Former African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has cautioned against South Africa isolating itself from the rest of the continent.
This is on the eve of the June 30 shutdown, which has seen the country criticised by others on the continent, for being anti-African and xenophobic.
Dlamini-Zuma was speaking at a National Democratic Revolution Seminar in Houghton, north of Johannesburg.
Dlamini-Zuma says that the economic challenges facing the country have been misdiagnosed, with immigrants being blamed for high levels of joblessness.
“If we get isolated by Africa, we’re doomed. I mean, if you go to any region and ask a country, who’s your biggest trading partner? They will not point at a country across oceans. They’ll point at countries in their region. But even if all Africans were to leave, there’ll still be unemployment. We need to fix our economy. We need to have a skills revolution, skill young people. And our education system must not train people for job seekers, but they must also be job creators, entrepreneurs.”
Meanwhile, Former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel says South Africa’s defective system of governance has contributed to the shutdown, scheduled for Tuesday, by anti-illegal immigrant groups.
He said that inadequate channels of communication at different levels of government, result in citizens finding alternative methods of resolving the challenges they face.
“People don’t have the means of communicating with those who purport to represent them. And even though structurally it’s better designed at local government level, where you have ward representatives and PR representatives, I would hazard a guess that it doesn’t exist in that way. We allow public representatives to get away with doing the very, very least. And what doesn’t even feature on that list is much communication with the people they represent. That’s a problem. So, if you ask Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma who her public representative is, one would hope that somebody like that would have been contacted by a public representative and that there’s communication. I would hazard not.”
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