Jobs focus of Zuma, premiers meeting

Pretoria - President Jacob Zuma's meeting on Tuesday in Pretoria with the country's provincial premiers focused on job creation.

At a press conference afterwards, Zuma said: "We have just concluded a useful meeting indeed, where we discussed a number of issues. The key issue of the meeting has been the question of job creation which is the priority that we are all involved (in). We also discussed other issues."

These, he said were the country's preparedness for holding the upcoming local government elections as well as the recent floods in the Northern Cape and subsequent reconstruction.

The Presidential Coordinating Council is a statutory body that meets regularly to coordinate and align priorities, objectives and strategies across national, provincial and local governments. This was the first meeting of the council in 2011.

Western Cape premier Helen Zille said the council was a "key cog in cooperative governance".

She said it gave her confidence in cooperative governance as her views were listened to, even though she was the only opposition party premier.

KwaZulu-Natal premier Zweli Mkhize said: "We are finding that there are common features and common challenges in different provinces."

There was much progress in the government's coordination "in ensuring job creation is a priority for the government right across different provinces, but also there are lots of areas that need to be resolved to ensure this can be accelerated".