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Programme Director,

Minister Department of Trade, Industry & Competition: Hon Parks Tau

Nedbank Group COO:  Mr Mfundo Nkuhlu,

Members of the Nedbank Group Executive and Board,

Distinguished business leaders and conference delegates,

CEOs and Business Leaders

Government Representatives

Representatives of organised labour, academia and civil society,

Members of the media,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning.

Let me begin by thanking Nedbank for convening this conference, and for the invitation to address you today. The kind of conversation we are having in this room, where government, business, labour and civil society sit at the same table is precisely the conversation our country needs more of. The opportunity gap that brings us together this morning will not be closed by any one of us acting alone. It will be closed by all of us acting together, with urgency and with honesty.

I want to begin by placing this conversation in its proper context. This year carries particular weight for South Africa. In 2026, we commemorate the Golden Jubilee of the 1976 Youth Uprising — fifty years since a generation of young people, armed with conviction rather than capital, stood up and changed the direction of our history. In their honour, government has declared 2026 the Year of Putting Young South Africans to Work. It is a fitting tribute, because the young people of 1976 were not asking for charity. They were demanding a future worth inheriting. Half a century later, our obligation is to help build that future, in the form of real, dignified and sustainable work.

Allow me to speak plainly about where we stand, because the scale of this challenge deserves honesty rather than euphemism.

According to the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey from Statistics South Africa, our official unemployment rate rose to 32.7% in the first quarter of this year, up from 31.4% in the final quarter of 2025. More than eight million South Africans are without work. That figure is sobering on its own. But it is among our young people that this crisis cuts deepest. Unemployment among South Africans between the ages of 15 and 34 stands at close to 46%. Each year, an estimated 1.2 million young people enter our labour market, and more than six in every ten of them find no foothold at all — not in employment, not in education, not in training.

Behind every one of those statistics is a person. A graduate who has sent out a hundred applications and received no callbacks. A school leaver with ambition and no entry point. A young woman with a business idea and no access to capital or markets. We are not simply managing a labour market statistic. We are managing the patience of a generation, and that patience is not infinite.

And this is not only a South African story. By 2050, Africa will be home to approximately one-quarter of the world's population. It will possess the youngest workforce globally and the largest concentration of new labour market entrants of any region on earth. The African Development Bank projects close to 850 million young Africans of working age by mid-century, with young people making up roughly half of a two-billion-strong continental workforce by 2063. The question facing us and facing every government and every boardroom on this continent, is whether this demographic dividend becomes an engine of prosperity, or a source of instability. There is no neutral outcome here. A generation this large, this connected and this impatient for opportunity will either become the workforce that builds Africa's century, or it will become the fault line along which our stability is tested. South Africa does not get to opt out of that choice. What we build here — in skills pipelines, in capital access, in genuine pathways to work — is also our contribution to how that continental story ends.

We often hear this problem described as a skills gap. I want to suggest to you this morning that the more accurate description is an opportunity gap. Many of our young people are not short of effort, or ambition, or even qualifications. What they are short of is a bridge — a pathway connecting where they are to where our economy needs them to be.

Too many of our training programmes were designed for an economy that no longer exists. Too many of our growth sectors — financial services, digital technology, green energy, advanced manufacturing, the care economy — cannot find candidates with the precise capabilities they require, even as graduates from related fields remain unemployed. This is the disconnect at the heart of today's theme. Closing it requires us to align training and curricula far more deliberately with the real and emerging needs of industry, rather than producing qualifications in the abstract and hoping the market absorbs them.

This opportunity gap does not end at the boundary of employment. It extends into ownership, capital and the institutions that decide who gets to build wealth in this economy, not merely earn a wage within it.

Just two weeks ago, an economist Duma Gqubule released his Black Ownership on the JSE Research Report, which was commissioned by the Black Management Forum and the National Empowerment Fund. It is the most rigorous account we have of three decades of democracy, examined company by company, drawn not from BEE certificates but from actual annual reports.

