DUMA GQUBULE: What I told the president about fiscal constraints
He seems to believe there is one and he has to get the private sector to pay for everything
President Cyril Ramaphosa reads Business Day. A day after I wrote that he should not only listen to the orthodox economists who dominate all debates, the president reached out to me to schedule a discussion about the country’s unemployment crisis. We eventually talked for an hour two days before the state of the nation address. But none of what I had said made it into the speech.
I pointed out that with an annual average of 6% GDP growth until 2030, we would only reduce the number of unemployed by 1.1-million. There would still be about 11.4-million unemployed people by the end of the decade, and the expanded unemployment rate would decline to 34.2% from 46.6%. I said this meant there is a need to massively expand public employment programmes and provide income support for the working-age population through a basic income grant...
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