President Jacob Zuma had not yet delivered his State of the Nation address by the time the Mail & Guardian went to press on Thursday evening, but it seemed pretty clear that jobs would be its principal theme.
Meanwhile, 1 500km away from Parliament, in Newcastle, government, with support from unions and larger garment companies, showed its enthusiasm for employment creation by sending the sheriff to shut down clothing firms that employ about 15 000 people.
Forget the sheriff; they should have sent teams of experts and economists to study how Newcastle has been able to do it. It could then try to replicate the model in Dundee, Utrecht, Vryheid and every other town and dorp in the country.
Clearly, new thinking is required. One economist says that you can tell just from the luxury cars in the parking lot that the company will not be competitive in the export market. A government task team to Newcastle would find that some of the factory owners there, far from being fat cats with luxury cars, live in a single room in their factory. This is how they remain in business.
It would find, too, that wages can be lower where people are able to walk to work. In much of apartheid-designed South Africa, workers pay more than a chunk of change just to get to work and back. The task team, if it got its hands dirty and went to have a closer look, would see that most workers would prefer to earn wages below the industry agreed minimum rather than lose their jobs.
Every other South African has quick fixes for the jobs crisis. Better education, a weaker rand, lower inflation, skills training and a deregulated labour market are often mooted as solutions.
All of these would help, but so mired is the labour market in old ways of thinking that even a combination of these factors would still not create a new economic culture in which the country is able to become a winner in manufactured exports, the source of real jobs growth. Structural reform to enhance overall competitiveness is crucial.
But the government must also acknowledge that it is not up to the job of managing the entire labour market and get out of the way, making it easier for the people of Newcastle and elsewhere to come up with their own flexible solutions to the crisis.
The fact that our economy, notwithstanding the high levels of unemployment, has been able to absorb perhaps a million Zimbabweans suggests that more flexibility, coupled with the ongoing social programmes government has already in place, may do the trick. It can assist by raising the social wage in success-story areas such as Newcastle by improving basic education, providing skills training, such as through technical colleges, and by upgrading healthcare, the things government is meant to do.
But we dare say that, given the choice of reopening a newly liberated clothing zone in Newcastle or cutting the rope at Eskom’s giant Medupi power station, Zuma and his top team would go for the latter. It’s bigger, newer, shinier and more expensive. This is what needs to change. The jobs are in Newcastle.
Media have role to play
South Africa has been a quiet place these past few months, with no major public protests. But if you saw how the police wrestled and throttled a Pretoria news photographer last week, you would have sworn we were in the middle of a major war zone. The photographer was manhandled when he tried to take pictures of police arresting a suspected thief, with police accusing him of interfering in their work.
Mail & Guardian photographer Oupa Nkosi, meanwhile, faces trumped-up assault charges after he was attacked by community members intent on stopping him from doing his job.
Last year, during the debate on the setting up of a media tribunal, many South Africans were quick to remind journalists that they should not feel that there is a special, separate law for them and that they need not cry fire in a crowded place. Which is all fine, but our leaders need to do more to educate the police, VIP bodyguards and other security officers that the media are not an irritation that gets in the way of their work. They need to be reminded that the work of the media is as important to this democracy as theirs is and that of their political masters.
The message needs to come from the highest office in the police and government. General Bheki Cele has, personally, been trying to reach out to editors, but it is to his staff that he urgently needs to communicate the role of media in a democracy.
We should never exaggerate the dangers that the South African media work under, but if we allow these types of incidents to pass off as insignificant, then we are gradually tolerating the taking hold of a new Âculture that might be “normalised” by the time we take notice.