Growing Black poverty, homelessness, crime and so many other social ills are systemically derived from the unemployment crisis.
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THOSE who write about our raging unemployment crisis very seldom draw attention to the systemic and structural factors it is rooted in. This is the biggest problem, which, if not addressed, will repeatedly fail to deal with and resolve what is arguably our biggest societal crisis.
In 2021 the prominent journalist and author Malcolm Ray wrote a book titled The Tyranny of Growth: Why Capitalism has Triumphed in the West and Failed in Africa. While he failed miserably to realise that global capitalism has been experiencing arguably its worst-ever crisis in the West, signs of which are more glaring today than probably ever before, he sharply and correctly drew attention to the mythical illusion of economic “growth” as the panacea for its systemic ills.
But if he did excavate, deal with and explode that enduring myth, he would have realised that global capitalism has palpably failed all over the world and not only in Africa. In fact, beginning with the ravaging effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the global capitalist world, the middle classes, the historical mainstay of the system, have been decimated.
The very serious problems of the unemployment crisis we have in South Africa, especially among the Black youth, are of such a magnitude that they starkly appear to be most probably our worst crisis in purportedly “post-apartheid South Africa”.
Growing Black poverty, homelessness, crime and so many other social ills are systemically derived from the unemployment crisis.
With an official unemployment rate of about 32.7% and an expanded definition of unemployment of 42% (if we take those who have given up hope of finding jobs), to say that we are sitting on a social timebomb is rather obvious. Of that high rate, around 60.9% are Black youth.
But it is a timebomb which is not impending. No, the growing crisis is daily reflected in numerous ways, especially in Black townships, where the youth languish in the doldrums of poverty and every conceivable social misery one can think of.
The Cape Times carried an article on Monday, looking at the dire implications of the jobless crisis among the youth, given that June 16 was the next day. But while it provides a statistical view of the dire jobless crisis, whether formal or informal jobs, there is not a systemic analysis of the jobless crisis.
However, at a time when a whole range of difficult questions have been thrown up by the global crisis of capitalism, we must also pose questions which begin to strike at the real roots of the unemployment crisis.
While the democratic right to a job is widespread in constitutional democracies, the jobless crisis deepens all the time.
However, in South Africa we tend to forget that we have always had an unemployment crisis, dating back to apartheid times, when cheap Black labour was in abundance and super-exploitable. Race, class and gender were constant factors that characterised the apartheid system, which we inherited after our 1994 Uhuru elections.
While we achieved a non-racial constitutional democracy in the the1994 elections and adopted a very progressive and far-reaching constitution in 1996, the economy has remained in the hands of what is called “white monopoly capital”, despite the advances made by broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE).
Besides, various political analysts have shown that BBBEE has largely benefitted a relatively small Black elite, not the impoverished Black working-class majority who languish in sprawling townships across the country. Instead, the intra-Black class divisions have exploded after 1994 and the introduction of Black economic empowerment laws.
It is in those Black townships where the unemployed Black youth are concentrated and where many or most have given up trying to find a job, bearing in mind that they largely lack the education, training and skills required for jobs in the formal economy. The vast majority end up, if they are lucky, with low-paid and often temporary or part-time jobs in the huge informal economy.
Therefore, the key question at this 50th anniversary of the 1976 Black student uprisings, which started in Soweto, in Johannesburg, is this: what has our post-apartheid democracy done for the Black youth? The inescapable answer is very little indeed, where it matters most in their lives.
Instead, the Black townships across the country are riddled with stark poverty, joblessness, crime, drugs, despair and every conceivable social misery we can think of.
They are trapped in utterly bleak socioeconomic conditions, not of their own making, but what post-apartheid has tragically bequeathed them.
But if we look at the conditions the Black leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) live under in formerly white suburbia, it is nothing less than a shocking shame. No wonder they for the first time lost the 2024 elections. A chasmic gulf separates the living conditions of ANC leaders and the Black working-class majority in townships.
Therefore, how do we expect the Black youth living under those terrible conditions in townships to commemorate and celebrate the 50th anniversary of June 16, 1976? This is a key and critically important question to both pose and answer.
I am not only talking about the “Black African” youth, as the previous apartheid regime or Statistics SA would identify it, even after 1994. What about the so-called “Coloured” and “Indian” youth who died or were injured in 1976 or during the early 1980s when the Black youth also revolted against apartheid?
Look at the youth in the “Coloured” townships of Cape Town, places like Mitchells Plain, where the United Democratic Front (UDF) was born in 1983, Bonteheuvel, Hanover Park, Elsies River, Manenberg and many other townships. The poverty, unemployment and crime in those townships today is considerably worse than they were during apartheid.
