Cape Town - With the current unemployment rate sitting at 27%, South Africans have little reason to celebrate Workers’ Day on Wednesday. This is according to Tebogo Mochine, human resources director of adult education company Media Works.
Mochine said there were clear observations regarding the problem when you looked at the make-up of the average unemployed person in South Africa.
“For instance, in terms of the 27.1% unemployment rate reported in the final quarter of 2018, 57.1% of unemployed South Africans did not have a matric qualification. Meanwhile, the percentage of South Africans who had some form of tertiary qualification numbered only 6.3% of unemployed South Africans for that period, while university graduates made up just 1.7% of the unemployment figure.”
Mochine said it was clear that the higher your level of education, the better your chances of finding work.
“Solving this problem is easier said than done and requires major educational shifts. But one way to start addressing this problem is to encourage the more rapid take-up of local companies hiring workers of all skill levels, and then subsequently upskilling and empowering them through workplace training and leadership programmes,” Mochine said.
According to statistics released two months ago, the unemployment rate eased slightly from 27.5% to 27.1% at the end of last year.
The figure showed that 149 000 jobs were created, mainly in the financial sector, followed by private households and manufacturing of leather and textile goods.
An unemployed young woman, Siphosethu Tutu, from Mfuleni, who holds a diploma in financial accounting, said she had given up looking for a job and had decided to go back to school.
She said the government did not care about the unemployed. “Looking at a country like India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion and an unemployment rate of less than 0.5%, I feel like our government is not playing the role in investing in the unemployed, because our country is in the same category as India. We are both developing countries.”
Economist Mike Schüssler said unemployment was a complex problem on many levels and one that the government could not fix on its own.
“Enterprise data indicates that South Africa has one of the lowest rates when it comes to getting businesses to start becoming viable,” Schüssler said.
He said that maybe the government and the people who study employment needed to try to find the reason why South Africa had no “animal spirits” - a term used by economist John Maynard Keynes to describe the instincts, tendencies and emotions that drive human behaviour, and which could be measured in terms of aspects such as consumer confidence.
Shevon Lurie, managing director of Vega, a brand of the Independent Institute of Education, said it was no secret that South Africa had faced difficult financial times over the past few years, with an overall unemployment rate of 27% and over half of all eligible young people struggling to find work.
She said there was certainly cause for alarm and a need for sustainable solutions.
“The fact that the government recognises the link between entrepreneurship and economic growth, and has put in place a number of measures to encourage and empower small to medium business owners, is definitely a positive step,” Lurie said.
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