Budget speech zeros in on unemployment
Unemployment was a major focus of the 2021 Budget Speech held on Tuesday at the Mpumalanga Provincial Legislature.
“Mpumalanga’s expanded unemployment rate increased to 46,4 per cent at the end of the fourth quarter of 2020, which was the third-highest among the nine provinces,” said the MEC for finance, economic development and tourism, Prince Vusumuzi Mkhatshwa.
The MEC said though all industries had been affected by the pandemic, construction especially had been impacted.
StatsSA’s latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey indicated that Mpumalanga had recorded 96 382 job losses in 2020. Job losses in the construction sector totalled more than 30 000.
“The effects of lockdown were felt especially by the construction industry,” said Mkhatshwa.
Eighty per cent of the province’s budget has been allocated to social sector departments. According to the MEC, these departments provide “essential services to the poor through targeted interventions”.
The provincial budget is expected to decrease by 6,2 per cent in 2021/22. Most of these cuts have been the compensation of employees. However, Mkhatshwa said that the main focus of the budget was to help Mpumalangans.
“The programmes we are rolling out ought to talk to the real improvement of the living conditions of the citizens of Mpumalanga.”
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Most job losses were in the informal sector, according to the MEC, making up almost 30 per cent of the province’s total number of job losses.
In her response to the Sopa debate on March 11, Premier Refilwe Mtshweni-Tsipane said economic actions by the legislature cannot continue to be “business as usual”.
While the MEC referred to the damaging effects of the Covid-19 regulations, the premier was more positive. “The pandemic presents an opportunity to reconfigure the economy,” she said.
The premier referred to economic inequalities that still plague the province and chalked it up to the apartheid government.
“We will always fall short unless we embark on a deliberate, aggressive and unapologetic transformation of the economic landscape. The structure of the economy must be transformed to allow for those on the periphery to become part of the mainstream, to occupy the centre stage of the economy.”
