Unemployed given more than a helping hand in their quest for jobs
FRIDAY MARCH 18 2016
IT’S A swelteringly hot day in Site B, Khayelitsha. We were meant to head to one of the taverns where these workshops usually take place. But it’s Friday – the day the police raid taverns in the area. So today’s workshop is taking place in a shack which stands in the front yard of a home.
The shack is used for church services on Sundays.
Given Shingange, 34, has taken me along to see first-hand the extent of the joblessness here.
He is armed with a bundle of freshly printed CVs that had been given to him in handwritten form during his previous visit.
Shingange visits the area once a month to help the jobless refine their CVs, assists them with interviewing skills and whatever else they need to find a job.
He and his friends cornered me with feedback for the Cape Argus after I had moderated the Cape Town launch of Eusebius McKaiser’s book RunRacist Run last year.
They liked the newspaper but Shingange, in particular, felt it could do so much more to assist people to, among other things, find jobs.
I chatted to them for an hour after the book launch, long after the last person had left the District Six Homecoming Centre.
Then I made the mistake of asking Shingange how I could help him. He looked offended. “No, no, no, you’re not helping me. By helping these people you’re helping yourself. This is all of our challenge,” he said.
That was profound and he persuaded me to come to one of his workshops because I had to experience it for myself, to see the immense challenge at hand.
“What happens is that we tend to think that by being there you’re trying to help me. I’m saying, ‘no, please don’t be here if you think you’re helping me’.
“The minute you see this as your problem, then only will you be able to understand what you need to do and that it has to be done.
“So I’ve had Judge Craig Howie, the retired judge president of the Supreme Court of Appeal, and his wife, who were very helpful with this.
“I spoke to his wife, Claerwen Howie, and said to her, ‘you’re not helping me’, when she said she wanted to help me.
“I said: ‘I want you to understand that this is as much your problem as it is my problem as a South African. It mustn’t come out of you thinking that you’re helping somebody. It’s because it’s your problem. I think it will help a lot if we see these challenges like that. If my colleagues here are working, then we’re all okay… then as a country it becomes different’.”
So there we were a few months later in the heart of summer, and I was about to witness Shingange’s intervention.
First he goes through the pile of CVs with the dozen people who have arrived for the workshop.
He is at times ruthless with them. From one of the CVs he dials the number of a person listed as a reference. It’s the wrong number.
“How can you list this person as a reference and give the wrong number?” he asks.
“The people looking at your CV will just reject it.”
Then he dials the number listed on the CV of someone attending the workshop.
The phone just rings. Shingange says: “You’re not going to get the job if you don’t answer your phone.”
I look around me. It’s stark in this shack. There are a few chairs each attendee has brought with them and Shingange’s laptop is perched on a crate.
It is a tough task. Apart from the lack of tools to assist him there is a language barrier as well.
Most job interviews are conducted in English and the first language here is isiXhosa (which isn’t Shingange’s home language either).
Shingange’s attitude? Deal with it. You have to learn the language if you want to get the job.
But Shingange is motivated. The CVs are fixed and he then moves on to doing mock interviews.
He asks me to be an interviewer screening someone who wants a job selling the Cape Argus in Khayelitsha.
The first interviewee suffers from a bout of stage fright.
The next person is affable enough but doesn’t really answer my questions.
But Shingange’s approach works. He has had reasonable success with a few who landed jobs as a result of attending his workshops.
One of the men who got a job in the security industry was asked the same questions Shingange had posed to him in a mock interview. He nailed the interview.
But once you’ve got the job it’s not the end of your involvement with Shingange’s workshops. If you’re working, then it’s time for you to give back.
There are the small things we take for granted but present a massive challenge when one is unemployed and has no resources.
Now you can prepare a great CV and have the interviewing skills down to a fine art. But where are you going to gain access to the internet?
Who will pay for your transport to the Cape Town CBD for that interview?
“Some people see their friends are now working and come to find out what is going on.
