By 
Here is my advice to the Administration of President Hichilema as Dr. Musokotwane prepares to present his government’s third national budget in October, 2023 for fiscal year 2024.
The challenge for our country should be to create not less than1,000,000 net new jobs annually, raise the proportion of the labour force in the formal sector to at least 50% by 2026, reduce official unemployment rate from 13% to 7% by 2026 and also raise labour force participation rate.
Our country needs to formulate a social emergency programme to deal with youth unemployment where every year more than 240,000 school leavers are entering the labour market without hope of finding a formal job. Most join the mass of more than 10 million citizens in informal operations – a sector of humanity comprising of angry lumpen elements, crooks, prostitutes, vagabonds – all that mass of humanity hovering between suicide and insanity.
This indeed is a time bomb.
My suggestion of your government to consider adopting some of the following suggestions:
1. Consider starting a compulsory six-months youth national skills development programme.
The currently under-utilized infrastructure of the Zambia National Service provides a ready-made avenue for both short-term skills training initiatives. More than 250,000 school leavers can be given skills at ZNS centres every year and also taught some discipline in conducting themselves in public and avoid nuisances of political cadres and misfits.
2. Consider introducing a youth leadership-wage and youth-training subsidy for companies providing youth apprenticeship programmes and on-the job training. There can be more than 200,000 young people who can receive this every year in addition to ensuring that TEVETA also manages another 300,000 youth apprenticeships every year. The VIS and SIDO initiatives were not bad ideas.
3. Establish a data base for the labour market, that is, a labour market information system.
4. Ensure that unless the skill is not available in Zambia, all employment shall be performed by Zambians.
5. Address the three million deficit in residential housing by ensuring that all district councils start constructing residential houses, roads, bridges along the lines of PUSH projects and construct industrial estates. Increase the Constituency Development Fund and make it accountable. Address the end to shanties and learn from China how it dealt with this colonial deprivation of decent shelter to its citizens.
6. Establish a small business development agency to mentor at least 2,000 small enterprises and train more than 10,000 entrepreneurs in business and technical skills annually. It is sad that our technical institutes have been transformed into universities and now we have to import carpenters and bricklayers from Zimbabwe and Tanzania.
All these ideas will need funding which Zambia has always had. For a start, ensure that Zambia has controlling interest in all our mines and that all sales from our minerals are first banked in our banks.
Further, ensure you abandon the unpardonable mistake of making mineral royalty tax deductible and if need be, increase the mineral royalty tax rate as we will never get fair corporate taxes from these mines who always carryon losses.
Reduce direct taxes and expand indirect taxes and continue providing subsidies to agriculture. And with all this, you will in time pay all your debts when they fall due as you will accumulate investable surpluses for expanded reproduction and manage the youth time bomb.
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