Pretoria - Business Unity South Africa (BUSA) and trade union federation COSATU have both came out in support of government's new economic growth path, adding that they will wait for more details of the plan.
The Cabinet economic cluster, through Minister in the Presidency Collins Chabane announced the new growth path approach at a media briefing on Tuesday.
According to Chabane, government plans through a series of interventions to facilitate the creation of about five million jobs in the next 10 years while reducing unemployment from 25 percent to 15 percent. Five hundred thousand jobs a year will have to be created in the economy to achieve the goals.
BUSA President Jerry Vilakazi on Wednesday described the plan as bold but achievable.
"We have seen in the past when the economy started growing at 5 percent per annum, we were able to create more than 500 000 jobs per annum so what this says is that if we do the right thing...we will be able to create more than 500 000 jobs," Vilakazi said during an SABC interview.
"So it is possible. It is bold but will require decisive leadership from government and it will require sacrifices from all of us it will require labour to come to the party," he added.
COSATU President Sdumo Dlamini said the labour federation, which has more than two million members, will wait for government to elaborate more on the plan and that unions were ready to support any economic policy that created jobs. Earlier, the federation's spokesperson Patrick Craven said the future of South African was in the balance.
"We must as a society ensure that we adopt and speedily implement a new Growth Path that will take us to the goal we set ourselves in the Freedom Charter in 1955, which declared that 'the national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people'," Craven said. Despite the progress in the political transformation, the economic structure inherited from apartheid has remained virtually unchanged, and in some respects worsened.
But Nedbank economist Dennis Dykes warned it would not be easy to achieve the targeted jobs numbers under the current economic climate.
"We have just come out of recession and many jobs were lost during that period so it may not be possible to create jobs at that speed especially with the economy still trying to recover," he said. He pointed out that many companies were still recovering from the effects of the recession while some were still shedding jobs
The new growth path indentifies six key sectors of the economy, including infrastructure development, agriculture, mining, green economy, manufacturing and tourism, have been identified as having potential to unlock employment opportunities.
In the green economy, government sees a potential 300 000 jobs by 2020, with 80 000 in manufacturing with a potential to rise to well over 400 000 by 2030.
The Industrial Development Corporation has been tasked with raising capital to drive growth of the green industrial economy in line with South Africa's commitments to drastically reduce carbon emissions in the next few years.
