Speaker, hon President, Deputy President - all protocol observed - the ruins of the Kingdoms of Mapungubwe and Monomotapa are messengers from the past bearing testimony to the fact that South Africans were advanced artisans and engineers long before the colonial period. If it were not for the disruption caused by colonialism of a special type, South Africa, as a region, would have remained a giant producer and processor of intermediary goods for local consumption and export purposes. The use of armed force to alienate our people from the means of production and, thus, turn them into proletariats of two worlds, is the mother of the current state of affairs - a 0,66 Gini coefficient, the highest in the world.
South Africa has the highest income inequality in the world because of the conscious, systematic and deliberate underdevelopment of the majority of the South African population. Colonialism of a special type, as practised by the apartheid regime, decided that the education given to the majority of our people should be shorn of all the necessary ingredients essential for the creation of an economically active citizenry.
While the apartheid regime is nothing but a painful memory in more ways than one, the people are governing. However, the question remains: Are the people sharing in the country's wealth? If the answer is negative, we, as their legitimate representatives, and in line with the Freedom Charter's assertion that no government can claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people, must ask ourselves whether we have legislated and enforced legislation enough to ensure the realisation of this ideal of our people. We need to ask ourselves whether the door to skills development has been opened enough to ensure that our people are skilled to drive their own economy.
Sceptics of the old growth path had cautioned that an export-led growth strategy would benefit capital-intensive and high-skilled industries, while in labour-intensive industries workers would be retrenched and factories closed. They also cautioned that liberalising trade lowers inflation, but it makes imports cheaper than domestically produced products. This would inevitably lead to the closure of factories or job losses; high unemployment and continuing job losses in the formal sector and rising joblessness, especially among the youth; continued mass poverty; and deep inequalities based on class, race and gender - the triple oppression.
It is against this backdrop that the 2010 ANC January 8 Statement makes it mandatory for our government to pursue sustained development, based on an inclusive growth path. In the same vein, the 2009 ANC manifesto commits to ensuring that state-led industrial policy leads to the transformation of the economy. It further states that such a state-led industrial policy programme will direct public and private investment to support decent work outcomes, including employment creation and broad economic transformation; reduce youth unemployment, including targeted wage subsidies aimed at lowering the cost and risk of hiring inexperienced workseekers; and support labour-intensive industries through industrial policy intervention, skills development, infrastructure investment and public employment programmes.
The contradiction, though, is that this high rate of unemployment coexists with an equally high employment rate - at 24,3% narrow employment rate and 31,1% unemployment rate, with the inclusion of discouraged workers. Ideally, unemployment would be absorbed by the considerably open labour market. However, this prospect is negated by our objective condition of a critical skills shortage, which is a highly specialised labour-market need. The specialised needs of our labour market have led to the import of skills for a number of critical projects, especially infrastructure development ones which have responded to the lack of local artisans and civil engineers by importing such skills.
The import of skills does not only affect the rate of unemployment but also the market value of all final goods and services that we produce within a particular period. This kind of phenomenon has led to South Africa being a consumer of imported final goods and, thus, helping to create jobs in other countries rather than, in the main, producing goods here which South Africa consumes. South Africa has found herself trapped in a negative balance of trade because of its skills deficit. Of course, skills poachers that have brain drained our country of medical skills have not, in the main, made the situation easier. But even without the poachers as a factor, the truth is that we are not producing enough skills to drive our own economy.
The ANC recognises the necessity to transform the economy in order to ensure that women are at the centre. The key task in ensuring economic growth and decent jobs is to ensure a strong responsive economic system that principally serves all South African women. This can happen through ensuring that the state plays a leading role in ensuring the implementation of the industrial policy. This is to ensure that women are key drivers of growth. Through the developmental state, the call of women to drive growth to create jobs seeks to break away from the old growth path.
