The terrible tinderbox of Zuma’s failure on jobs

The children of South Africa’s 1994 revolution will, one day soon, eat up their parents. They have no choice but to do so. We have, after all, failed them in the most spectacular fashion – and continue to do so. 

Last week Statistics South Africa announced that our unemployment rate had jumped up dramatically in the first quarter to 26.7%. In the expanded definition of unemployment, 8.9-million South Africans who are able to work are not in jobs.

Think about that. Weigh it up in your head. In South Africa today there are 8.9-million people who want to work, are able to work, and are not in work. Most of them are young people.

In the run-up to the 1994 and 1999 elections the ANC ran a campaign built around jobs. The party’s yellow posters screamed: “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!’

In the run-up to the 2009 election Jacob Zuma’s election campaign was centred around the promise of jobs. We know now what a lie that was. In his tenure the unemployment rate has plummeted from just over 20% to the staggering 26.7% it is today.

The Times reported last week that the SA unemployment rate is higher than that in the US during the Great Depression.

Of course it is not Zuma’s fault – his office will claim that the global economic crisis is responsible.

What do you do as a young person when you see your brothers unemployed, and you are set to join them in their despair? What are your prospects?

If you were that young person in Khayelitsha or Zandspruit what would you have made of the report by KPMG last week saying that the South African economy was now not even the second largest in Africa anymore?

Citing data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), KPMG said South Africa has been known as the continent’s second-largest economy since Nigeria rebased its gross domestic product data in early 2014.

However‚ the firm said the IMF World Economic Outlook report released in mid-April provided more sobering GDP statistics for South Africa.

“Not only did the multilateral organisation suggest that the South African economy would grow by a mere 0.6% this year‚ but also that the country is now only the third-largest economy on the continent behind Nigeria and new silver medallist Egypt,” it said.

There are two devastating facts in these paragraphs.

First, growth of only 0.6% is beyond shocking. Even with the effects of the global meltdown something terrible has happened here. It is that this government’s policies have failed, or its leaders have failed to implement the very plan they have written – the National Development Plan. Whichever it is, growth of 0.6%, given the challenges that his country faces, is frightening. It means things are getting worse, not better.

Second, why are we losing out to so many other similar countries across the country and the continent?

It’s simple: we are not nurturing our entrepreneurs, businesspeople and industry – the very people who create jobs and grow economies.

Again last week figures from Statistics South Africa showed that manufacturing production shrank 2% in March and mining output plunged by 18%. What are we doing to support manufacturing and mining? Why isn’t this a crisis for this government?

Every day now we hear about protests at university campuses across the country. We are turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to other, urgent, sounds too – the people of Zandspruit, Vuwani and other places where schools are burnt and roads blockaded.

We should listen a little bit harder to the Zandspruit and Vuwani voices. In those communities there is hunger and there is despair. There is unemployment and there is little or no hope of a prosperous future.

In those communities, tomorrow does not necessarily mean hope. It more often means more of the same misery.

These are the places where protests will begin to turn from random, isolated, localized community disaffection. These are the places where many will begin to ask why a small elite seems to prosper, while their lives seem to be getting worse by the day.

The new South Africa is a place of hope. It is a place where many of us always believed that tomorrow would be better than today. The facts and figures coming out of StatsSA should be an alarm bell for all of us, though.

They indicate a different reality, a reality that says that under President Zuma tomorrow is increasingly looking bleak, that tomorrow many a young person will not be able to find a job.

The SA Institute of Race Relations said that in 2014 70.4% of black youths between 15 and 24 were neither working nor in training.

That is what is called a tinderbox. Take hope away and the match is lit. The young will eat up their parents and their country. This is a crisis, but no one is listening.