YOUTH DEVELOPMENT: FRAMEWORK LEGISLATION IN THE PIPELINE?

YOUTH DEVELOPMENT: FRAMEWORK LEGISLATION IN THE PIPELINE?

• 15 July 2024
• Parliament
• SA Legal Academy

Framework legislation for youth development is in the process of being drafted, according to newly appointed Women, Youth & Persons with Disabilities Minister Sindisiwe Chikunga. This is probably the most logical interpretation of a statement in the official version of the Minister’s 2024/25 budget vote speech, announcing that the department ‘has developed the South African Youth Development Act’.

Chikunga was probably referring to a draft Bill, which presumably will be the focus of a public consultation process before being tabled in Parliament. Only when the Bill has been passed and signed into law will it become an Act. And only once operationalised will it give practical effect to a National Youth Policy published in July 2020.

As former Minister of Transport, Chikunga should be more familiar with the process of preparing legislation than her speech suggests. This is especially because:

• it was delivered to a contingent of newly elected MPs, many of whom are new to Parliament and some of whom may eventually be involved in processing the Bill, and
• it drew attention to a commitment in the 2023/24 budget vote requiring the department of Women, Youth & People with Disabilities to ‘move beyond advocacy’.

At the time, Chikunga’s predecessor undertook to ‘rally’ government and society at large behind an ‘ongoing war on youth unemployment … and a visible sense of hopelessness amongst the marginalised’.

In that context, references to the National Youth Development Act as a fail accompli could raise worryingly unrealistic expectations.

• speech
• youth policy

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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