IF SOUTH Africa has any hope of emerging from its current state affairs, its first point of order needs to be to elect people without any criminal convictions to their name, under no pending investigation relating to any corruption, bribery, tax evasion or money laundering.
Once elected, candidates must be subjected to public assessment and 12 months’ scrutiny of their time in office to ensure that elected office-bearers are accountable and to ensure that Parliament is not used for self-enrichment by people who fail to serve their communities and constituencies.
These are some of the plans shared by politician Anele Mda, who will be contesting the elections as an independent candidate.
In unveiling her manifesto recently, Mda said while there had been notable macroeconomic stability in the country, this had not been translated to the much-needed creation of sustainable jobs, internships and learnerships to build a skilful workforce in the country.
In order to eradicate unemployment, Mda said, an aggressive and rapid approach was needed to foster a shift from the current situation.
She said the laws regulating the functioning of companies operating in the country must be job creation-driven “and equally be centred on putting South Africans into the job market”.
Furthermore, industries identified by the Department of Employment and Labour ought to be encouraged to focus on placing unskilled and semi-skilled unemployed people in the job market, using various approaches to ensure that they too secured employment.
At the same time, the government had to offer business incentives through the broad-based black economic empowerment and employment equity scorecards to companies which issued internships and learnership, only after ensuring that internships translated into secured employment.
Mda said there was also a need to aggressively expand and widen participation in certain industries whose operation had a direct impact on growing the economy, especially within sectors such as the financial sector.
“Our economy must be reflective of the country and the current major role-players cannot be sector dictators. The diversifying of this sector is pivotal for many reasons, principal among which is to ensure that occurrences like the much-talked-about rand manipulation (by banks) is avoided in the future.”
In addition to leveraging existing legislation, Mda said she would push for the introduction of new laws that would enhance support, care and protection for survivors and victims and strengthen measures against perpetrators of gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide.
To do this, her key proposal was the implementation of a parole waiver to all convicted perpetrators of rape, GBV and femicide, domestic violence and all other related offences until the perpetrator has served more than half of the prescribed sentence.
Mda also touched on reviewing the allocation of social grants to eliminate a perpetuated dependency syndrome, strengthening the country’s public healthcare system and improving access to it, fighting corruption in the public service, producing a patriotic police force, and maintaining immigration laws, border management and asylum processing, to name a few.
The Star