The 2016 municipal elections are over. Politicians campaigned tirelessly on issues of service delivery, infrastructure, crime and the scandals engulfing President Jacob Zuma, scoring political points in the process. Yet we heard little about the most critical issue facing municipalities: jobs.Earlier this year, Statistics SA revealed that 5.7m people actively searching for jobs are unable to find one. That is 500,000 people more than last year.It’s not surprising: our cities are battling to juggle the rapid increase in SA’s working-age population (now 36.4m people), coupled with the mass migration of rural populations to urban areas.To satisfy this hunger for jobs, we can’t simply look to our first-tier cities — Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. Secondary cities have to come to the party. These include Pietermaritzburg, Tlokwe (Potchefstroom) and Polokwane, which have to find ways to reinvent themselves if they are to compete for investment.But can smaller cities do this?For a sta...
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