THE STUFF OF REVOLUTIONS
s South Africans were insulting one another from the comfort and relative safety of social media (our national pastime now that we can’t bear to watch the embarrassment that is our national soccer team), Statistics SA again published a set of sobering statistics. Another set, equally sobering, was published midmay. This week the second set of statistics revealed a 2.2% contraction in the GDP in the quarter ended March. The previous quarter had registered promising 3.1% growth. There’s no need to get into the details of this dismal state of affairs.
The first piece of statistics I’m concerned about, published on May 15, concerns youth unemployment and is tucked inside the labour force survey. There are 10.3m people in the 15-24 age range.
Thirty-two percent of them are not working, not in education and not in training. That’s 3.4m people who are disengaged from the marketplace and the education that should prepare them for a future in which they can contribute to the development of their families and communities.
We have another 5m jobless people in the 25-34 category. The official unemployment rate here is one in three people, says Stats SA. When pooling together those aged 15-34, officially the youth in SA, the unemployment rate soars to 38.2%. Of all unemployed people in SA, the youth account for 65.3%.
There were about 71m unemployed youth, aged 15–24, globally in 2017, says the International Labour Organisation. Context: 3.4m of them are here in SA, which has a population of 55.7m. We punch way above our weight in this category. Negatively so.
Then we have the real unemployment rate — not the official rate government would prefer us to believe — standing at 36.7%.
This is the stuff of which revolutions are made.
AYoung people facing the hardships of unemployment generally don’t have much to lose. “Some of these young people have become discouraged with the labour market and they are also not building on their skills base through education and training,” says Stats SA. In a country with such a high unemployment rate, young South Africans face extreme difficulties engaging with the labour market.
Significant blow
It is incumbent on government to reopen the vocational training institutions it has been neglecting