Notes from Africa

Walking the unemployment walk


By Stef Terblanche

(This column appears every week in Leadership magazine (online) under the title "Out of Africa".)

In the beautiful Mara Region of north-western Tanzania, between Lake Victoria and the Serengeti National Park, live the Ngoreme people who have a saying: “If you refuse the elder’s advice, you will walk all day”. The implicit meaning of that should be quite clear to anyone. Well, to most.

Why then ask for advice if you are going to refuse it and end up walking all day? Perhaps certain members of the South African government – and many members of South Africa’s vocal labour unions – should be sent to the Mara Region to consult with the Ngoreme elders in the hope of getting an answer to that age-old question. Perhaps it will also help solve South Africa’s unemployment crisis.

For this is the kind of anomalous contradiction with which South Africa is again faced regarding its critical inability to create jobs.

Just this week Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe woke up to the fact that we are all sitting on a ticking time-bomb – a threat of frightening proportions that we have been writing about for quite some time. After a somewhat denialist South African government had ignored or down-played this threat for years, Molanthe this week boldly held up the Arab spring of youthful uprisings as a dire warning for South Africa.

"Our country is not insulated from these challenges especially because we have close to 2.8-million young people between ages of 18 and 24 who are unemployed and not in any institution of learning. This statistic represents the ticking time bomb that threatens to inflame pent-up emotions within the youth if not urgently addressed,” said the Deputy President in an address to the conference of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies in Johannesburg. Perhaps that is why the ANC Youth League loves him so much.

Nonetheless, next (and this is not a Youth League trait) the Deputy President did the sensible thing: he asked the Jewish Board of Deputies for advice on how to create jobs and thus defuse this dreaded ticking time bomb.

"I believe that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies is well positioned to help us answer some of these challenges because of the skills, knowledge and influence your members wield in the South African economy," Deputy President Motlanthe said.

Just a week ago we wrote about the storm in a teacup that had developed around the hapless Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan, when he was seen to be offering advice on this question. The mainstream media, business and others on that particular side of the fence went into a frenzy when Gordhan spoke the words they loved to hear: South Africa must introduce a youth wage subsidy in order to stimulate employment of the youth, and, South Africa may have to reconsider its labour legislation if it hoped to achieve the government’s job-creation targets. And National Planning Minister gave a cautious and qualified nod of approval.

Predictably Gordhan was attacked most vitriolically by labour, even if it was all a little over the top, his remarks having formed only a minute and mostly off the cuff part of his speech to a conference of internal auditors. It was offered as little more than a vague suggestion, a stone in the bush type of thing. Nonetheless, good advice is still advice.

But it was not the kind of advice the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) wanted to hear. It was enough to make the labour leaders choke on their workers’ breakfasts, shouting that Gordhan’s intentions were “reactionary”, that he had joined a right-wing campaign to “expose the workers to more exploitation” and that they would fight any right-wing attempts to weaken existing labour laws.

This elicited some defence of Gordhan from the ANC when spokesman Jackson Mthembu said it was “disrespectful and contemptuous” of Cosatu to characterise Gordhan as such.

National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) general secretary Irvin Jim threatened to call on President Jacob Zuma to fire Gordhan for his “neo-liberal anti-worker" policies and said workers would meet the minister "in the streets" as they now considered him to be the new "enemy". All of this was to be expected from labour.

But what was perhaps not quite expected was the next move coming from Gordhan’s very own colleagues in the Cabinet, when, by way of a statement made by the very irrepressible Cabinet spokesman, Jimmy Manyi, Gordhan was given a dressing down of sorts. Stopping short of issuing a reprimand, Manyi said Cabinet had resolved to remind the public that the Department of Labour alone would lead the way on labour matters. Why then, Mister Deputy President, bother to ask anyone for advice?

Not that advice on how to solve South Africa’s unemployment problem has been in short supply. Apart from Gordhan’s cautious whisper in that direction, South African business leaders, would-be foreign investors, economists and business analysts, the World Economic Forum, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have all been giving the same advice to the South African government: change your restrictive labour laws to stimulate job creation and economic growth.

The latest Global Competitiveness Report - produced by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland - saw South Africa slipping eight places from 46th most competitive nation to 54th amongst the world’s top 139 countries as measured by $US GDP. One of the big reasons for its tumble was labour market efficiency and poor labour relations. The report put South Africa at a dismal 131st out of 139 nations for lack of flexibility in wage determination.

The UN Conference on Trade and Development came to pretty much the same conclusion in its World Investment Report. This past week the IMF’s Staff Report for the 2011 Article IV Consultation with South Africa also said South Africa's unemployment challenge is "significantly higher than in other emerging markets".

So, in the words of one exasperated opposition politician: what will it take for the government to take good advice and commit to a "pro-growth and pro-jobs" economic policy? If not, and if it continues refusing advice, it will surely end up walking more than just all day as envisioned by the Ngoreme people. The unemployed youth of South Africa, on the other hand, may stop walking altogether. Instead they may ominously start stomping their feet in a toyi-toying war dance.