Youth rage may be anticipation of a bleak future
What should be the boon of a young workforce has become the threat of a jobless horde
WHAT can be deduced from student protests ranging from the #RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town last year to the current turmoil on campuses across South Africa over tuition fees is that young people’s prospects are desperate.
It is easy to be consumed with the uncomfortable sight of police and campus security guards clashing with unruly students hurling stones and damaging infrastructure, but does the seemingly unquenchable anger of young people speak of problems outside the hallways of higher learning?
The state of youth unemployment in South Africa is “precarious”, according to statistician-general Pali Lehohla. He is passionate about policymakers taking what the numbers say seriously.
Some three-quarters of South Arica’s 5.6 million unemployed are categorised as youth.
The number of unemployed young people shot up to 3.636 million in the second quarter of 2016 from 3.1 million in the second quarter of 2008, Stats SA figures show.
The World Economic Forum said South Africa’s economic growth, now forecast at just 0.1% for 2016, made it unlikely that the unemployment rate would fall soon, “hampering the ability to leverage Africa’s demographic dividend”.
While most of the developed world and Latin American and Asian nations are faced with the headache of an ageing population, sub-Saharan Africa is in a better position with a younger population, a transition that’s been under way since the ’80s.
But the consequence of a continued and unsuccessful battle with youth unemployment was a “demographic disaster rather than a demographic dividend”, said Tessa Dooms of the National Planning Commission, which advises the government on the implementation of the National Development Plan.
“If left without options, the unemployed youth of today will be the dependent and unproductive parents of the next generation of struggling youth in 2030,” she said.
“We will go from being an incomplete democracy to being a broken democracy because the most potentially productive people will have lost the opportunity to contribute and will not be interested in building a social compact.”
Since the ’70s, South Africa had been losing out on demographic possibilities and the education of the youth, Lehohla complained.
“We are losing that wave as we see what is happening at universities, as we see what is happening in Vuwani, with the destruction of educational institutions.”
Since the beginning of the year, 29 schools have been vandalised or set alight in Vuwani, Limpopo, because of communities’ disputes over new municipal boundaries.
While the country has some positives to show over the past two decades of democracy, the poor education system has been the most difficult legacy to shake off.
The consequence is a young and predominantly black population that is likely to find it hard to find gainful employment in an economy that is rapidly modernising and moving away from the pick-and-shovel labour that once characterised the mining industry.
While Lehohla acknowledged that the “development legacy of South Africa created all this”, in reference to the poor-quality Bantu education offered to black people during apartheid, he said more could have been done.
“Blacks and coloureds are totally regressing in their education . . . and also in the jobs market. So the future is pretty bleak,” he said.
White people have the highest educational qualifications and black people the lowest.
In the second quarter of 2016, 31.2% of people aged 15 to 24 were not in employment, education or training. This “NEET” rate was highest among coloured women, at 35.9%, and black African women, at 35.1%, according to Stats SA data.
While progress has been made in subsidising poor schools so that pupils do not have to pay school fees, the quality of their education still leaves much to be desired.
If South Africa did not continue addressing the problem of poor education, the ultimate burden would fall on the state as more and more people would depend on social grants, with fewer people paying the taxes that support such social spending, Lehohla warned.
Of the almost R1-trillion national budget, overall expenditure on social assistance is R129billion, projected to rise to R165billion by 2018-19.
Lehohla partly blamed the high number of unemployed or economically inactive young people on the bar for passing school exams being set so low compared with other countries.
“You pass with 33%, where can you go? You can’t go anywhere with a 33% pass, and institutions of higher learning are too few. And we have too many people who are supposed to be in school who are not in school.”
However, more young people have been enrolling for basic education. The WEF’s latest Global Competitiveness Report shows some improvement. It notes a “small but important” upgrade in the quality of education, with primary school enrolment now passing 97%.
Among attempts to steer the country away from wasting its youthful bounty, there have been several measures to encourage the private sector to give young people a chance through learnerships and work experience.
The Employment Tax Incentive, which Cosatu strongly opposed in 2014, fearing that older employees would be retrenched to make way for younger and cheaper employees, has been successful by some accounts.
Companies receive a tax incentive for employing young people.
The National Treasury proposed last month that the threeyear incentive be extended beyond its December cut-off date to February 2019.
It has also proposed that the claims which employers are allowed to make in each tax year under the incentive be capped at R20-million, something Business Unity South Africa opposes, saying it is too low.
Blacks and coloureds are totally regressing in their education
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