More people than usual paid a price last quarter for the quest to build a country in which everyone has what apartheid gave only a few. Stats SA revealed last week that unemployment is now at 29%. This horrendous figure triggered alarm in the public debate. Since we are in a bout of national gloom, it was taken as one more sign that the end of this country is near.
Comment last week noted that the figure was the worst in a decade. But little or none of it mentioned that, in 2003, the figure was slightly higher — 29.3% — and the country is, a decade and a half later, still here. Nor that the number has easily exceeded 20% for a long time. To put that in perspective, the highest unemployment rate in the US during the Great Depression was 25%.
So, unemployment levels usually associated with economic catastrophe are entirely normal here. They get a bit worse when, as now, the formal economy is in trouble and perhaps a bit better when it improves, but the differences — including the one that prompted dismay last week — are minor given that even in “good” times about one in four people who want a job can’t find one.
Despite reports of jobs bloodbaths that fuel the end-is-nigh mood, unemployment rose not because there are fewer people in work — 21,000 more people are employed compared to the last time Stats SA measured. The problem is not that the formal economy is melting, it is that it cannot create anything like the number of jobs needed by the people who come onto the labour market each year, which is why youth unemployment is at 50%. This has been so for half a century, whether the formal economy was growing or shrinking.
So, people are not out of work because something new happened to the formal economy. They have no jobs because it is working much as it always has. The problem is not that what has existed for decades is in trouble but that it is still with us and does not work.
The debate does not see this because it yearns for the past. The “solutions” that always greet the unemployment numbers all assume that one day we will find a way to ensure everyone has a formal job. And so political parties and think-tanks proclaim magic plans to make that happen — even though, everywhere on the planet, the world that made it possible no longer exists.
Why do they cling to this fantasy? Because it was what white people enjoyed when apartheid was working for them. Whites, for obvious reasons, want this back. And black thinkers and leaders believe white privilege will not end until everyone enjoys what whites had then. Both views are understandable, but what a small minority enjoyed by using force to deny it to everyone else cannot be extended to all.
In the economy, this thinking labels people who make their living outside the formal economy as a problem, not an asset. And, as we again saw last week, when people from other African countries do the same thing here, politicians denounce them to loud cheers. If people who know how to feed themselves on the streets don’t fit the mould, those who do this and were not born here fit it less.
It is ironic that other Africans are so scorned here because several African countries are doing what this one should be doing — creating new and growing opportunities for people who don’t work in air-conditioned offices but provide for themselves and contribute to the economy. But then they are trying to build a future, not a past.
• Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.
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