The new President of the Republic of South Africa, Jacob Zuma delivered his first State of the Nation address on Wednesday the 3rd of June 2009. Within the speech there were wide reaching calls for job creation and that was a central plank of the message. There has been a mixed reaction to what he had to say with many technical experts and opposition demagogues seeing the massive increased job creation programme as unrealistic, especially in the face of the recession.
- R787 Billion on infrastructure
- Key industries to be bolstered
- Retrenched to be re-trained
South Africa is feeling the effects of the global downturn and recession, but we are not feeling as hard as most of the rest of the world. The State of the Nation is a way for the President to let us know how he thinks things are going to go, where we have come from and where we want to go to. The upshot of all this is that while the address was a positive and balanced look at where we are at, it was rather short on specific solutions and there were some comments made to the effect that it is more of a manifesto than a programme of work. The undeniable fact is that we are in recession and that job security and job creation are massively important at the moment.
Will the expanded job creation programme work for you? Well if you are in construction it should help, but we can guess that the focus will be on entry level jobs. If you are worried about being retrenched the new re-training idea could benefit you. At the end of the day in a recessionary environment it does not really matter what politicians say but what you yourself do. Plan a budget and stick to it, then cut down on what you don't need and put that saved money away for later, so that when 2010 comes around and the expected upturn starts kicking off you will be prepared to take advantage