Job Creation in South Africa

David Lipschitz reply to "More formal jobs in Q3" on Engineering News.

The South African population is growing at 1% per annum, ie 500,000 new people every year. South Africa needs 42,000 new jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. 59,000 jobs in a quarter is 20,000 per month. Not enough. Also a lot of these jobs are government employment projects which are not sustainable. At some point the private sector cannot support an overextended government and the economy will crash. It's time for government to act on the incentives they have been proposing for the fastest growing sectors of the worldwide economy, namely IT (especially Smart Phones) and Renewable Energy (RE). Anything else will either create a bloated government or an economy in downward spiral. I should note however, that South Africa is a resource rich country, but it doesn't have enough electricity to extract and beneficiate these materials. The main restriction therefore on real growth in South Africa is the lack of electricity supply. An RE industry incentive, plus deregulation, plus enacting the "embedded energy" legislation would ease this burden and instead of the electricity industry losing 1000 people per quarter it could add 5,000 per month.