“One of the people who is now working has a monthly train ticket but doesn’t use it every day.
“So when I’m not here, what sort of networks do we have in place that will make sure that Ayanda can take that monthly ticket to go look for a job?
“This has to be a community thing because I come here once a month but what happens when I’m not here?
“If one of the guys here has an interview in town he should be able to go to one of the women and ask to borrow your ticket to get there.
“But he also needs to be able to ask to borrow a shirt for that interview.
“If, for example, he needs R2 or whatever, Ayanda must be able to say here’s R2 for whatever you need because I was employed before you.
“It can’t be that when you get employed, you say: ‘I’m out’.
“You have to create a platform to get them to work together.”
What motivates Shingange in this labour of love? His own story is pretty unremarkable. He was born in Pretoria, the eldest of five children, and was educated in Mabopane, north of Gauteng.
In 2001, he joined the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and went on to study at the military academy in Saldanha. That is when things changed and he found his purpose. His story stopped being unremarkable when he left the SANDF to go into the private sector.
He now runs a private company on the side, doing consulting and training in IT and is developing an app for the hospitality sector.
“It started a while ago with a centre in the Western Cape where I started teaching people how to use the internet.
“I didn’t understand why I could only use the internet when I was at university.
“I went into the community, similar to this, and I started to teach people how to use the internet because I was trying to bridge the digital divide.
“I bought a used laptop and took a flipchart on a stand from the office to teach people in a community hall what a computer was.
“When it was time for me to get practical I borrowed computers to get people to just type their names.
“I think it’s experiencing this that makes you feel good. But it’s not enough to just feel good about it.
“The IT side, the information literacy side, was going to be my thing.
“How do you get people to be developed in such a way that they fight for themselves, they know their rights and are able to access information in that way?
“I want to see people protesting for broadband. I want people to say they want free internet – not burn stuff – but I want what’s written on the messages to be replaced with ‘We want broadband, we want internet access’.
“We know that with that we’ll be able to access information that will help us develop, help us get jobs, help us be active citizens.
“That is what influenced the whole thing. I’ve done this on the West Coast and in Pretoria. All the people, not just young people, but the older people have shown serious interest in wanting to access the internet.”
In 2007, his computer training centre in Middelpos, Saldanha, earned him the Stellenbosch University Rector’s Award for community service.
He is currently studying for a postgraduate qualification at the university.
Shingange believes the Western Cape has unique challenges for the jobless.
But if you want to understand these challenges, you have to immerse yourself in the problem.
“You cannot have a blanket approach with your solution. Here you deal with people who are from the Eastern Cape, so you’d expect in terms of level of education there would be some issues with regards to what they know, the basics and how they communicate.
“The people are certainly different here than in other provinces. They are not Capetonians just because they are here.
“They are Capetonians who are from the Eastern Cape – a province that has and still faces some challenges.
“One has to be able to characterise it and get into these uncomfortable spaces.
“We are here now and it’s very hot. You have to be in these spaces if you want to understand what’s going on.”
Thanks to a supportive spouse and the support base of friends and acquaintances who understand his mission, Shingange has successfully rolled out his workshops.
“I do other things like public-speaking training, which comes around once every six months.
“I think my wife has some of these things covered but I always have some money, somewhere. “There are friends who assist. “It has been difficult so you have to try and find the money… I don’t have a monthly income so to fly in and out of Cape Town there are always people who are willing to help because they know it’s not just me. “It’s never just me just running this. “I may come here with CVs that are printed by someone else and using someone’s car. I did not pay for the print-outs, I may look for information on the internet and somebody else paid for the laptop and data.
“I’m in the front with these things but there are small things that are done by other people.”
Before I know it, Shingange has roped me in. One of the workshop attendees will come to the newsroom on Monday to use a workstation to type up more CVs and print them out.
It’s the least we can do to help – not Shingange – but ourselves for now.
But watch this space. Maybe there is a lot more we can do – all of us.