We need more people looking to create jobs than people looking for jobs
News 24 – 25 March 2022
With every second South African youth with a post-matric education
becoming an employer, we will have enough jobs for even more foreign nationals,
writes Alex Mabunda.
One of the things I always look forward to, driving to and from work, is
listening to talk radio, more so when it is an open line, where listeners share
their views on various current affairs topics.
In recent weeks, with everything that is happening in the country, the
issue of migration and youth joblessness has dominated the airwaves. The
arguments against migration have become so crass and emotional that on one
radio station I often tune in to, the announcer has to constantly warn his
listeners to refrain from using inflammatory language in their contributions.
As a leader of a management consulting firm, my natural inclination is to want
to apply my first-principle problem-solving techniques to complex issues such
as this.
I ask myself: "Are foreigners really taking our children's jobs?
Have they set out to come and take away from our people? Must they be sent home
en masse, like Nigeria and Ghana did to each other's citizens in the 1960s and
1970s respectively? What is the role of the government in all this?"
And then the objective side of me kicks in, and I ask myself: "What
is our role, as the black South African society, in this?"
Man looking for a job
As the English saying goes: "If wishes were horses, beggars would
ride." Indeed, if the answers to these questions were that simple and
obvious, like many callers and voice-noters would have the world believe, we
would probably not be here. I, myself, a beggar, found no horses to ride, until
one day when a young South African man approached me looking for a job. He told
me he has B-Tech in Agriculture, and he's now studying teaching methodology in
order to find a job as an agriculture teacher.
It was not the fact that we did not have an immediate requirement for
agronomists in the firm that created a moment of epiphany for me. It was me
wondering: why would someone who has had the privilege of a specialised
education be without anything valuable to do to earn a living outside the
dictates of formal employment?
I thought about the migrants who come into South Africa without proper
documentation, some without education, without capital, without a relative,
without contacts in high and low places, not even a meaningful domicile, but
they end up having a business, if not a job, in a matter of months. If these
guys can pull this feat, what makes someone with a green ID book, post-matric
education, a network of well-to-do and not-so-well-to-do family, friends and
community, hop from one qualification to another in pursuit of employment?
This, I thought, is really employment going around looking for
employment! At this moment, the late Robert Nesta Marley's song, Rat
Race, seized my mind with the line that goes: "In the abundance of
water, the fool is thirsty." Have we become a nation of Bob Marley's
fools, or is it just me in the privilege of incumbency?
Material incentive to become an employer
But then I remembered that I started at the cost of what would in every
likelihood have been a great corporate career. I had so much to lose when I
left formal employment, with less immediate material incentive to become an
employer. I remembered that all I had was an unassailable desire to outdo what
was then a sum total of me. I began to feel less sympathetic for the young
agronomist, who had every incentive to do something bigger than his then self.
Unlike me, he needed it, and had nothing to lose, yet he did not see it, it
seems.
That day I went home satisfied that my first-principle problem-solving
technique had finally broken the code. I realised that what we lack among our
youth is belief in self and self's unlimited capacity to dream and see the
dreams through. Self-starters are outliers, not the norm. This is our issue! It
may well be that youth employment schemes should not be the pursuit. Instead,
we should be pursuing youth entrepreneurship schemes, where we encourage and
teach our young to become employers.
We must teach them that being able to read, write, use a computer and be
knowledgeable in at least one subject of specialisation is everything they need
– after a dream and the commitment to getting things done – to become
employers. We need to have more people looking for opportunities to create jobs
than people looking for jobs.
With every second South African youth with post-matric education
becoming an employer, we will have enough jobs for even more foreign nationals.
Needless to say, we would become a wealthy nation.
But then I woke up the next morning remembering that wishes remain
exactly that, wishes
www.samigration.com
