EDITORIAL | Act now to defuse the joblessness time bomb

South Africa’s staggering unemployment crisis has come under the spotlight again after the latest Stats SA Quarterly Labour Force Survey revealed that the joblessness rate increased to 33.7% in the second quarter of this year.

As has become the norm whenever new figures come out, there were the usual expressions of horror and surprise, with the government promising to take steps to remedy the situation. This is cold comfort for about 8.5-million South Africans who are at home without jobs.

Experience has taught them that a week or so after the statistics are released the political and economic elite moves on with life, seemingly unbothered by the country’s greatest crisis.

It was precisely because of our stratospheric unemployment rate that job creation was identified as one of the key priorities of the National Development Plan’s Vision 2030 in 2012. The NDP set the goal of reducing the unemployment rate to 14% by 2020 and to 6% by 2030. With less than four years to go to 2030, not even an eternal optimist can hope that the target will be met.

Yet, since taking office almost a decade ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government have continuously called job creation “an apex priority”. The president has said more than once that high unemployment is “the thing that keeps me awake at night”.

For too long politicians at election time have pretended to have a magic wand to create jobs

The crisis is felt most acutely among the youth, with Stats SA saying 43.8%, or 5-million South Africans under the age of 25, are without jobs. This is often described as a “ticking time bomb”, with analysts warning that the country may be headed for an “Arab Spring”. That the kind of explosion that caused unrest in much of the Middle East and North Africa in the 2010s hasn’t occurred here should not lull us into believing that the crisis is not yet with us.

The seemingly unrelated incidents of upheavals over illegal immigrants, mass shootings at taverns and gang turf wars all often involve unemployed youths. Youngsters who have not lost hope of a brighter future do not spend their days raiding tuck shops and public clinics, chasing after those they believe to be undocumented immigrants.

Paradoxically, youth unemployment has been increasing at a time when South Africa has invested a huge chunk of its financial resources in the education and training of its young people. Greater numbers of South Africans now access university than they did in 1991.

However, too many of those produced by the education system end up as unemployed graduates or bereft of skills needed by the economy. The system is clearly broken and needs fixing.

This begins with a clear plan that involves all the key stakeholders. For too long politicians at election time have pretended to have a magic wand to create jobs. Experience, however, shows that it is entrepreneurs in the private sector who create the most jobs. The government’s role is that of establishing a policy environment within which such entrepreneurs and enterprises thrive.

When Ramaphosa first took office, he spoke of a “social compact” between business, government, labour and civil society under which such a policy environment was to be created. But, like many of his early ideas, this process was allowed to fizzle out without much action. Yet no real and viable solution to the unemployment crisis can be found without the state and private capital agreeing on a clear plan to grow the economy at a much faster pace and in a manner that creates jobs for citizens.