EFF leader Julius Malema wants unemployed university and college graduates to be given stipends that are more than the R350 grant the government rolls out to people without jobs.
Malema was speaking at the party’s 16 June rally at the Durban University of Technology in KwaZulu-Natal.
“We need to pay people according to their qualifications. If there is no matric then R350, [people with] matric [get] R1 000. Like that. That is the only way we will defeat illiteracy,” he said.
Malema said giving the stipends to unemployed graduates was important to empower the younger generation to not be deterred by unemployment.
“Those who are coming after you will never get to school. They will say, ‘My sister is an engineer, yet she is poor and unemployed — why must I go to school?’
“We must pay you for going to school because we said to you, go to school and get a job to better your family. You went to school and now we cannot give you a job.
“Let going to school be rewarded. If they cannot give us [youth] the jobs that they promised, they must give us the money,” he said.
According to Stats SA, unemployment increased from 32.7% in 2022 to 32.9% in the first quarter of 2023, representing 7.9-million people without work. About 44.7% of those were people aged between 15 and 34 who were not in school, employment or training.
Malema encouraged students to vote in the national elections in 2024.
“We are calling on young people to declare that 2024 is their 1994. We want the youth of South Africa to make a decision in 2024 and know that it is either the bottle or the ballot.”
TimesLIVE reported that deputy president Paul Mashatile, speaking at a Youth Day commemoration in Mangaung, said the government was determined to ensure the youth have access to socioeconomic opportunities.
“Our initiatives, strategies and programmes are geared towards providing a hand-up, as opposed to a handout. We believe that when we give the youth a hand-up, you enable them to see something inside themselves that they did not previously see.
“The goal is to make sure that young people see a chance that didn’t exist before and know that they can do more than they thought they could before,” Mashatile said. - TimesLIVE