Setting youth on path to success
Race card will harm noble cause
helluva lot harder after three ratings agencies have lowered their view of us, two as junk; official unemployment is now at 27.7%, perhaps closer to 40% and almost half of all South African households are receiving one kind of social grant or another.
On Thursday, Gauteng Premier David Makhura announced Tshepo 1-million, an ambitious project that has his officials and colleagues probably quaking in their boots. Makhura wants to reach 1 million of 2.7 million youths in this province who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.
His plan, which aptly means Hope, is based on training people with the skills the market wants, getting them permanent jobs or relevant inter nships so they get experience to go with their qualifications. For those who don’t want to work for a boss, he wants to train them as entrepreneurs and for the small enterprises, he wants to make them into medium-sized businesses able to employ more youths. He’s enjoyed incredible success with the first part of his project, the threeyear-old Tshepo-500 000. In fact, it was because of the way in which everyone was getting behind it; from the private sector to civil society that he promptly doubled the target.
He sees it as an ecumenical, non-sectarian province-wide social movement to give hope to people who would otherwise have nothing. He knows who they are. He speaks eloquently of driving through townships and seeing two-thirds of the residents there during the day time because they’ve nowhere else to go. He speaks of the danger of them either doing drugs or running them, of women turning to prostitution.
Makhura paints a picture that is graphically Dickensian. He speaks of the nightmare that keeps him up at night. The knowledge that every time there’s a protest, the young, desperate and hopeless will be in the vanguard, ready to fight, vandalise and loot because life, especially the promise of a better one, has failed them, sits front of mind with him all the time.
Makhura has made the youth the cornerstone of his administration, the foundations though are social cohesion and commitment – the very opposite of the race card being played so glibly by other members of his party in other provinces as well as nationally. His dream is of the gift of 1994 becoming a reality for everyone who lives in Gauteng at least. He has lobbied corporates, churches, civil servants and communities from Carletonville to Cullinan in his messianic determination to avert the revolution, the time bomb that he sees ticking on the street corner.
Mthethwa’s plan is to lobby for the name of the country to be changed. He spent last weekend accusing FNB and Acsa of being racist for donating to the Knysna disaster relief funds for supporting whites, blithely – expediently – ignoring the sheer scale of the inferno that never stopped to respect either class or colour in its voracity. He just doesn’t get it. Marie Antoinette didn’t get it either.
Historians believe Marie Antoinette was misquoted and misunderstood. Mthethwa won’t be so lucky, we know why the race card is so attractive. All Bell Pottinger did was to cynically rework swart gevaar for a family of immigrants, it’s been grabbed with the desperation and played with the same unashamed expedience as the hated overlords of the equally corrupt and venal apartheid government.
Years ago, working in Kimberley, I heard of a couple who’d got married on a shoestring. They were too proud and determined to keep up appearances. They couldn’t afford a wedding cake, so the husband arranged for a cardboard cut-out, against which they could pose for their photographs. The marriage didn’t last.
Mthethwa’s plans are like that cardboard cut-out. They’ll be as useful when the mob is at the gates of his official mansion. There won’t be any need for the tumbril to go to the guillotine, the petrol bombs and necklaces will be even more effective, irrespective of whether he’s a South African government minister or an Azanian.