Cyril to reform cabinet to shake up economy
Unemployment ‘great headache’
President Cyril Ramaphosa has told investors he is going to rearrange his cabinet as part of reforms in the government to move the economy forward. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Johannesburg yesterday, Ramaphosa also hinted that some people who served in his cabinet will not return.
“We’re now going to reconfigure our cabinet as part of the reform package our country needs for the economy to move forward and address the needs of our people.
“The reconfigured cabinet structure will come out with an institutional framework to serve our country best and focus on economic growth. The key risk for us is low economic growth and creating jobs. The [new] structure of government will speak to that,” he said. Asked by Goldman Sachs’s Sub-Saharan Africa’s chief executive Colin Coleman what can be expected in the next five years, he said: “We now have the sixth administration and a new presidential term to clean up. All those things will propel us and move us forward.” Ramaphosa further said he was aware of some of the hurdles that have led to slow growth of the economy and the high unemployment rate. “We know the constraints on the economy and we need to speed up on them. Following the technical recession last year, we embarked on an economic stimulus plan and identified a number of reform issues we had to address. That's already under way,” he said. His remarks came a day after Statistics SA released data showing that the number of employed persons decreased by 237,000 to 16.3-million in the first three months of this year, taking the unemployment rate to 27.6% from 27.1% in the last quarter of last year. This means that over six million people in the country have no jobs. Ramaphosa said government was committed to addressing youth unemployment which is a “great headache”.