Thursday, November 26, 2009

South Africa 2010: more jobs to be lost?

With the first African world cup looming ever closer, the host nation is looking at righting all internal troubles before inviting the world for the games.

But things are not looking so good on the books of the working class. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) wants their governmment to fix the exchange rate to create more jobs.

If the world cup should be successful, the people must be content. But reports of thousands of people being thrown out of work is fostering feelings of malcontentment.

Officially, South Africa is out of recession and its mainly due to the ruling ANC's investment in roads, railways and stadia for the world cup.

And even as Cosatu predicts more than a million jobs will be lost by the end of next month, we are in for an interesting last couple of months before kickoff.

Already costs of some of the stadia have increased two-fold and many have complained about the price of tickets which they say is too expensive.

I think that's not an argument, but let's leave that for another day.