Rocket to a future of possibilities
JOBS! Nothing makes Buffalo City perk up and feel better about itself than the prospect of jobs. Yesterday we reported that Pan Africanist legend-turned entrepreneur Dr Siphiwe Cele has built a mind-boggling, billionrand electronics factory in our metro’s East London Industrial Development Zone which will hire 1 000 people in the next 12 months.
He admits that the first to be hired will be graduates, who are needed to run his 100% black-owned Yekani Manufacturing plant. It is the next layer of the project, which is common in large industrial endeavours, which should interest our thousands of unemployed young people.
Mini factories will be built to feed the 28 000m² central plant with components. Workers for these smaller factories will be trained on the job. “We will be employing more people who are not necessary skilled who will be trained,” he said.
It should interest those who care deeply about pumping economic growth in BCM that Yekani will be producing 4G cellphones, laptops, and tablets, all going by the name of Yekani. BCM may be struggling economically but our people, especially our youth, are in love with online culture. To have southern Africa’s largest producer of international-class electronic goods, especially cellphones, right in our metro, ought to be a massive boost to our community’s ability to become information rich.
It will take much, much more to turn Buffalo City into a cohesive, solid, productive, job-rich and prosperous town, but it must surely be a stroke of genius to build a plant right in our midst which, if accessible in terms of jobs, affordable electronic goods and cheap data, has the potential to rocket us forward into a world of new possibilities.
Yekani Manufacturing and its stakeholders and investors – the Department of Trade and Industries, private banks and funds, and Dr Cele who has put his own cash into the venture – will have their main focus on manufacturing electronic products for automotive, defence, and aerospace industries and consumers.
But it is no secret the government, led by Trade and Industries Minister Rob Davies, who was at the launch this week, and President Cyril Ramaphosa, are in full support of Dr Cele’s passion to get Yekani products into the hands of Eastern Cape youth.
How this meeting of digital minds, between elder and younger geeks, will play itself out in the city is an unknown, but people of the metro need to get behind this project and realise its future potential.
It is an anomaly of modern society that despite worrying levels of financial and economic disparity, the advent of cellphones and data has revolutionised mass communication. It is no longer surprising to see a gogo from a deep rural area looking for free wifi to check her WhatsApp, or ask Google a question.
We need to grab the opportunity represented by the Yekani plant and its products and make it work for us and future generations. And, for this to happen, we need free wifi in BCM.