Johannesburg - A youth employment and skills report from Stats SA caused consternation this week when it suggested, according to media reports, that black youth had lagged behind on “skills acquisition” since 1994.
But closer reading of the report gives a more complex picture than the week’s headlines, which even claimed black youth had “regressed” on skills in post-apartheid South Africa.
These supposed findings from Stats SA have since become a political football between the opposition DA, which threatened to submit its own Youth Employment Plan to the Presidency, and Buti Manamela, the deputy minister in charge of youth affairs there.
According to Stats SA, there has been an overall improvement in the proportion of skilled employment for South African youth across the board, but the gains have been racially uneven. Among white youth, skilled employment grew by 19.3 percentage points, reaching 61.5 percent this year(from 42 percent in 1994). Indian and Asian youth underwent the largest rise (25.5 percentage points), moving from 22.5 to 50.7 percent. Among coloured youth, skilled employment rose from 10 to 22.5 percent.
The lowest increase in skilled workers occurred among black African youth, moving from 15 to 18 percent between 1994 and this year
While the picture is bad among coloured and black African youth, the real point of the Stats SA findings is the continued failure of the job market to absorb these two groups.
This is what the report says
: “Possibly of most concern is the increase in the unemployment rate for black Africans with tertiary education. It more than doubled, from 8 to 19 percent. Not many would have predicted such an outcome for the post-apartheid period.”
But the DA wasted no time in attempting to turn the tables on the government and the ruling party, casting what is a labour market failure into a failure of the education system. “The report indicates that over the past 20 years, the skills level of black youth aged between the ages of 20 and 34 has regressed (it doesn’t). This proves that two decades after the advent of democracy, black children are bearing the brunt of poor outcomes in our educational (sic) system,” said the DA’s Michael Cardo, the party’s spokesman on the Presidency.
For reasons that are unclear, most media reporting on the story followed the DA’s reading of the study, and bemoaned the failure of “skills acquisition” among black youth.
But the Stats SA report has little to say on the issue of skills acquisition, and the acquisition of skills and comparative skills levels are not subjects the report claims to have researched.
“The trend (unemployed black graduates) raises serious questions about the quality and or appropriateness of tertiary education and reinforces the findings regarding skills development.”
In addition, the report’s comments on the education system relate mainly to economic growth.
“In South Africa, the education system, from basic education to universities, is far from optimal. Although it is difficult (if not impossible) to quantify the extent education (or the lack of it) has contributed to (or hindered) economic growth, few would dispute the need for far-reaching changes in our skills development efforts.
“Employers would dearly love to see young people coming out of training programmes better equipped to cope with the demands of the workplace.”
Manamela hit back over the weekend, accusing the DA of deliberately misconstruing the report and using the plight of black youth to promote discredited “neoliberal gibberish”. He raised the impossibility that the number of skilled black youth (or even the level of skills acquisition) could have regressed, given the population trends of the last 20 years.
According to Stats SA’s own census figures, the percentage of Africans with tertiary education more than doubled between 1996 and the last census in 2011, from 3.6 to 8.3 percent of the total. In 2012, he continued, black Africans made up 67 percent of the enrolments in South Africa’s universities, up from 50 percent in 1995. “So to suggest that skills acquisition is on the decline for Africans cannot be true,“ he wrote.
Manamela pointed to joint research by the UCT-based Development Policy Research Unit and the University of Johannesburg which in 2012 showed that black graduates found it harder to enter the labour market than their white counterparts, even when they have the same qualifications from the same institutions.
The deputy minister also took a swipe at Stats SA, questioning the validity and usefulness of the exercise.
Comparing the October 1994 Household Survey to this year’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey is only one of the limitations of the report.
There is also the rather scientifically imprecise definition of “skilled employment”. Skills levels are not measured directly, but according to the report “data relating to skills may be estimated from employees’ type of occupation”.
Tellingly, the report shows that the lowest proportion of skilled employment among black Africans is in the 25-34 age cohort (viewed in total, black Africans actually dominate all skills categories, as a result of sheer weight of numbers). This is the typical age of entry into the labour market for graduates, particularly those with post-graduate qualifications.
The decline of skilled employment for black Africans in that segment points to the difficulties they experience in obtaining something their white counterparts take for granted – a fair chance.
There can no longer be any denying that South Africa’s education system is failing an entire generation of young people, particularly black Africans. There is no need for any study to prove that fact, and indeed the Stats SA study does not.
What it does is highlight entrenched racial inequality in the labour market. That problem can only be resolved if one of two things happens.
Either attitudes and practices change rapidly in the private sector, or the state adopts a far more muscular approach to the implementation of employment equity.
Sunday Independent