The finding is stark. At the end of December 2024, black ownership of South Africa's sixty largest listed companies stood at R255 billion — equivalent to 6.9% of the South African assets held by those companies, and just 1.5% of their total market capitalisation. The B-BBEE Commission's official claim, by contrast, is approximately 29% black ownership.

That gap, between 6.9% and 29%, is not a rounding difference. Gqubule himself describes it as a “voodoo system of accounting" — a system in which companies continue to count black shareholders long after those shareholders have sold their stakes, in which debt-funded ownership structures prevent any genuine transfer of wealth, and in which empowerment certificates record transactions that, on closer inspection, transferred no real value at all. If we are serious about meaningful transformation, then when shares change hands, companies must ensure that ownership is transferred in a way that broadens and deepens participation among historically disadvantaged Black South Africans. Empowerment must not be allowed to leak out, rather it must continuously expand the base of beneficiaries, creating lasting value, productive assets, and intergenerational wealth within Black communities.

But Gqubule is not entirely without hope, and neither should we be. His research found that two-thirds of the black ownership that is real and verifiable on the JSE is broad-based: employee share schemes, community trusts, public retail programmes open to ordinary South Africans. MultiChoice's Phuthuma Nathi scheme alone has paid more than R19.6 billion in dividends to upward of 75 000 shareholders since 2006 — domestic workers, gardeners, professionals, stokvels and small businesses among them. That is not paper empowerment. That is real, democratic wealth creation.

The lesson is clear, and I want every employer in this room to sit with it. Broad-based ownership works. Paper empowerment does not. A young person who graduates into a workplace they can never meaningfully own, or a sector they can never meaningfully invest in, has only crossed half the bridge. Meaningful work, for this generation, must eventually open a door to meaningful ownership.

Through the Employment Equity Act, the National Minimum Wage, labour market regulation, public employment services, skills development interventions and social dialogue institutions, we seek to ensure that economic growth translates into shared prosperity.

Government has not stood still on this front, and I want to take a few minutes to outline a couple of examples of where our energy is currently focused, because I believe business has a role to play in each of these efforts.

Firstly, through the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention, we have built the National Pathway Management Network — a network of networks connecting young people to opportunity. More than 4.78 million young people are now registered on this platform, and over 1.67 million have secured earning opportunities through it to date. This year, the Department of Employment and Labour has committed R350 million, in partnership with the Presidency and the Network, to place 130 000 young people into learning opportunities, work exposure programmes and employment interventions.

Secondly, we have repositioned our Labour Activation Programme to respond more directly to where the jobs actually are. To date, nearly R3.4 billion in contracts has been handed to implementing partners across the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga, Northwest, Limpopo and Gauteng, benefiting over 118 000 young people. A new call for this current financial year is at final stages.

Thirdly, we have committed a further R95 million to the Industrial Development Corporation to support Youth Employment Innovation Projects, aimed at placing 7 000 young people into productive economic activity — testing new and creative models for absorbing young people into the world of work.

The Department has built Employment Services South Africa (ESSA), the largest government work-seeker database in the country. I want to make a direct and practical request to everyone in this room: make use of ESSA, our online recruitment platform., which can be accessed via www.labour.gov.za. It carries millions of work-seeker profiles, verified and ready. It cannot be business as usual for employers to say they cannot find suitable candidates while a platform built precisely to solve that problem goes underused.

The Department of Employment and Labour has not been standing still on policy either.

The recent amendments to the Employment Equity Act represent an important milestone. The Employment Equity Amendment Act, 2022, came into full legal effect on 1 January 2025 — the most significant reform to employment equity law in nearly three decades. I want to be direct with everyone in this room: these are now your obligations. Not proposals.

There are three things in particular that every employer here must internalise. Firstly, the Minister is now empowered to prescribe sector-specific numerical targets across eighteen key economic sectors over a five-year period — binding equity goals for designated groups at every occupational level. Secondly, the Section 53 compliance certificate is now a prerequisite for any state contract or government business. Compliance has a commercial consequence. Non-compliance has a commercial cost. Thirdly, the new Employment Equity Regulations of 2025 introduce what legal analysts who have studied them closely describe as “a significantly more prescriptive and compliance-driven framework." Aspirational plans with minimal accountability are over.

