“South Africa talks a great deal, but lacks a great deal of implementation capacity.” This was the opinion of Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, Rector of the United Nations University and Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, during a policy debate around unemployment held at the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Future Africa Institute in Hatfield, Pretoria.

The debate, themed ‘Rethinking traditional approaches to tackling unemployment in South Africa: Exploring feasible, well-designed grant-based approaches for the unemployed to complement active labour-market policies’, was hosted by the Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development (SA-TIED) programme and independent research forum Econ3x3.

SA-TIED is a programme that looks at ways to support policy-making for inclusive growth and economic transformation in the southern Africa region through original research in collaboration with the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), South Africa’s National Treasury, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and other other governmental and research organisations in the region. Econ3x3 is an independent forum for critical public debate on unemployment and employment, income distribution, and inclusive growth in South Africa, and it publishes accessible research-based contributions and expert commentaries.

The debate at UP encouraged an analysis of the success of grant-based approaches to tackling unemployment in other developing countries. Participants suggested that South Africa could learn from other countries by assessing the relationships between grants and active labour market policies and how, collectively, these can boost employment.

“Many of the things I heard during this debate are quite important, and they are worth repeating, but I have to add that this is not the first time I am hearing these sentiments,” said Prof Marwala, who is also a UP alumnus and the former Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg.

We are starting not from point zero, but from negative

“My message to South Africa and South Africans is that it is time to implement. We do talk quite a great deal of implementation capacity. We need to start doing things. And I am reminded of what the first Prime Minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, once said: ‘Like never before, we need thinkers of great thoughts; like never before, we need doers of great deeds.’ It is time for us to start doing.”

He said South Africa’s struggles with implementation stem from a pressing shortage of technical capacity, which can be easily seen in the inadequate skill sets among the country’s political groupings.

“Go and look at some of the layers of our government. Go to local governments. I come from Limpopo province in Thohoyandou, and we can see that we need engineers to be able to run that municipality,” Prof Marwala said.

“Where are we going to get them, because we do not really train enough technically skilled people in South Africa? They do not want to go and live in the rural areas, and we need to change that mindset. But we also need to expand our training process.”

“Secondly, organisational and managerial skills are something that we need to actively develop, but we need to start at a young age. The idea that somebody can all of a sudden start knowing what needs to be done when they have just graduated from university is false. Education starts in our homes at the earliest of ages, and we need to be actively involved to make sure that we have a cohort of cadres who are equal to the task when it comes to confronting the problems that we are facing as society.”

Discussing timelines for when South Africa should implement solutions, Prof Marwala said: “We obviously ought to have known in the past. Today is too late. It needs to have been done in the past. When should we start? We should start now. And we should know that we are starting not from point zero, but from negative. We have lost time. We have lost ground. This is urgent. Our people want jobs. Our people want prosperity. We need to have roads that are good. We need to once and for all replace informal settlements with decent living areas for our people. We need to fix our education and health systems.”