Unemployment is the single greatest threat to SA’s long-term stability. With some of the country’s towns and cities recording more than 40% unemployment for the youth, especially black youth, it is a miracle that the situation has not yet exploded into a socio-political fallout. Yet there is general consensus that we are running out of time — that unless we start to turn around the trend where not even a university degree now promises our young a better future, we are headed for trouble.
It is this realisation that is forcing every political party, government department and private sector companies to talk up the need to create jobs. Just recently, President Cyril Ramaphosa was talking about how his youth employment programme, YES, was now yielding some results, with more than two-million young people getting job opportunities. Not enough, even the president would acknowledge, but an important step towards lifting a number of South Africans from generational poverty.
The conversation over how to reduce unemployment has to be a constant one, but one that is treated with seriousness and no intention to blame the jobless for the crisis. We therefore find it hard to understand comments attributed to mineral resources and energy minister Gwede Mantashe, who also serves as ANC national chair, about unemployment. In a recent studio interview with SABC news, Mantashe sounded like he was blaming joblessness on the claim that not enough young South Africans go out to actively look for jobs.
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He told his interviewer how he got his first job as a mineworker after actively searching for it through the migrant labour employment of yesteryear, Teba. Mantashe then waxed lyrical about today’s youth whom, he claimed, passively waited for “the progressive” ANC government to find them jobs. Every South African directly affected by the unemployment crisis by virtue of being jobless or knowing at least one person in their family looking for work knows that what Mantashe is saying is untrue.
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