Equipping youth with requisite tools is crucial

In what could be seen as being in touch with the challenges that the Eastern Cape youth is faced with, premier Phumulo Masualle has admitted that while a lot has been done to address social ills like unemployment, more can still be done.

While addressing scores of young people at a breakfast dialogue in East London recently, Masualle told the youth, whom some of them had received funding from his office, that young people were the future.

And in order for the country to have a bright future, the state and the private sector should work together.

The best investment that a country can make is by investing in its young people, he said.

“To look at how far we have gone is always a good opportunity and also to look to how we can do at times, because it’s not all the time that the things we do necessarily achieve the objectives we set ourselves, or through them we achieved but we could have done more.

“You see, one of the things we did

For the country to have a bright future, the state and private sector must work together

during this fifth administration that is soon to come to a close was working with young people we managed to secure a framework for youth development.

“That is a platform that was canvassed with young people that then became our blueprint, our mandate to really look to how we really advance youth development,” Masualle said.

He said it was crucial that the youth development centre was operational so that hundreds of youths would benefit from it. Masualle said his administration takes youth development serious with almost all departments having programmes to equip youths. These are in entrepreneurship, agriculture, maritime and aviation among other sectors.

“We can report progress in those aspects but of course, it is progress that we could still do more in terms of even other departments assimilating the programmes we’ve taken to the Office of the Premier to have what we’ve termed flagship projects in a way in which we want to make examples for others to follow in advancing, or giving effect to the youth development strategy that we adopted as the province. “We can all agree that all in spite of the things we have done, we still have a larger problem of young people that are without jobs, young people that are finding themselves in very desperate environments which require this continuous work that should draw in not only the public sector, but also the private sector needs to come into space so that we attend to this urgent dusk of the development of our country, for the development of our province,” he said.