Image: AFP/ GETTY IMAGES/ MUJAHID SAFODIEN
“Of the 1.2 million young people who enter the labour market each year, approximately two thirds remain outside of employment, education and training.
“More than half of all young people are unemployed. This is a crisis. We need to make this country work for young people, so that they can work for our country.”
These are the words of President Cyril Ramaphosa during his state of the nation address in February. The president was addressing the crisis of youth unemployment, a matter which has been troubling SA’s vast youth population for a long time. It is likely to remain a huge problem unless we change our approach to the matter.
It is unthinkable what will happen after the Covid-19 rampage. However, the president’s appreciation of the crucial importance of youth for our country is promising. The president’s assertion that we need to ensure the country works for the youth by enabling them so that they can work for the country is a critical change in approach. What we have come to doubt, though, is how the people in power are persuaded by Ramaphosa's approach.
According to the president’s estimations, about 800,000 young people who join the labour market each year are not in employment, education or in training. This is a huge waste of human potential, considering that we need every hand available to assist in developing our country. This is not to mention the potential for huge social instability which is being fomented in the frustration of this crisis. The real tragedy is that it is entirely possible to turn the situation around and create value for the country by abandoning a few stale approaches to governance.
One prevailing approach of our socialist-influenced government is to try to be everything to those it hopes to buy favour from. So it is a government that favours a nanny approach towards citizens, often projecting itself as all-knowing. The problem is that it is not possible for a government to be all-knowing, and it is a waste of time and resources to try to do and be this. The best a government can do is to facilitate and co-ordinate the efforts of citizens to attain a meaningful life on their own terms. Also, such a government tacitly assumes citizens are stupid, incapable or both, and by so doing it sets itself against its own people.
A second prevailing approach of our socialist-influenced government is an obsession with distributive policies. However, concentration on distributive policies comes at the expense of a focus on the generative policies that inspire a nation to generate new wealth.
However inadvertently, this approach entrenches already existing extractive models of wealth creation which are destructive and exploitative in nature. This is because the government depends on pre-existing wealth that was generated through the exploitative models that socialist-influenced governments, like ours, often purport to fight against. This leads to the next prevailing approach.
The third approach panders to dominant economic players. This can be called the dominance-obsession approach. Governments pander to these huge economic players because they provide the bulk of government revenues.
Often, powerful and dominant political players fall within this group to form a volatile concoction of entrenched interests. However, by pandering to them, governments fail to invest in future economic players. These future players are often young, penniless, inadequately educated, perhaps even unorganised and largely powerless. However, in very real terms, they are the future.
This handful of outdated approaches has the unfortunate ability to create an institutionalised culture of governance that entrenches the status quo of poverty, crime, unemployment and a stagnating economy. This is why Ramaphosa’s “implied” change of approach offers such hope. If our society, hopefully led by the government, identifies young people as investment-worthy human resources who are the only prospect of productivity and economic wellbeing in our future, we might have a chance. We must not invest in young people simply to deal with unemployment. We must enable them to create a meaningful economy, not just for themselves but for the country and for their children.
The disruption triggered by the pandemic provides an opportunity for us to unravel the approaches that have rendered us so vulnerable and think anew.