For the first time since January 2025, sectoral employment equity targets provide a measurable framework through which transformation outcomes can be monitored consistently across the economy. That is what distinguishes this round of reform from those that came before it: not simply new rules, but a common yardstick against which every sector, and every employer within it, can be assessed.

I am aware that these reforms have been contested. There has been litigation. There has been political opposition. I understand the discomfort that change of this magnitude provokes. Our responsibility, however, is to continue implementing the constitutional mandate entrusted to this Department with fairness, integrity and resolve, and that is precisely what we intend to do.

Let me be equally clear about what these measures are, and what they are not. They are not designed to punish business. They are designed to unlock talent. They are designed to broaden opportunity. They are designed to ensure that South Africa's leadership structures better reflect the demographics of this country, and the skills already available within it.

And the international evidence is entirely on our side. Countries that achieved genuine structural transformation are growing faster than we are. Rwanda has sustained growth near 7%. Malaysia's Bumiputera programme reduced poverty within that community from around 65% to under 8% over five decades. Kenya's inclusive governance framework has driven consistent growth above 5%. In each case, the lesson is the same: countries that aligned their growth models with their demographics outperformed those that did not. South Africa, growing at under 1%, is not proof that transformation is unaffordable. It is proof that our transformation has been too slow.

Ladies and gentlemen, the legislative architecture is in place. The sectoral targets are set. The Commission is doing its work. Government has done its part.

The next phase of transformation will be written in boardrooms, not government offices.

First: make transformation a board mandate, not a compliance function buried three levels down. Set five-year equity targets at every occupational level. Report on them publicly. Let your investors hold you accountable for them the way they hold you accountable for revenue and risk.

Second: end paper empowerment. Structure ownership transactions so that they transfer genuine, net wealth, and when black shareholders exit, replace them. Empowerment must be permanent, not episodic.

Third: fix the ceiling, not the pipeline. Black Africans already constitute close to half of professionally qualified workers and roughly two-thirds of skilled-technical workers in this country. They are in your organisations. They have been there for years. The pipeline is not broken. The ceiling is. Remove it.

Fourth: turn procurement into power. Direct the majority of your discretionary procurement to black-owned and women-owned SMMEs. Procurement remains the fastest, most scalable mechanism we have for distributing wealth across this economy.

Fifth: partner with the Department of Employment and Labour. Come to the sectoral targets process with your data, your operational realities and a genuine commitment to achieve those targets, not dilute them. We are not your adversary. We are your partner in building the economy that keeps your businesses viable for the next generation.

None of this is charity, and I do not present it as such. It is enlightened self-interest. An economy with eight million people locked out of earning is an economy with eight million people locked out of spending, saving, borrowing and investing. The opportunity gap is not only a social wound. It is a constraint on every growth forecast this sector produces.

Closing this gap will require a level of coordination between government, business, educational institutions and civil society that, frankly, we have not yet achieved at the scale this crisis demands. It requires our universities and colleges to treat industry advisory input as central rather than ceremonial. It requires civil society organisations, who often reach young people in places government and business structures do not, to be proper partners in implementation rather than afterthoughts. And it requires all of us to measure our success not by the number of programmes we launch, but by the number of young people who complete them, transition through them, and remain employed a year, three years, five years later.

That is the standard I am asking us to hold ourselves to. Not activity. Outcomes.

Fifty years ago, a generation of young South Africans refused to accept the future that had been written for them. They did not have access to capital, to platforms, or to the kind of partnerships represented in this room today. What they had was the conviction that things could be different, and the courage to act on it.

We owe their memory more than commemoration. We owe it construction — the building, brick by brick, partnership by partnership, of an economy that has room for the seven in ten young South Africans currently locked outside it. Government has set out its part. I have set out, too, what I believe business, and this institution in particular, can contribute.

Let this conference be remembered not for the conversation we had, but for the commitments we made and kept. Our young people are not asking us for sympathy. They are asking us for a bridge. Let us build it together.

I thank you.​

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