Our Youth Day celebrations have lost meaning, I fear.
A media house’s recent survey illustrates the point.
The question that was asked of the public was, “Would the youth of 1976 be proud of the South Africa of today?” I found myself wondering what the point was. Suppose the answer was in the negative, then what?
Then, one of the news items on a broadcast network showed a group of young people toyi-toying. One carried a banner that read “Educated and unemployed”. I found myself wondering, “Does education equate employment, or is education used as a proxy for ‘I have skills’?”
But say it was such a proxy, then the question would be, “If you have a useful skill, why are you waiting for employment instead of creating employment?”
Have we spoiled our youth? Have we told them, “You must wait for someone else to rescue you?”
Is that a fair question?
To cement that, I recalled an interview with former president Jacob Zuma in which he was asked, “Why don’t you give young people a chance?”
The thrust seemed to be, “Why did you found a political party for yourself? You should instead have formed it and then given it to young people.”
Where’s the agency in that? In other words, are the very people advocating for youth also saying, “We know they are not capable; they need to be spoon-fed.”
Our country has an unemployment problem. That is reality, but it also has another problem that might even be bigger: an inferiority complex, a belief not similar to that of the youth of 1976, who had it ingrained in their soul that “we are our own liberators”. What is self-evident is that murder among youth is high, and so are pregnancy, substance abuse, including drugs, and crime.
According to the latest crime stats, 64 people between the ages of 15 and 34 were killed each day in the first quarter of 2025 in South Africa. The Eastern Cape is where a young person is most likely to be claimed by violence, compared to the other eight provinces.
In June last year, the Road Accident Fund estimated that more than a third of South Africans who died in road crashes in the two years from 2020, 34 946, were young people.
It is politically opportune to only talk about unemployment while turning a blind eye to the other problems.
A 2022 report by StatsSA called “The young and the restless”, which focused on health problems among people between the ages of 10 and 19 years, came up with some concerning figures.
The results showed that the leading causes of death in this bracket are external, including accidents in the home, assault, contact with an object, and traffic accidents. This is followed by infectious diseases such as intestinal infections, tuberculosis and HIV, as well as influenza and pneumonia.
External causes contributed 46 572 to the total number of deaths among adolescents in the decade from 2008 to 2018.
In this much-vaunted national dialogue, we need a frank conversation about the problems of our youth, not just a focus on the politically expedient unemployment.
A can-do attitude and innovative ideas will pave the future
Don Makatile
This month of June is especially prescient as it marks the 49th anniversary of the Soweto student uprisings, just one year short of the big five-zero.
While the youth of 1976 had one identifiable enemy, the monster Apartheid state that was hell-bent on imposing Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools, the 2025 cohort have their own ogre to contend with, which is unemployment.
The official unemployment rate stood at 32.9% in the first quarter of this year according to Statistics South Africa. Of this depressing statistic, which translates into nearly one-third of the South African workforce being currently jobless, the youth unemployment rate is a staggering 46.1%. The youth refer to people between the ages of 15–34.
Once they leave school, contemporary youth find they are faced with bleak job prospects, only to twiddle their thumbs at home and swell the ranks of the unemployed. Among the unemployed youth are university graduates.
The Tintswalos – in the analogy of President Cyril Ramaphosa – in the ensuing pages know best that their future is not dependent on the R370 grants of the generous Nanny State but their own resolve to roll their sleeves up, and put in the work.
Henry Ford, the innovator who gave us the motor car assembly line, once said: “Don’t find fault, find a remedy.”
Our Unsung Heroes have done a Ford. They did not loiter at the street corners to find fault with what the government can dole out. They took matters into their own hands.
Another Ford quote, probably the most seminal and, for the purpose of this message, the most sanguine, is this: “Every business is a monarchy, with not a man, but an idea as king.”
This year’s array of Unsung Heroes has demonstrated a remarkable entrepreneurial spirit at the core of which is the seed planted, the idea. Ford was an amazing ideas man from whom all young people with their eyes on the bigger picture will do well to emulate.
It is their ideas that will fill the factory floors with posse upon posse of inspired workers, just as was evinced at the Ford Motor Corporation in the lifetime of the founder. Perhaps this culture endures, who knows.
There is another ideas man, the founder of Tesla, who shall remain nameless.
His pernicious personality will ensure that one day when his name is mentioned, it sounds like a swear word. Such men, instead of being ostracised, offer us the chance to learn from their mistakes, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Ideas are the very engine, the axis on which businesses run. This June, somewhere in the USA, local football outfit Mamelodi Sundowns are participating in the Fifa Club World Cup, one of only four African sides against the crème de la crème of global football.
It is all thanks to the ideas of one man, Dr Patrice Motsepe, who was sufficiently fired up to imagine a football club from our shores mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Paris St Germain, Borussia Dortmund, Palmeiras, Porto, and others.
Look at the perspicacity of the ideas of the Unsung Heroes we have lined up for your reading pleasure and, surely, you will agree that the thinking and concepts sprouting out of their heads will take them, in particular, very far but the country, in general, even farther.
Through them, we are in no doubt that we will see, in our lifetime, young men and women who are creators of jobs, not job-seekers, as has been the norm through the years.
Our Unsung Heroes stand as a testament to the truism that the youth are tomorrow’s leaders. They are brimming with innovative ideas that only need the enabling environment the state should create for business to thrive.
Of course, we hold true to the argument that the government is not the employer. It is the private sector that will create the much-needed jobs.
The jobs will come from the heads of the smart young men and women featured on these pages.
We doff our hats to them.
