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Zuma: Business leaders to work with state to solve crisis

Cape Town – Business Unity SA and the National Treasury will create a task team to focus on economic growth and job creation, President Jacob Zuma announced on Tuesday.

This followed Zuma’s meeting with over 140 business leaders and cabinet minister in Cape Town, where they looked at ways of growing the economy and averting a credit rating downgrade to junk status.

“We are going to have a small group that is going to sit and work out the things we agreed on … that we can do concretely to ensure that we grow the economy and deal with the issue of unemployment,” Zuma announced after the meeting, according to the SA Government News Agency.

Business Unity SA president Jabu Mabuza and Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan will create the group, he said.

The task team will actively explore and develop proposals identified at the session and will present their report at a follow-up meeting, Zuma said.

“Once the group has dealt with those issues… we will [call a] meeting to listen to that report,” he said.

“Once [the report] has been adopted, we will then take it as our programme and we will dissolve that committee because we don’t want to form another structure,” he said. “It is short-lived, unless that meeting takes a different direction.”

The team will unpack new proposals to grow the economy and create jobs, while reducing youth unemployment.

They will also explore steps to prevent a sovereign downgrade by the rating agencies, develop small and medium enterprises and strengthen public-private partnerships.

It will dig deeper into proposals for the agricultural sector to mitigate the impact of South Africa’s worst drought.

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