We are the people who can’t even make our own underwear
There is tragedy in the African and “coloured” communities where if you were to ask about progress achieved, you would likely be shown a successful or rich black person not in any systematic pattern of progress as measured by the Stats SA or Human Sciences Research Council or by any of the more serious academics and major universities, but more in an arbitrary way.
This says, as the oppressed and exploited black people, 92% of the population are casual about measuring their own oppression and lack of progress. This is the root cause of the lack of progress.
In the 1800s black people acquired university degrees. They ran businesses, owned land with title deeds, and some even had voting rights.
The problem always arises as to whether when everybody is considered and measured, can we say black people have flourished, say from 1800 to 1994, and again from 1994 to 2024, once the hard statistics were collected and processed?
To be clear, a black person driving a 7-series BMW with a house in Houghton is not a sign that blacks are out of poverty. The opposite is true.
Black people, taken as a whole, statistically are regressing economically.
The tragedy is that once measurements are done as per the 2016 Community Survey – a large scale survey that takes place in between census – then we notice that since 1994 black people, excluding Indians, have been increasingly poor on a very large scale.
The survey, issued in September 2020, revealed “substantial shifts towards skilled work among white and Indian/Asian populations, with the proportion of skilled workers increasing from 42% in 1994 to 61% in 2020 among white employees with correspondingly 25% to 51% over the same period among Indian/Asian workers.
Only 15% of blacks on average and 20% of “coloureds” made it into the skilled workforce during the same period.
So even if a black person were to get a job it would be an unskilled job. Our people have not been completing N3 or N6 with full practical work experience and trade tests or anything equivalent to that.
Artisanship, and commercial skills such as bookkeeping, tailoring and so on, are the foundation of nation building.
As things stand, we are a people that cannot even make their own underwear. Economi-cally it means we will only get unskilled, low paid work, and transmit generational poverty to our children and grandchildren.
Serious entrepreneurs start their businesses between the ages of 42 and 45, with solid work experience, credible skills, and post matric qualifications. There will be a shortage of black entrepreneurs if we are unemployed and unskilled and poorly educated in the post matric sphere.
However, with whatever is presently available, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs need to create about 1.7 million jobs a year in new businesses.
This means community banks must be established by communities to fund entrepreneurs, local universities, TVET colleges and other institutions. These institutions must develop capacities to support the crea-tion and growth of local black entrepreneurial businesses.
As an example, US-based Stanford University alumni create $1.7-trillion in gross domestic product (GDP) per annum.
The combination of intention, community banking, solid work experience and sustained education and training will create businesses that will vacuum-suck the 12 million jobs backlog and put the country’s economy on the 6% to 15% GDP growth trajectory.
The state and the private sector should invest 18% to 23% of GDP every year to support gross capital formation – part of the expenditure on GDP showing how much value added in an economy is invested rather than consumed – to support the creation of economic infrastructure.
That is about R1.4-trillion that must be invested every year for economic infrastructure and related matters and the GDP must treble in size by the year 2054.
That will signify concrete progress and entrepreneurs behind that growth must be intentionally black people. We must note that since 1994 black fathers have largely abandoned their children in large numbers. Sound fathering is necessary for aggressive economic growth.
Lastly, let us be realistic about where we are now educationally, and make serious efforts to open universities in every district.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, for every one black person (as a proportion of their population group) who would complete a bachelor’s degree, there were 1.2 white persons who did the same.
The corresponding numbers for 2016 derived from the Stats SA Community Survey show that for every black person completing a B-degree, there are six white persons who were doing the same.
- Swana is an academic, a politi-cal analyst and a member of the 70s Group
