Red Alert: The DA's "real jobs"
Searching for a pretext for yesterday's gimmicky, deliberately provocative march on the ANC's headquarters, the DA posters trumpeted "6 million real jobs". Helen Zille started this diversionary pretext two weeks ago. In a statement she labelled as "bogus" the ANC election manifesto's commitment to creating 6-million work opportunities through the expanded public works programme (EPWP) over the next five years. Zille haughtily dismissed these as only short-term temporary work, not "real jobs".
Of course nowhere does the ANC manifesto claim that EPWP work opportunities are formal sector jobs. Moreover, these 6-million work opportunities are only one of dozens of ANC-alliance election commitments to address the crises of unemployment and poverty.
Unfortunately for Zille, as her colleagues had to quietly remind her, the commitment to a major up-scaling of the EPWP is not the ANC's alone. It's in chapter 3 of the National Development Plan (Zille likes to present herself as the world's greatest champion of the NDP). It's also in the budgets of all three spheres of government, including her own Western Cape administration.
In November last year, when DA City of Cape Town mayor Patricia De Lille tabled her mid-term report she said that the creation of 37,000 temporary EPWP work opportunities was "her proudest achievement". Clearly Zille and De Lille are at cross purposes on this - are these work opportunities just "bogus", or are they an important part of a wider set of interventions to address poverty and unemployment (as Mayor De Lille clearly and correctly believes)?
It was left to the DA's Wilmot James to make a valiant clean-up effort. Not for the first time in the past few weeks, Dr James has been wheeled out to clear up behind the blunders of his boss. James argues that the DA march was not against EPWP jobs as such. But, he says, we must not conflate EPWP "work opportunities" with formal sector jobs -as if anyone in the ANC or government was making that conflation. Let's at least welcome James's reassurance that the DA is committed to up-scaling the EPWP.