In one of his previous state of the nation addresses President Thabo Mbeki voiced his concern over the high vacancy rate in the public sector.

In one of his previous state of the nation addresses President Thabo Mbeki voiced his concern over the high vacancy rate in the public sector.

He set a time-frame during which the vacancies had to be filled. But nothing much has been done to fix the problem.

This approach is extremely baffling, given that our country has a high unemployment rate and poor service delivery, which was blamed for recent xenophobic attacks.

This should have been attended to as a national emergency by all who are concerned about the future of the country.

ANC president Jacob Zuma, speaking at the University of Zululand, emphasised the importance of graduates to the country and tried to dissuade them from emigrating.

But many graduates are either unemployed or underemployed.

Many of them battle to get into learnerships and/or internships, which in themselves are not sustainable because most people who complete such training are not guaranteed employment.

A worrying aspect of many public sector departments is that at the end of their financial year they return a lot of unspent money to the Treasury.

Why is that money not spent on job creation projects?

Phillimon Mnisi

Johannesburg