Ramaphosa to visit city for rally

DEPUTY President Cyril Ramaphosa will be in Kimberley early next month for an ANC cadres rally.

ANC provincial secretary, Deshi Ngxanga, said that his office had confirmed Ramaphosa’s availability for the rally to be held at the Mittah Seperepere Convention Centre on September 2.

The Provincial Executive Committee (PEC) of the ANC in the Northern Cape has pledged its support for presidential hopeful Ramaphosa in the build-up to the party’s national elective conference in December.

“The Northern Cape will stick with Ramaphosa, even if it means that we are the only Province that supports him,” said Ngxanga.

Ramaphosa’s visit follows hot on the heels of President Jacob Zuma’s visit to Kimberley on Women’s Day, while Zuma’s former wife Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, who is also a presidential hopeful, visited the city for the Freedom Charter lecture in July.

Meanwhile, the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in the Province has called for the scrapping of bachelor’s degrees as a minimum requirement for internships due to the shocking unemployment statistics that were recently released by Stats SA.

ANCYL provincial secretary, Neo Maneng, stated that the increase in the expanded unemployment rate, which has risen to 45.3 percent in the Province, affected the majority of young people.

“The ANCYL urges government to urgently give attention to the exacerbating state of affairs in the Province. The bachelor’s degree requirements for internships must be scrapped immediately to allow college students who have completed their 18 months of theoretical work to be employed in such internships.”

Maneng also called on government to set aside 30 percent of all state contracts for young entrepreneurs.

He added that all mining companies, municipalities and provincial departments should enter into memorandums of understanding with all the TVET colleges in the Province, with regards to absorbing students once they had completed their studies.

“The National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) mandate must be reviewed in order to turn this institution into a one-stop centre of information, with specific focus on the unique needs of the Province, where information on opportunities such as learnerships, bursaries and SMME grant allocations should be exclusively centralised,” said Maneng.