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Cape Town - South Africa would establish "within a few weeks" a multi-stakeholder working group to respond to the country's skills challenge, says President Thabo Mbeki.
He said the group would be called JIPSA - the Joint Initiative on
Priority Skills Acquisition.
In his state of the nation speech at the opening of parliament on
Friday, the president paid particular attention to the white Afrikaans-based party, the Freedom Front Plus, in its campaign to use the skills of unemployed white skilled workers.
While he did not refer directly to their ethnic status, he said he would like to "extend the sincere thanks of our deputy president (Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka) and government as a whole to the response of the Freedom Front Plus and other formations and individuals who have responded to our appeal for South Africans with the necessary skills to make themselves available to provide
the required expertise in project management and other areas".
The Freedom Front Plus holds four seats in the 400-seat National
Assembly and is led by Pieter Mulder, a veteran member of parliament.
Mbeki noted that the first group "of the 90 already identified and assessed will be deployed in their new posts in May."
He said government would make "other interventions in education and training. These include eliminating fees for the poorest quintile of primary schools, targeting 529 schools to double the mathematics and science graduate output to 50 000 by 2008 and re-equipping and financing the further
education and training colleges."
Mbeki noted that government had completed the task of registering unemployed graduates with over 60 000 in the database.
"We wish to express our appreciation to the many companies that last December pledged to employ some of these graduates. An intensive campaign to link up these graduates with these and other companies will be undertaken this year."