Speaker, the hon member will, of course, know that when government said it was going to create a specific number of jobs, it was discussing the matter in the context of a global recovery from the financial problems of 2007-08. Things, of course, have changed. We now have another financial crisis.
South Africa is not an island so that, when the world is faced with this difficulty, it can move as if nothing had happened. That crisis affects everyone. In fact, the question of unemployment is a global problem. As long as you have these economic problems you cannot move faster in terms of growth.
Consider, as an example, the situation today where the Eurozone is in difficulties. We are still on the positive, not on the negative, but we can't grow as fast as we thought we could. Nobody could have predicted that there would be this global situation when we said that we were going to grow at a particular rate. We based our outlook on the economic landscape at the time.
What is government going to do? I don't think we can perform magic. We are going to try to do whatever we can to ensure that we are able not just to move faster so as to grow up to 9% or 10%, but also to ensure that we stay in the positive.
The Minister indicated here what we are doing as government to keep our economy afloat and at the same time create employment. There are very specific things that we have done. We have, for example, put aside R800 billion for infrastructure. That is one specific thing that tends to create jobs, and you have already said that, in terms of the statistics, we are in fact creating jobs, but just not at the rate at which we had said we would.
However, given the plans that we have put in place, we are confident that we are going to create jobs and we are going to deal with the situation. In the face of the global economic crisis, we are still moving forward. Thank you.