Mabila Mathebula
Before I wrote this article, I decided to look at the impact of unemployment on the people who would be exiting the Community Work Programme (CWP), making sure that it was worth writing about.
There was consensus among the dejected people that the phenomenon of unemployment in South Africa was troublesome and tanglesome for individuals and society.
Disappointment was hardly a strong enough word to describe their reaction as the CWP will be tailing off soon. Thirty years after democracy in South Africa, unemployment, particularly for young people, is a sticky social problem. Our economic prosperity has reigned and fallen and our democratic glory has fizzled due to a weak economic climate and job losses, eroding confidence among job seekers.
It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see young people, some of whom are armed with tertiary qualifications and experience, languishing in a dungeon of unemployment.
One of the respondents said: “Unemployment has far-reaching consequences, affecting not only my finances but also my mental health.” The words of Will Rogers are worth recalling: “The more you read and observe about this politics thing, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.”
Human Resources (HR) departments are inundated with an avalanche of job applications. For example, one job advertisement might attract more than 20 000 applications. Our HR departments were neither designed nor capacitated to process a plethora of applications.
The selection method now involves a random sampling method as opposed to a bow-to-bow selection process. If you thought that only marriage was regarded as a lottery – which many people enter and only few win – you had better think again. A lottery is about luck and no other attribute. Equally, job applications in South Africa are a gamble, a new form of lottery. These days, one is lucky if one is called for an interview.
In a weak economic climate, the job market is like a lottery; so many people apply and only a few are appointed. It is also difficult for prospective employers pick up the winning numbers. One’s qualifications and experience do not matter anymore. The HR departments were never designed to process oversubscribed job applications. The question is: Is the selection process still valid or should we think of another system?
My encounter with the CWP has also taught me about the attitude of South Africans towards hard labour. As a rule, hard labour is regarded as badge of degradation and inferiority. Our people have CVs or skills on paper but no skills to operate in a changing economy.
They can hardly translate declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is to know a concept and its technical details. Procedural knowledge is the application of the knowledge. On the other hand, foreign nationals, particularly those who come from Mozambique, do not have CVs and academic qualifications but they have skills and the right attitude towards work.
Most of them are virtuous young men and women and will lose no opportunity that comes their way to make a livelihood. For example, the Zimbabweans survive through a job referral system, particularly in the hospitality industry. They do not go through the rigorous process of job applications that South Africans go through. Employers also want to evade organise labour by employing foreigners who do not embark on industrial action.
The questions is: Do our “progressive” labour laws and organised labour create jobs or destroy jobs for South Africans? This is tantamount to having a crown without a jewel. The Pakistanis thrive on cooperatives and now they are dominating the township economy.
It also notable that when the Israelites settled in Egypt as shepherds, they formed a cooperative, for every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. Foreigners club together in order to survive. South Africa must also learn to club together in order to survive and we must take a leaf out of the foreigners’ book.
How can one say they are looking for work when the yard is untidy and the tablecloth mottled with greasy sports and coffee stains?
This brings me to the lessons that Booker T Washington learnt in the home of Mrs Ruffer when he was a domestic worker: “Even to this day I never see bits of paper scattered around a house or in a street that I do not want to pick them up at once. I never see a filthy yards that I do not want to clean it, a paling off of a fence that I do not want to put it on, an unpainted or unwhitewashed house that I not want to paint or whitewash it, or a button off one’s clothes, or a grease on a floor, that I do not want to call attention to.”
I must also give praise where praise is deserved – to AfriForum. The organisation has copied a black concept of stockvels to its advantage. It has accumulated R3 billion to build a Christian university. The envisaged Christian university is important and those who go through it will be important too. The university will fight poverty and create employment in the Afrikaner community.
This brings me to our religious leaders and the story of Zacchaeus in the Bible. When Lindiwe Sisulu was the minister of a human settlement, she once threw down the gauntlet on all religious leaders, about the housing crisis in South Africa. She said: “These are also your people; you must also play a role to ensure that they have a place to shelter under.”
The question is why was Jesus in Jericho? I answer: to address the question of poverty and corruption. In the Gospel, according to St Luke, the Bible records that: “But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, ‘Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.’”
Zacchaeus went beyond the Mosaic Law. Jesus used Zacchaeus as a conduit to address poverty and corruption in Jericho. If the Master were alive today, he would have commended AfriForum for a noble project.
The PCW will be tailing off because of funding concerns. The government cannot deal with unemployment alone. Fighting unemployment is a titanic labour. We often talk about private-public partnership, but is time we spoke about public-private-faith-based organisations partnership. The AfriForum project is a perfect example of citizen faith-based-organisations-private partnership.
The involvement of faith-based organisations will also encourage cooperatives, as we saw with the Israelites. The cooperatives are important in improving the working conditions of women and men globally. Research has estimated that the livelihoods of nearly half the world’s population are secured by cooperative enterprises. Is it not high time for churches to farm out cleaning services, magazines, wellness services, transport, youth development, psychological services, church uniforms and taking care of the sick and the aged to cooperatives? I pray for our religious leaders to be convicted by what I call “The Zacchaeus Effect”.
In addition, organised labour must also come to the table. It is our children who are suffering and dying of depression. We are living with a ticking time bomb that can explode at any time. Maybe we do not see it because to those who are employed see unemployment as a recession but to the victims it is like a depression. Although there was crime in Jericho, Jesus did not preach about crime because he knew that one could not preach about crime without dealing with poverty first.
Author and life coach Mathebula has a PhD in Construction Management.