On-The-Air (11/12/2015)

11th December 2015

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Sakina Kamwendo speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Kamwendo: Mining is helping to show how rich and poor South African youth can work arm-in-arm as volunteers.

Creamer: It is an important time of the year now to start considering how many students are coming off into the world of work and how many of them will not get jobs. There are about 700 000 to 800 000 people graduating from various schools around the country, who will be looking for jobs. One of the things that is happening now is an intention to expand the City Year, which was encouraged by Nelson Mandela. We see them down in Joburg doing an incredible job.

They want to scale up, because of the scale of this issue of people not having experienced anything regarding work. The volunteers here get tremendous experience in the world of work and 10% of them actually become entrepreneurs. They start their own businesses. We see now that even one of the alumni that has come off is actually putting money into the organisation, because it costs something like R40 000 for each volunteer a year.

This needs to come from both business and government. So government comes forward with about 40% of it, corporates and just about all the mining houses with another 40%. Individuals put their money into it as well, including foreigners, because it is an international concept this City Year, where you volunteer to do community service and at the same time you get exposed to the world of work.

The work that has been concentrated on is education work, where 23 000 pupils are tutored and mentored. A lot of these people involved in this training go out to the schools in this area and they tutor and mentor young pupils. They say it has a fantastic affect on the education system. What we are saying in South Africa now, is that it is a big issue these people who can’t find jobs. There are three to four million people under 25 who are sitting out there and have got no prospects.

There must be an outreach to these people. It is good that corporates and government work together and we see this formula City Year working so well and now needs to be expanded. It is run by Murphy Morobe we know from the struggle days and also Rick Menell who actually offered it its first offices when he was CEO of Anglovaal Mining and now is a banker making sure it is funded.

Kamwendo: Goldman Sachs is proposing a National Service Initiative for 300 000 unemployed youth.

Creamer: Yes, Goldman Sachs came forward and stress tested the economy of South Africa and found that our financial sector getting good points, but where they had red lights flashing was around this big unemployment problem.

They are proposing to government and they have met at all levels of government and all corporates that one of their big documents is that we have a national service initiative and have actually got the plan out laid. They are saying that we must try and do 300 000 unemployed youth being drafted in to military service, but with a huge community aspect to it. You will then wear your uniform, but you will go out and serve the community.

One of the issues that is a worrying issue, is who is going to train these people. We have not got enough, as City Year will tell you, there are not enough people who are actually well versed in youth training. You see that City Year are now saying to Goldman Sachs use some of our formula in this as well because people have got to get used to the world of work. City Year has been so successful in preparing youth that companies snap them up when they come out of this organisation. So, can we have a combination of both military service and the City Year-type approach, where it is very civilian and very voluntary. Maybe we will come up with a great formula, because we see other countries are doing it.

I have just been speaking to people now and Nigeria has got a youth service. They shouldn't be ahead of us and this, I think, is one of the most crucial issues at the moment. We are talking about the firing of the Finance Minister and that is raising massive issues, but what about all these young people, a massive sea of young people. What are we going to do to give them some hope? Along comes Goldman Sachs and says this is one thing you can do and the cost would be 0.8%, in terms of the Goldman Sachs proposal, of our national budget.

It is going to be costly obviously, but not having it might be far more costly. So, it is interesting to see that people are coming forward now seeing this problem very clearly, particularly those stress testing our economy and saying that we have got to do something about our unemployed youth.

Kamwendo: Mining giants Anglo American and Glencore have painted two sharply contrasting pictures in this week’s global presentations.

Creamer: It was incredible. These are two big mining giants, of course, Anglo American so well known to us, iconic, they had a very disastrous approach to the future looking at really halving just about everything.

Halving their business units and cutting their assets by 60% down to 20 assets. Looking at a potential of a lot of job losses. We saw their share price fall, whereas Glencore came up with a far more positive approach and we saw their share price shoot up 14%.

We are seeing two tales here in mining one quite negative the other one possibly positive and coming through from Glencore also listed here in Johannesburg and talking about going ahead strongly with its business.

Kamwendo: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Martin will be taking his usual seasonal break and he’ll be back At The Coal-Face again with renewed vigour on Friday the 15th of January next year.

 

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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