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Making the Eastern Cape ‘Work’

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The Eastern cape remains a reservoir of cheap labour for other provinces that offer job opportunities. The fact that most of the miners killed in the Marikana tragedy were from the Eastern Cape is testimony to this lamentable situation.

The two former homelands in the Eastern Cape (Ciskei and Transkei) continue to have a majority of female headed households that go under the heavy burden of poverty, dependence on remittances sent home by migrant workers and the largess of the State through the social grant system.

The government of this Province has disappointed millions of rural inhabitants who cannot access job opportunities where they live and are forced to seek greener pastures in other provinces. Not only is this situation fraught with uncertainty and insecurity, it is also a recipe for disaster as far as the social fabric of these families and communities is concerned.

No one other than the Eastern Cape ANC government is responsible for the fact that so many people in this province are unemployed. The DA has recently launched its proposals on how to stimulate the country’s economy through its 8% growth project, this was followed by a national jobs campaign focusing on skills development, entrepreneurship, infrastructure development, opening our economy to African trade and creating an economic and legislative environment that will attract foreign direct investment and create work. These proposals were met with unprecedented media and public interest and attention.

This initiative embarked upon today is being symbolically kick-started in the Ngqurha IDZ for a host of really important reasons, not least of which is to illustrate the fact that World Class infrastructure does attract and stimulate foreign direct investment and Economic activity. The DA in the Eastern Cape has supported this initiative since its inception and believes that it should be taken to the next logical step by being declared an export processing zone with all the concomitant legislative and economic incentives that would promote more international investment.

The Eastern Cape is a predominantly rural province where agriculture and related industries play a dominant role in the provincial economy. Outside of the two Metro’s that both have harbor linked IDZ’s that are focused primarily on industry linked to the motor manufacturing sector the bulk of potential job opportunities must be created in the rural areas where the majority of our population lives.

Despite government’s focus on rural development and land reform through the Comprehensive Rural Development programme we are faced with accelerated “Platteland” decay, unprecedented urbanisation and migrant labour. The DA believes that the full agricultural potential of this province can only be achieved if there is fundamental and comprehensive land tenure reform in the former homelands.

The recent constitutional court judgement regarding Members of Parliament’s right to propose private legislation will allow my Private Members Bill to be resuscitated whereby I will seek to have the Communal Land Rights Act, Act11/24 (which was found to be Unconstitutional), replaced with innovative proposals around Land Tenure reform in communal areas.

The DA will through this Provincial Job Creation Campaign inform all communities of what we regard as solutions to this critical joblessness by positing simple solutions to addressing this situation.

Athol Trollip MP

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Port Elizabethan

This author is a 'catch-all' for occasional articles and letters written to MyPE. The Author of each article can be found in the signature at the bottom of each individual article.