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Our unemployment and poverty trap is apartheid’s legacy that is perpetuated by our government

Thamsanqa D Malinga
By Thamsanqa D Malinga
21 Apr 2023
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Since the advent of democracy, our government, the former liberation movement, has crippled black South Africans. It started off by making frivolous promises they knew very well they couldn’t fulfil. From free houses, free electricity, free education to free this and that.

South Africa’s poverty problem is as institutionalised as it was during the legal apartheid years. In fact, South Africa is still an apartheid state. It is a state where black people continue to be perpetual serfs, and their white counterparts remain the privileged few with bread and salt easily available to them.

This is not a thumb-sucked argument, no way. It was confirmed by ANC veteran and former president Thabo Mbeki. In 1998, when he was deputy president, he said South Africa is “a country of two nations” – one white and wealthy, the other black and poor.

Emotions quickly reach a breaking point when it comes to the topic of the shortage of resources in black communities, and more often than not we have seen that it results in conflicts of black self-hate, or what some in the media have termed Afrophobia.

As such I feel duty-bound to contribute to the debate by addressing the emotions and the conflicts resulting from the jobs discourse and posit that problems of unemployment and poverty are a result of the legacy of apartheid which is perpetuated by the current government.

Held in bondage


A lack of jobs and the resultant poverty is an institutionalised problem that is entrenched in and by the state’s systems which hold black South Africans in bondage as serfs. Writing his prologue to my book, Blame Me on Apartheid, legal eagle Vuyani Ngalwana SC noted:

“Sadly, since 1994 that most evil and enduring apartheid achievement seems to be perpetrated by successive governments of what used to be a liberation movement, sacrificing the cerebral development of the black child at the altar of political expediency. It is a fact that ruling over an ignorant population is less complicated than having to account to a population that thinks and therefore can reason and therefore can make informed choices, especially when the ruling elite has nothing to offer except promises of ‘a better life for all’ which often translates to food parcels and poverty-trap social grants.”
The so-called democratic government has mentally incapacitated the unemployed, and largely black South Africans, by not empowering them.

Ngalwana was spot-on – since the advent of democracy, our government, the former liberation movement, has crippled black South Africans. It started off by making frivolous promises they knew very well they couldn’t fulfil. From free houses, free electricity, free education to free this and that.

Even with jobs, the ANC government had promised them and said they would be available here and there. These include many other sorts of lies that served as building blocks for institutionalising poverty.

To receive these free packages, people had to do one thing only: look up to the government for the manna and you shall be saved. Perhaps it is for this reason that former ANC president Jacob Zuma arrogantly declared that “the ANC will rule until Jesus comes”.

At the time he probably knew the damage his political party had done in trapping black South Africans in enduring poverty. Unfortunately, many in our communities fail to grasp this institutionalisation. Instead, when the issue of jobs is discussed some resort to saying “South Africans are lazy” – oh please! That is a lame excuse.

Read more in Daily Maverick: South Africa comes first — this country is ours and not an ANC (Pty) Ltd

The so-called democratic government has mentally incapacitated the unemployed, and largely black South Africans, by not empowering them. Instead, it has been promising them what it could not deliver for almost three decades – nor will it deliver in the four decades to come.

This is no different from the apartheid government that rendered blacks debilitated by denying them quality education. On the matter of education, I wrote in Blame Me on Apartheid that “it is not common sense that there will be investment in a black child’s education. It is not common sense that the infrastructure of a public school in Zola, Soweto, or KwaMagxaki in Port Elizabeth, is going to be the same as that of a public Hoërskool in Akasia, Pretoria simply for one reason: the education of a black child is an apartheid social paradigm.”

A true apartheid paradigm


In South Africa, where employment is offered, the requirements are made stringent for the black child through educational achievements, which are likely to be present or otherwise as a legacy of apartheid. This has been the case with the government sector as well.

The one largest provider of jobs in South Africa, a black majority-administered government, has been found wanting by encouraging young people to flood universities and yet making them mere interns only to discard them after internship programmes.

At least, on their part, they would have fulfilled the statistical requirements for reporting for budget votes and the presidential State of the Nation Address. We know. We have seen it.

Our bureaucrats get massive kudos for mentioning statistics – politically curated statistics. I guess it’s comforting to just mention what you did for the natives no matter how meaningless it is – a true apartheid paradigm.

For this reason, as I note in Blame Me on Apartheid, to this day we see young people reduced “to the legacy of Number 80, Albert Street, Johannesburg, the head office of Johannesburg’s Non-European Affairs Department (JNEAD).

“This was the nerve centre for controlling the lives of black people in Johannesburg for decades. This area was notorious for its function of carrying out the Department’s responsibility for influx control and employment. In a way, it served as a recruitment spot for all work seekers.

“So, the traffic intersections are now the modern-day Albert Street equivalent, degrading young black children from the townships and their parents because they are compelled to stand at intersections hoping that a car will stop by to pick them up and transport them to a place of employment. This further opens them up to exploitation by any potential employer seeking cheap labour.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: The South African government is just another unashamedly absent father

I therefore cannot be faulted when arguing that poverty in its current form in South Africa is institutionalised, just like how apartheid institutionalised it.

It is all in the promises and lies, the bureaucracy and systems of our democratic government, the corridors of the buildings our people visit daily – all of which have been an inheritance of that apartheid, a crime against humanity. DM

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