A former senior Treasury official has called for the government to be more ambitious about public employment projects, balancing more spending on social grants with more spending on public employment, particularly for young people.

The University of Cape Town’s Andrew Donaldson, who served for many years as the Treasury’s deputy director-general in charge of the public finance and the budget offices, said the rapid scaling up of the presidential employment stimulus over the past two years showed that the government could “think big” about public employment. But such programmes should be thought of as permanent ones that SA will need for a long time, rather than as just relief programmes...