long way towards addressing the deficiencies in health care. If these capacity problems are not addressed, our health care system will deteriorate even further, with or without an NHI, and it will be the poorest South Africans who suffer. So our vision is to address their plight.
To implement a real programme of redress that will build reconciliation and change our society, we must also have the tools of change at our disposal. To do that, a DA government will focus on the two things that can truly create opportunity: education and the economy. [Interjections.] These two are intertwined, as is the case with our failure or success as a country.
Since the consolidation of our democracy, much has been achieved in education. We have historic levels of access, a standardised curriculum for all our learners, regardless of race, and truly exceptional levels of budgetary investment year on year. But as much as we have invested, education is seldom the vehicle for opportunity that so many of our children need it to be. Too many of them become lost in a system that seems to have a measure of failure hardwired into it. South Africans don't have to live in the country if they choose not to. I don't believe that we should just celebrate access. We should celebrate children completing their education. Over a million learners enrolled for Grade 1 in 2000, but only half that number wrote matric last year, and just over 348 000 passed. That means just 33% of the children who started school in Grade 1 finished matric. Why is this? In disadvantaged schools teachers work on average three and half hours a day, compared to six and a half hours in advantaged schools. In disadvantaged schools, a fifth of the teachers are absent on Fridays and almost 30% of students are taught maths by teachers with no maths qualifications. If we compromise on our children's education, we accept a two-tiered school system as an unchangeable fact of life.
Education is the only way out for most people who want to work to have a better life than the one they were born into. I do not believe that we should accept that there will always be schools that are terminally dysfunctional or that there will always be some teacher who will not or cannot teach. There should be no such thing as compromising a child's future. So our vision is not to compromise.
Because education is the foundation of an economic strategy that seeks to build opportunity, I believe that we should give schools that are performing more power to manage their own affairs. We will direct maximum resources to the first three years of schooling and ensure that there is compulsory testing of learners in Grades 3, 6 and 9. We will maximise resources spending on schools that have gone without for decades, supplying them with text-rich content and books, delivered on time, before using money on bloated administrative functions. And we won't just make schools a place where our children are evaluated. They need to be taught by people who demonstrate not only their capacity, but also their passion for education. We will give those with this calling that chance.
Mr Speaker, most teachers deserve our thanks for their dedication and the work that they do. But just as teachers have rights, so do children. Our government will pass legislation that will respect teachers' right to strike, but subject them to certain limitations. Before a strike can happen, there will need to be consultation and agreement between the government, the unions and the school governing bodies.
In education, we need partners who are truly willing to help our children, every step of the way. So we won't forget about the majority of teachers who want to be part of our pact for the future. But in the dream of our future, fixing schools is just one part. If we can ensure that our children get the best education they possibly can, then we must ensure that they can enter an economy where they can find a job.
In several ways South Africa's economy has flourished in the democratic era, free of the shackles of sanctions, restricted trade access and warped internal economic policies. But the country we live in today has some very harsh economic realities.
We applaud any gains in the fight against unemployment and real indicators that show victory in this struggle. However, an expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those that have given up looking for work, shows that more than 100 000 jobs were lost last year. Furthermore, the last decade has produced only 624 000 jobs, meaning that total employment has increased at a rate of just 0,5%. This means that the rate of job creation would need to rise by nearly 10 times in order to meet the most optimistic projections of job creation for the end of the decade.
In contrast, one of our fellow Brics countries, Brazil, has an unemployment rate five times lower than ours, while we continue to experience lukewarm economic growth. Last year we grew at 3,4%, while Africa, the continent we claim to lead, experienced a growth rate of 5,5%. Countries in our region, like Angola and Botswana, are growing at 9,4% and 7,8%.
I believe that South Africa's major challenge lies in its competitiveness. We are less efficient than many of our emerging market competitors. Turkey, for instance, withdraws more value out of every rand from taxation than we do. Other governments simply develop higher returns.
In addition, South African labour is uncompetitive. Labour productivity is much lower than the rest of the developing world. Our competitiveness has slipped in key sectors like mining, agriculture and manufacturing. In mining, especially, we are not as profitable or as desirable as elsewhere in Africa. So, in the midst of a commodity price boom, we saw investment in the mining sector drop. Expensive and highly regulated labour kills competitiveness and it kills jobs. And increased state intervention in the economy bloats the public sector and creates inefficiencies.
A commitment to intervention for intervention's sake means that we have too many voices saying too many things. If investors wanted to predict what South Africa's economic policy was going to look like in three years' time, they would have to consult the New Growth Path, the National Development Plan, the Industrial Policy Action Plan 2 and the budgeting process, and try to understand the many contradictions between them.
I propose that we take our economy from being an average performer with massive potential to one that capitalises on our advantages to grow faster and assume the economic leadership role in Africa that we should have.
As part of our vision for South Africa, we will ease labour-market entry to include voluntary exemptions for designated economic areas. This will create a competitive niche entry point for first-time workers. Complementing that strategy, we would introduce a targeted youth wage subsidy for job seekers between 18 and 29 years old, earning below the personal tax income threshold.
Opportunity will also be spread to those wishing to start their own businesses. We will create a one-stop shop for business registrations where prospective entrepreneurs may register a company name, lodge their documentation with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission and register with the SA Revenue Service, Sars, and the Department of Labour.
Mr Speaker, opportunity must take stock of those who have been systemically and historically disadvantaged. One of the ways to do this is to ensure that there is true financial redress for those who were blocked from accessing economic opportunities in the past. That means making economic empowerment truly broad based. I think that our current model, which relies on arbitrary quotas, has done little more than expand the size of the financial elite by creating a special category of beneficiaries who can access economic opportunities again and again.
Our vision is to do more to help the average worker become an owner of capital. That means building into contracts the need for real partnerships between business and employees and incentivising share ownership across the economy.