“I want you to make a living for yourself, because there are no jobs.”
Watching a Bloomberg documentary on the Stilfontein mining disaster, I came to the realisation that these zama-zamas know full well the illegality of their actions, but to them the difference between legal and illegal work is immaterial. They work to put food on the table, put their children through school and care for their ageing mothers.
These are the people that government is leaving behind by not ensuring a growing economy. These are South Africans trying to make a living in an economy that has been limping along since 2007.
Between Q1 2016 and Q1 2026, the number of unemployed South Africans increased from 5.7 million to 8.1 million. The number of people in long-term unemployment (unemployed for more than a year) more than doubled over the same period. The unemployment rate amongst black South Africans is higher than the national average and has remained so for the past 10 years.
IRR polling shows, year after year, that South Africans want government to focus on job creation. Racism, land reform and inequality are not as important as the government would have South Africans believe. Three in four South Africans believe that with better education and more jobs, inequality between races would steadily disappear.
This is the real transformation South Africans want. Jobs. Not more BEE or employment equity. Not fake transformation.
The government should measure its success in the quality of lives of South Africans, not the intentions of race-based policy.
Take President Ramaphosa’s imaginary Tintswalo. Does she have a stable family home? Are her parents providing the nutritional meals she needs to grow? Does she attend a good Early Childhood Development centre? Are there good schools, with teachers present and with good pedagogical skills? Are the standards of South Africa’s higher education impressive?
Then we get to the job market. Tintswalo is now a qualified mechanical engineer, ready to put her skills to use in building infrastructure. The barriers to employment, like the Employment Equity Act and the restrictive minimum wage, mean that Tintswalo ends up driving an Uber. That is the result of government policy, because that is a more accessible option. In a similar way zama-zamas are driven to mine illegally, because their former employers have decided to close shop due to bad government policy, infrastructure constraints and insecure property rights.
What are the real, everyday outcomes of policies like Black Economic Empowerment, the Employment Equity Act and the Expropriation Act?
Misery for the unemployed, who are locked out of jobs by a government supposedly acting in their best interests.
Instead, millions are forced to “hustle” as one miner said in the Stilfontein documentary, running a small spaza shop, making just enough to survive, unable to grow. Not because they don’t want to, but because government policy disincentivises it. An example is the now-scrapped Small Business Licensing Bill, which sought to require businesses to apply for a licence every five years, through the very same municipalities that are failing to provide the most basic of services.
The Department of Small Business Development, which should rather be called the Department of Small Business Destruction, would rather spend millions on a Spaza Shop Support Fund than support local businesses by ensuring as little restriction on economic activity as possible.
SA’s informal economy is a testament to the success of ordinary South Africans in the face of a government that seeks to regulate the life out of it, which results in companies advertising the fact that they have no jobs to offer. It is an indictment showing the consequences of decades of anti-growth and anti-poor policy.
Former US President Ronald Reagan once said, “A big businessman is what a small businessman would be if only the government would get out of the way and leave him alone.”
South Africa can only grow if its people grow. South Africa can only prosper if its people prosper, and South Africa can only be strong if its people are strong.
[Image: Chris Patterson]
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