Support private sector to set up labour intensive investments

Editor, RE: Why we must end the ‘kaminuza’ syndrome. (The new Times Wednesday September 16) This is a good contribution from Sunny. Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) will meet the demand of the current need for qualified brown-collar professionals. It will not create new jobs. No new or different academic institution will create new jobs, just new and more employees. Eventually, all TVET graduates will take the semi-professional positions like plumbers, cobblers and the watch fixers you talk about but what will happen to the current less educated plumbers and cobblers? Schools don’t create jobs, they create job seekers. Private sector growth geared specifically at job growth will solve the job creation. Every year, the country currently releases over 20,000 graduates. Yet the businesses currently in the country are not labour-intensive, only have a few hundred employees each and are hardly recruiting. Most businesses are technology intensive. The biggest companies are employing as few as possible to make the biggest profit margins. Government needs to start encouraging and providing significant tax and other incentives to investors who create mass employment. This can be combined with increasing manufacturing for export to fix the country’s balance of payments. Al

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Support private sector to set up labour intensive investments