JONATHAN JANSEN | This latest ANC vote-grabbing exercise is cynical in the extreme

And just like that 287,000 unemployed youth got paid jobs as “education assistant placement” (sic). Boom. How on Earth did that happen? Pay attention, people. It’s election time. Expect more unexpected gifts as we hurtle towards the municipal polls. Timing perfect, Ebrahim Patel, who just announced that businesses that suffered losses during the July riots and looting in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal will receive help. Wonderful. What else? Free this, free that. Bloody scoundrels, these politicians. The opportunists will stop at nothing.

I train my students to ask the right questions when these freeloaders come promising things. Questions like, why are there still 3,000 schools with pit toilets? Where’s that promised bullet train now that 8,000 people are living on or around Cape Town’s central train line? Why has the top official in government still not been arrested for giving the orders to assassinate courageous whistleblower Babita Deokaran?

There is nothing righteous in giving unemployed youth education jobs for five months (November 1 to March 31) when at least one of those months is in the dead period of the Christmas holidays. The problem of youth unemployment is systemic and structural, meaning there are deeper reasons in the makeup of the economy that explain why 3.4-million youth between the ages of 15 and 24 are out of education and jobs and 9.1-million when the age range is stretched from 15 to 34. The latest overall unemployment rate is a massive 34.4% (17.1% in Zimbabwe). These “temp jobs” are too short for training and too shallow for skills acquisition. Seducing desperate youth “to apply for this enriching experience” and then dropping them back on the streets after the election is cynical in the extreme.

If the government were serious about this initiative it would have given these 287,000 young people at least two years of uninterrupted, on-the-job training as school-based ICT experts or education psychologists or reading specialists, under the mentorship of expert teachers in those fields of specialisation. The in-school training would then be supplemented with one year of university or college-level education in those designated areas of specialisation so that the theory speaks to and informs the practice of teaching, rather than the other way round, as we do at the moment. The way we do things now is to train students on campus for three or four years and then give them a short teaching practice experience before unleashing them on schools; that model is not only inefficient, but ineffective for purposes of teacher preparation.

The goal here is not to think hard, long and deep about transforming education in the longer term; rather, the object is immediate and short-term — in other words, political.

If this short-term plan for unemployed youth were to be transformed in the ways suggested, that would certainly constitute a highly innovative intervention in a school system which for the majority of our children has long been moribund. But that is unlikely to happen. Why? Because the goal here is not to think hard, long and deep about transforming education in the longer term; rather, the object is immediate and short-term — in other words, political.

Because young people out of school, out of training and out of work are desperate inside this Covid-19 economy, many will jump at the opportunity to at least gain some income as the holiday season approaches. Understandable. Heck, some of our citizens might even swallow this opportunistic trick by government and vote for ruling party representatives in the upcoming municipal elections. We never learn.

It’s like watching a child do a magic trick for family entertainment. You can see exactly where the disappearing coin came from in its magical reappearance on the top of the hand. But you applaud and look surprised, humouring the young one for the sake of his confidence and emotional wellbeing. Many of our citizens who can see clearly through the pre-election trickery will nevertheless go along with the magic show for the sake of peace.

It is perhaps our tragic fate in SA — the inability to fix things for the long term, to sacrifice the politics of now for long-term development. To play catch-up with the past rather than to imagine our education futures differently. That long-term orientation requires patience and commitment, and large doses of ingenuity if we are to move the needle on education in the country.

The truth is, this quick fix for short-term employment gains among unemployed youth can actually be transformed into something meaningful and enduring if the job opportunity is turned into meaningful education and development tracks that lead to a practical qualification for the 287,000 young people. Now that is the kind of politics and politician I would vote for.