Thousands have lost their lives in gang warfare on the Cape Flats, where those townships are situated, over the past two decades. Many of those townships are no-go areas today.
Many NGOs and community organisations cannot even organise in those communities, so bad is the criminal violence which has wrecked the areas daily. Even churches have been robbed and broken into, and some welfare organisations had to close down over the past few years.
All sense of community has been virtually destroyed. These are the socioeconomic conditions the vast majority of Black youth live under today in Black townships across the country.
Usually, the youth are seen as the face of the future of a country, where the seeds of hope are sown for a brighter and better future. But how do the Black youth in all the townships face and build a future for themselves under such conditions?
These questions become much more important and, in fact, urgent when we and the world, in fact is experiencing an unprecedented and multidimensional socioeconomic crisis today, which predicts greater unemployment ahead.
Judging by the stark lack of investment in the economy in this country over many years, which some have called an “investment strike”, what future job creation can those youths expect or look forward to?
This is the heart of the tragic unemployment crisis we and the whole world, in fact, face, whether youth or not: capital will not invest in job creation unless it will generate profits. The bleak conditions the Black unemployed working-class youth face in the townships and the desperate necessity of job creation mean little or nothing to these investors.
Besides, the system of capitalism requires a reserve army of labour, the bigger the better, in order to drive down wages as much as possible. That is why we need a public discussion and debate about this situation, together with capital, trade unions and the state.
That is the only way in which the huge jobless crisis can be dealt with. While many will argue that it is impossible in a free-market economy to adopt such an approach, unless we can do so, there will be no long-term solution to the enormous jobless crisis.
In this regard, it is the trade unions which must take the lead. There will obviously be resistance from capital, but so serious is the jobless crisis, especially affecting the Black youth, that such talks are imperative.
With the unleashing of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) about a decade ago, of which robotics and AI are products, many more retrenchments are widely expected in the period ahead, which will swell the ranks of the unemployed much more.
The main point is that we need an open public discussion and debate about the jobless crisis and how to deal with it. Perhaps it is high time for new confrontations in dealing with the jobless crisis; otherwise, the future of the Black youth, who are languishing in the doldrums of unemployment in the townships, will be highly imperilled.
And since the huge power of capital is so decisive in creating jobs by investing much more, we urgently need those discussions now. Otherwise, the youth will have no future at all.
Instead, we will see a continuous escalation of crime and ongoing, vociferous and combustible anti-immigrant marches in this country. Jobs, whether in the formal or informal economy, and searing poverty, bred by unemployment, lie at the heart of those protests.
Who is there to care about how the Black unemployed youth in the townships are surviving without jobs and with access to food, housing, health and other basic municipal services?
So much have we departed from the promises of the Reconstruction and Development Programme of 1993, the Freedom Charter and those of so many electoral campaigns that many are asking what the youth of 1976 struggled for. We need to face and answer that question.
Strongly related to these matters is the pro-capitalist illusion in the first place of economic “growth”. It is certainly high time that the trade unions place on the top of their agenda a matter which we urgently must unpack.
Growth or no growth for who? Can the economy have grown without corresponding substantial benefits for employees?
The whole discourse of growth must be interrogated by both trade unions and the state, with the underlying understanding of the factors which have facilitated or impeded it.
And should trade unions and the state, especially in a constitutional democracy, not collectively discuss growth, investment and related job-creation strategies? And are the investment-to-profit ratios openly discussed and debated with labour and the state, or are those matters only decided by private-sector companies?
These are some of the wider systemic issues which should be discussed by trade unions and the state. These matters must be addressed in the same manner proposed company retrenchments are, so that there are full disclosures and transparency.
We are in such a huge crisis in this country that while it might appear that these matters are not relevant to the youth, they are very much so. The economy and job-creation investments are very relevant to the Black youth who face a jobless crisis, with few or no prospects for the foreseeable future.
It is not that the government has done nothing to deal with the unemployment crisis.
The Presidential Employment Stimulus and the SA Youth Mobi Platform have indeed provided some temporary work and livelihood opportunities.
But it has been totally inadequate in dealing with the staggeringly high rate of unemployment, especially among the Black youth. What worsens the unemployment crisis is the huge continuous loss of jobs.
In the first quarter of this year, 345 000 jobs were lost, which largely affected the youth. Another big factor hindering Black youth employment is the huge lack of skills, which has its roots in the apartheid past.
This lack of skills is more serious because increasingly it is what is required for many or most jobs, certainly in the formal economy, and this will be so permanently, especially in the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and AI.
* Dr Ebrahim Harvey is a political writer, analyst, and commentator.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.