Cape Town - It seems the one characteristic South Africa’s 27 million “born frees” have in common is a lack of a job. These are the “post-apartheid generation” of children, teenagers, and young adults born after 1990.
In its report “Born free but still in chains: South Africa’s first post-apartheid generation” released on Wednesday, the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) found unemployment among male born frees of working age was 67 percent; among females it was 75 percent. The national rate is 36 percent.
South Africa accounts for 0.77 percent of the world’s youth population, but clocks in 1.9 percent of its unemployment.
The numbers fly in the face of the 1994 democratic dream of equal opportunity and prosperity for future generations regardless of race, and although gains have been made in the provision of housing, water, child support grants and electricity, the system has failed to provide most of the young people with decent schooling, vocational training, access to the labour market, and entrepreneurial incentives, the report says.
“Our democracy is 20 years old and everybody wants to know how we’ve progressed as a nation, especially our youth because they comprise half the population,” said IRR researcher Gerbrandt van Heerden.
“As they become old enough to vote and work, they will have an increasingly large impact on the South African political and economical climate.”
A National Planning Commission survey found that if youths failed to get jobs by the age of 24, they were unlikely to ever get formal employment.
“The born-frees are our future leaders, but they are not being groomed to be.”
While university enrolment in South Africa has steadily risen, unemployment among Africans with tertiary education has more than doubled, suggesting a problem of quality, not quantity, in the school system.
A 2008 study for the Presidency found that 88 percent of African state schools were poor performers. Barely half of pupils will pass their final exams.
For income, a glut of youths collect child support grants - almost 61 percent receive state grants of R320 every month - but few attempt entrepreneurship. Of 1.5 million informal businesses in 2013, only 74 000 were run by people under the age of 24.
The rest might end up one of the 45 000 people between the ages of 14 and 24 who spend their “salad days” in a cell, comprising 29 percent of the prison population.
Combined, these factors have triggered a feeling of societal and economic alienation among de-incentivated youth, who out of ignorance or frustration, abandon democratic institutions and protest in the streets.
The average number of protests that have turned violent has surged from 2.7 a day to more than five a day in the last three years.
A survey showed 55 percent of South Africans said unemployment was the most important problem not resolved since 1994.
“I don’t think South Africans will find it surprising that unemployment is such a major problem for our born frees. I think they’ll be shocked to see just exactly how bad it is,” said Van Heerden.
Cape Argus