Toby Shapshak: Pattern Recognition

things by the ANC before each election. Education is broken, hamstrung by incompetence in the education departments and by spectacular dysfunction within the teachers’ union, Sadtu, which is more concerned with protecting its members than with teaching children.

Once these children emerge with whatever flawed education they can scrape together, their prospects of getting jobs will be dismal.

According to Statistics SA figures released in June, only 6,2m young people were employed out of 19,7m people aged between 15 and 34. A further 3,6m were unemployed and 9,8m were defined as “not economically active”.

That is more than half of our young people, the future of our country and economy, who are “not economically active”. This brings with it all of the feelings of uselessness, despondency and lack of dignity associated with joblessness.

Statistics SA’s youth labour market report, from June, found that 1m jobs were created from 2008 to the first quarter of 2015, but most of these were filled by adults. The youth saw job losses of 221 000 in the same period. Youth unemployment has been between 35% and 37% since 2012. No wonder they are angry.

It has been an edifying sight to see the ANC leadership, people who came to power on the back of toyi-toying, now hiding behind police firing stun grenades and tear gas, and behind razor wire and steel fences, at Luthuli House, parliament and the Union Buildings. They’re behaving like the Nats did when the ANC-inspired youth of the 1970s and 1980s roared their anger.

The ANC, which invented the toyi-toyi, is now the target of toyi-toying demonstrators, who have the sympathy of the world at large. How the tide has turned against a corrupt, out-of-touch, arrogant ANC and government leadership. Live by the toyi-toyi, die by the toyi-toyi.