In respect of the need for skilling and reskilling, job creation is decent work, particularly for women. The ANC's call for the creation of decent work refers to employment with all benefits and protection within the discourse of labour rights. This speaks to matters of a provident fund, paid maternity leave, and medical aid in a manner that promotes a better life for all women.
At the beginning of 2006, under the leadership of the Presidency and, in particular, with the support of leaders in the labour federations, business and civil society, the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition, Jipsa, was formed. Through its structures, such as the joint task team and the technical working group, and with the assistance of funding from the Business Trust and project management by the National Business Initiative, a process of identifying and clearing blockages began.
The initiative, albeit an important one, was a short-term response to a systemic requirement for a human resource development strategy and structures that work. The important work and studies undertaken by Jipsa that were not implemented will be taken forward, as the staff of the Jipsa secretariat are absorbed into the Department of Higher Education and Training.
The basic education foundation, whose strengths and quality determines the capacity for skills acquisition, is an area that cannot be left unattended. In this regard, we should welcome the initiative to conduct annually independently moderated assessments in Grades 3, 6 and 9. These assessments will focus on the critical foundation skills of literacy and numeracy that are fundamental for learning. The success of this initiative will improve the numbers of learners that qualify with a university entrance and subsequently increase the broader matric pass rate.
Skills acquisition also takes place on the factory floor where many of our people, who continue to be classified as unskilled, are doing most of the complicated work for a pittance because of their lack of formal qualifications. This lack of formal accreditation of these toiling masses has not only led to their being exploited - based on the fact that their employers, though enjoying the proceeds of the work of their skilfulness, opportunistically continue remunerating them as unskilled labour - but has also locked them in a belief that they remain unskilled even though they work skilfully. In that regard, they cannot rely on their experience and skills to seek employment elsewhere as, there also, they will be deemed unskilled.
The proposed new sector education and training authority, Seta, landscape, in summary, features the recertification of 15 Setas with minor changes; the amalgamation of several Setas to ensure greater efficiency, resulting in the establishment of six new Setas; the reduction of 23 Setas to 21; and the recently launched Quality Council for Trades and Occupations which has the mandate to address the quality of training in and for the workplace and to ensure that workplace training and knowledge is accredited and certificated, including proper recognition of prior learning.
This initiative will ensure that our skills base is accorded its true reflection and improve the situation of many skilled workers whose workplace-acquired skills had never been acknowledged, accredited or certificated. The FET colleges remain fundamental in publicly driven, skills-development college infrastructure. However, there has been a view that college is a consolation prize for university, and that colleges are not necessarily institutions of choice. It is important that this myth be dispelled, not just through oral utterances, but support for FET colleges. The FET colleges should also be capacitated to produce the kind of skill that is so needed by the economy which, in its nascent stages, is assimilated into the mainstream economy.
It is the skilled people, more than professions, who are the engines behind any economy. Our education system is geared towards producing professions more than skills. It is no wonder that a learner becomes part of the education system for 12 years, from Grade R to Grade 12, but emerges out of this system unemployable and with no skills to work independently.
Critically, we must ensure that the numerous offers of job training do undertake a proper assessment of the recognition of prior learning and the important skills that are derived from this life experience process. More often than not, it is these skills which have been honed out of the practical working experience of millions of workers that are far more useful to the economy than abstract certification which cannot be applied practically in the workplace and leads to unemployment.
A united and democratic nation able to take its rightful place in the family of nations and to heal the divisions of the past will be built through broadening the skills base. This can be achieved by strengthening the education foundation, diversifying skills acquisition and ratification methods, and capacitating skills-generating centres for a local skills- driven and job-generating economic growth path. Only such a nation can restore the glory that belonged to the proud economically independent generation of our Mapungubwe and Monomotapa ancestors. Indeed, South Africa can once more produce a generation of artisans, engineers and other economically driven skills. The ANC supports Budget Vote 1: The Presidency. I thank you, hon Speaker. [Applause.]