This week’s unemployment report from the national statistics agency would have made disheartening reading for the hundreds of thousands of young South Africans finishing their studies at the country’s many institutions of higher learning.
For many of them, the end of the year will be the start of a bleak process of knocking on endless doors looking for their first job and having those doors shut in their faces, partly because their newly minted degrees have not equipped them with the skills employers are increasingly looking for.
The unemployment data from Stats SA was certainly beyond depressing, to quote Cosatu’s Matthew Parks. His characterisation of the crisis as a ticking time bomb was spot on.
Unemployment has surged to 32.7% from 31.4% and is even higher at 45.8% among young people aged 15 to 34 years.
Only 16.8-million people have jobs in a country with an adult population of about 41-million. Nearly 4-million people were discouraged from looking for jobs in the first quarter of the year. These are bleak numbers by any definition.
In his state of the nation address in June, President Cyril Ramaphosa made much of the fact that the Youth Employment Service, a partnership between business and government, placed more than 200,000 young people in yearlong work experience opportunities.
It’s a commendable initiative, certainly not to be sniffed at, but what about the millions of other young people stuck at home with no prospects? We need a more coherent programme of action that equips our young people with the skills they need to enter the world of work, instead of piecemeal solutions.
A good starting point is to address the mismatch between the degrees South African universities are offering and the practical skills employers are actually looking for.
As a case in point, education expert Riaz Moola recently highlighted how, in an increasingly digitalised world, thousands of young South Africans looking for their first job are at a disadvantage because they lack the basic AI skills increasing in demand in the workplace.
As Moola argued, AI is not replacing people, as is the common refrain, but rather amplifying those who know how to use it. We should therefore be moving swiftly to ensure that basic AI skills are integrated into the curriculums of all South African schools and tertiary institutions, leaving no single child behind.
Sadly, however, no matter how well we train our young people, they will still struggle to find jobs in an economy growing at just 1.1%, a dampener for business investment.
We need to get serious about removing the structural impediments that stand in the way of South Africa getting to the 3%-5% expansion needed to get its people working.
And that means rooting out corruption, reducing bureaucracy, improving infrastructure and public services, expanding private-sector participation, improving safety and encouraging investment.
Mass unemployment should not be normalised and any government serious about dignity and opportunity for its citizens must prioritise job creation and reform above all else.
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