The Eastern Cape government is proposing to shake up the job market with a ground-breaking job summit.

Economic Affairs, Environment and Tourism MEC Andre de Wet outlined the proposal on Friday during a visit to the Community Self Employment Centre (Comsec) in North End, Port Elizabeth.

The summit proposal has a number of elements, many of which make it a radical departure from conventional job summits of the past.

De Wet said standardised summits had government and organised business and labour presenting papers and signing a memorandum of understanding, with little or no follow-up.

“The first thing we want to do is to get total public participation.

“I am going round speaking to as many people as I can to get buy in. To be able to get that I am talking to Percci, I have spoken to the Border-Kei Business Chamber of Commerce, I have met Cosatu in East London, and I will be meeting Nafcoc.”

He said the proposal was to involve a core team representing all role players, with this team driving the process.

A preliminary date of the end of October had been indicated by the Premier, said De Wet, although he said he was concerned about setting this up in such a short period of time.

Where the concept deviates most dramatically from the traditional approach is that entries will be called for a competition to gather innovative job creation ideas and projects. Let’s bring those ideas into a pool that we can look at and say, ‘but, here is a brilliant idea’. It doesn’t matter how small it is, because a small idea can be repeated a thousand times over.”

The objective was to identify sustainable, employment-creating opportunities.

A second competition was also being mooted that would recognise small business success “where people can come forward and say: ‘ This is our success story, we have created so many jobs’, which would then help us as government to identify anyone out there who is seriously making a contribution to job creation.

“And we would then engage with them and say ‘How can we duplicate this’?” said De Wet.

“In that competition we would hopefully identify a whole number of organisations, reward them in the competition and then have the ability to negotiate and interact with them to say: ‘How can we in fact expand this in a far bigger way in our province to create more jobs’?”

It is also proposed to host an exhibition alongside the job summit.

Traditional job summit activities would also be part of this plan.

“I have spoken to labour and said I have no problem identifying issues right up front and then have papers addressing those issues.”

De Wet was at pains to stress that he wanted full participation in planning this event.

He requested that any parties interested in contributing should contact him.

The MEC’s email address is andre.dewet@deaet.ecprov.gov.za.