Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen announced on Friday that the party’s new economic policy pledge aims to improve the ease of doing business, which it says will unlock between 350 000 and 400 000 new jobs.

Steenhuisen said the economic policy is built on the “simple, yet fundamental, truth” that the wrong choices, made by the wrong people, have created the country’s unemployment crisis, and that better choices made by the right people can solve the crisis.

“Reforming labour policies through better choices, including the party’s introduction of a new Youth Employment Opportunity Certificate, will unleash hundreds of thousands more jobs for young people,” he said.

Steenhuisen added that a further 700 000 to one-million new jobs would be created through better collective bargaining to expand representation as well as exempt small, medium-sized and microenterprises from “agreements they cannot afford”.

Choices on industrial policy will generate between 400 000 and 500 000 new jobs, and an improved trade policy would add another 100 000 to 150 000 jobs, he highlighted.

He said South Africa’s high unemployment rate was a “man-made disaster”, which he said was "designed and executed" by the African National Congress (ANC).

He highlighted unemployment as the single greatest crisis facing South Africa and pointed to the fact that more than 70 people out of every 100 young people aged between 18 and 24, and 42 people of every 100 work seekers, could not find a job. He labelled this the “original sin of the incumbent ANC government”.

“Even on the narrow definition of unemployment – which excludes those people who have given up on ever finding a job – the number of jobless South Africans of working age has increased from 20% in 1994 to nearly 33% today. This unemployment crisis, created by the ANC, is a crime against the people of South Africa,” said Steenhuisen.

He explained that the DA’s detailed policy, developed in consultation with “some of the best economic thinkers in the world” and built on global examples of best practice, presented “the most compelling and exciting economic offer South Africans have seen in a generation”.

“It introduces a clean break from the destructive statist policies of the ANC that created our unemployment crisis, and sets South Africa down a new path to growth based on modern, pragmatic and fit-for-purpose policies,” he said.

Meanwhile, with the election now a little more than a month away, the DA said its historic new economic policy provided voters with a detailed roadmap of how the party would “rescue” South Africa from unemployment.