All the laws and plans are not working yet

When the African National Congress (ANC) asked South African voters to return it to office in the 2009 general elections, it did so based on an election manifesto that primarily focused on job creation and service delivery. One year on, it seems to have fallen far short on both scores. The combination of delivery failure and an unemployment crisis is creating a potentially explosive situation for the ruling party as next year’s municipal elections loom.

However, not all the blame can be laid at the door of the present Zuma administration. For one, the present administration inherited a badly flawed local government system constructed by previous ANC administrations and it has been busy over the past year putting in place new legislative structures, action programmes and agencies to attempt to improve delivery. Perhaps it requires more time, although that could prove an expensive luxury, with patience in townships across the country wearing thin as next year’s elections approach.

On the employment front, the challenges are immense and the country is experiencing what may rightly be termed a “national catastrophe” as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) put it this past week. The latest unemployment figures released by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) alarmingly showed that unemployment in South Africa continued to rise despite the country having emerged from its recession.

While economists continue to claim that South Africa’s economy is recovering, the latest employment figures challenge that assertion and confirms Cosatu’s view that for South Africa’s workers, the recession is far from over.

The unemployment figures also show that the government’s much vaunted training layoff scheme, to put workers’ jobs on hold instead of scrapping them during the recession, has failed.

In fact, the Zuma administration appears to be in a state of denial over the unemployment problem, considering how the president attempted to hoodwink South Africans in February on the occasion of his State of the Nation Address into believing that the government was succeeding with its job creation targets (500 000 jobs to have been created by December 2009 and four million jobs by 2014).

As 'proof', he cited the 480 000 temporary work opportunities created in the Expanded Public Works Programme as having achieved 97% of the target of creating 500 000 jobs between April and December last year. These, however, are only very brief, temporary, unskilled, poorly paid work opportunities with no lasting benefits for anyone, and can by no stretch of the imagination be termed “jobs” in the ANC or Cosatu’s definition of decent, permanent employment as envisaged in the ANC’s job creation promises.

The figures released by Stats SA last week show a 0.9% increase in unemployment – using the narrow definition – in the first quarter, to 25.2%. This means that 171 000 jobs were lost between the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. Since the fourth quarter of 2008, unemployment has risen 3.3%, amounting to one million people having lost their jobs over that period.

The situation becomes far worse if the expanded, more realistic definition, which includes people who have stopped looking for work, is used. That figure has taken unemployment up from 34.2% to 35.4% over the first quarter of 2010.

The latest figures show that 4.31 million workers are now unemployed in South Africa. As Cosatu points out, each of these workers has an average of four to five dependants, which means that around 20 million people are living in abject poverty. Potentially economically active workers, who could be creating wealth and delivering services to the community, are left idle and demoralised, says Cosatu.

Their frustrations are added to those of the millions of impoverished people in townships around the country, waiting for the government to make good on its delivery promises. Many have already lost patience and have resorted to violent protests. All they can see is a very small political and business elite, greedily enriching themselves at the expense of the masses.

Add to these the additional thousands of demoralised youths who emerge each year from an education system that has failed them and who have no hope of finding employment, and the situation becomes very explosive.

The only cause for some very cautious optimism is the fact that employment is considered to be a lagging indicator, while figures relating to business sentiment and outputs continue to suggest recovery.