“I am over 70; I have never had a government looking for a job for me. I went to [the employer], took a contract, and worked as a miner. I went home, bought cattle, bought sheep and went back to the mine. The difference is that today, because there’s a progressive government, people expect that government to go and give them jobs. They don’t look for jobs and that must change. I am sure that you work for the SABC because you looked for a job and applied — not the SABC looking for you. You looked for a job and got employed. People must begin to appreciate that you do queue up for a job and you get employed. Adverts are not going to employ you. You’ll have to look for an advert and apply in real terms. If you don’t do that, you are not going to be employed. And I am going back to what I said — let’s move out of being a passive society, to being an active society…”
These were the words of Gwede Mantashe, the minister of mineral and petroleum resources, in an interview with the SABC a week ago.
I quote him verbatim because, following a backlash from South African youth, he has since claimed that he was quoted out of context.
But it is clear that Mantashe was intentional about what he was saying — that SA’s unemployed youth are passive and expect jobs to come to them.
I am one of few young people in our country who have never experienced unemployment. I found work straight out of university. But I have friends, people I went to university with, who struggled for years to find employment.
These are young men and women who, like me, studied geology, water resource science, environmental science and urban planning – degrees that are constantly being included in the critical skills list published annually by the government that Mantashe serves.
Many who are employed are doing jobs that are not aligned with their skills and qualifications — jobs that pay far too little and are often precarious.
Mantashe’s assertions that the youth is passive fly in the face of evidence. Just three months ago, the police advertised 5,000 posts, with most of them being for low-paid jobs.
More than one million applications were received for these posts, with around 300,000 of them being from university graduates. This is a common occurrence. The reason that young people are unemployed is not because they do not apply or qualify for jobs; it is that there are no jobs available.
Persistent systemic challenges rooted in structural inequalities underpinned by racialised capitalism are the main issue.
— Malaika Mahlatsi
Roughly 600,000 people enter the labour force every year. At the same time, our population is growing at a rate of 1.5% annually — almost twice the average global population growth rate.
But this is occurring alongside a shrinking economy that has grown by less than 1% annually for decades. This stagnant economy cannot absorb the number of new entrants to the labour market.
But economic growth is not the only problem because even at the peak of our country’s growth in the mid-2000s, when output was growing at more than 4% annually, we were creating more than 500,000 jobs a year.
Persistent systemic challenges rooted in structural inequalities underpinned by racialised capitalism are the main issue. Mantashe, a former communist, used to make this very argument.
But today, as he sits in parliament collecting millions in salary and benefits, enjoying the comforts made possible by our hard-earned taxes, Mantashe pretends that the issue is about young people being passive.
There is no greater insult to people who know the indignity of unemployment and the dehumanisation of poverty. But there is also no greater reminder of why out-of-touch pensioners in our parliament must be removed from power.
Sowetan
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