Stop nightmare of youth unemployment
During his 27 years in jail, Nelson Mandela evidently subscribed to British weekly business magazine The Economist. His jailers kept this luxury going in the mistaken belief that the ANC leader and his fellow inmates were teaching themselves economics, rather than informing themselves on events about the world.
The story goes that once the regime found out that The Economist covered more than just economics, business and finance, it ordered the immediate cancellation of the subscription.
Every week, The Economist, Madiba’s subversive read, publishes a page that ranks countries in terms of GDP, inflation, current account balance, budget balance, interest rate and currency units. Unsurprisingly, the top-ranked countries are the world’s two largest economies: the US and China.
Thirty years since Madiba walked out of prison, it is dispiriting that SA is ranked last in the list of 42 countries surveyed. The third column in the table is the most depressing: unemployment. Even with the charitable measure of joblessness, which merely documents those out of work but still looking, SA fares poorly.
At 29.1%, SA has the highest unemployment among the countries on the page, above Spain’s 13.7% and Turkey’s 13.4%. And we fare badly when compared with allies in the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Russia’s unemployment is at 4.6%, China’s at 1.5%, India’s at 7.2% and Brazil’s at 11%.
These numbers tell part of the story, but not the full story. As mentioned in this column before, they relate to the narrow definition of unemployment, excluding discouraged workers and, worse, those least spoken about — youths, many of whom have no experience of having worked at all. These are people who are on the verge of being left behind permanently by events such as the fourth industrial revolution.
The unemployed, understood as those who have prior work experience but are no longer employed, are often in a better position than new graduates or those who exit the basic school system before the end of the 12-year period.
South Africans read every day about thousands of jobs being cut by big business and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and state departments not filling vacant posts.
Typically, these layoffs are preceded by negotiations with organised labour to minimise the negative effect on the departing workers. These social plans take many forms: workers are retrained for highdemand jobs before leaving or are given severance packages that cushion them for a few months as they figure out postemployment options.
For example, ahead of the split of Eskom into four companies — the holding company and three subsidiaries for generation, distribution and transmission — there is talk of a just transition to ensure that the 47,000 employees at the utility aren’t thrown onto the streets en masse. Instead, if all works out some should be absorbed in the renewables sector.
There are also many forums that have placed the issue of adult unemployment on the radar. President Cyril Ramaphosa has placed it on the agenda of his annual job and investment summits, and his monthly meetings with business and labour leaders.
But what about the unemployed youth? According to Stats SA youths aged 15-24 are the most vulnerable in the labour market. The unemployment rate among this age group was 55.2% in the first quarter of 2019. “Among graduates in this age group, the unemployment rate was 31% during this period compared to 19.5% in the fourth quarter of 2018,” the agency says.
Credible forecasts suggest that the picture is not likely to improve in the short to medium term.
In 2018, Ramaphosa launched the Youth Employment Service (Yes), an imaginative private sector-funded initiative to help resolve the crisis. Since then thousands of young people have tasted the privilege of waking up each day to report to an office.
But the problem is frighteningly bigger than current ad hoc initiatives can cope with. A year ago hundreds of youths marched to representatives of big business demanding that more be done. And indeed, more needs to be done to defuse the time bomb.
Up to now victims of corruption and poor service delivery — a loose alliance of communities, labour unions and youth — have directed their anger towards public infrastructure, torching schools, clinics, universities, houses of unaccountable councillors and other amenities.
Retrenched parents and their unemployed children have hitherto refrained from attacking private property like shrinking factories, jobshedding banks, shopping malls, mines and multinationals. How long private property will be spared this growing anger and frustration is a nightmare question to many.
The prospect of this unthinkable scenario becoming reality is too ghastly to contemplate — perhaps even less palatable than a credit downgrade — for any parent with an unemployed graduate or teenager not in training.
What’s to be done? A start would be for Ramaphosa to declare youth unemployment a national emergency on Thursday when he addresses the nation, and focus minds on this crisis.
A coherent national strategy to tackle youth unemployment would be the best homage to Mandela’s memory.
Unfortunately, as happened in the mid-1980s, it has been left to business, as part of civil society, to seize the initiative to eliminate by far the biggest threat to social stability since 1994.
RETRENCHED PARENTS AND THEIR UNEMPLOYED CHILDREN HAVE HITHERTO REFRAINED FROM ATTACKING PRIVATE PROPERTY