MICHAEL MORRIS: Jobs crisis has been a long time coming because of failed policies - Business Day

Michael Morris 
Almost 20 years ago, in 2007, then deputy president — and custodian of the grand-sounding Accelerated & Shared Growth Initiative for SA — Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, expressed concern about the army of unskilled people who might reach the age of 35 without ever having had a job. 

This detail comes from the 77th annual report of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), in which then CEO, the late John Kane-Berman, wrote: “We pointed out that unemployment in the 15-24 age group was running at 50%. For many of them, [we observed in presentations at that time], unemployment will become a permanent condition, for nearly two-thirds of all the unemployed have never worked before.” 

Kane-Berman went on to say that “(w)e also [warned] yet again against any attempts further to regulate the labour market”. He cited a Business Day column of March 2007 in which the institute said, “To the extent that affirmative action means hiring and advancing people who were previously barred by racial job restrictions, it clearly does redress a major injustice and economic absurdity.”

Yet, while acknowledging that “(t)he numerous forms of disadvantage arising from apartheid will linger for years ... the continuing focus on race allows all too many current ills to be traced back to apartheid and previous disadvantage. In the process the extent to which disadvantage arises from current policies is ignored. But the list is long, and growing.” 

Whether history repeats itself as tragedy first, then farce, as Karl Marx famously said, or the other way round — as his devotee Herbert Marcuse said was truer of Nazism, for example — modern SA is a distressing case that combines both.

In a farcical and tragic echo of Mlambo-Ngcuka’s worry two decades ago, only last week employment & labour minister Nomakhosazana Meth said she was “gravely concerned” about “ongoing retrenchments” and “heavy job losses” as businesses closed or downsized. 

What has SA been doing for these 20 long years? Back in 2007 the unemployment rate was 25.5%; today it is 33.2%. That is 13 percentage points higher than in 1994. Instead of being gravely concerned, my colleague Hermann Pretorius, head of strategic communications at the institute, said last week that Meth ought to be ashamed.

The jobs crisis, he pointed out, “is the direct and inevitable consequence of policies that she and her party have championed for years”. The central planning, coercive labour laws, minimum wage mandates and race-based hiring targets have all “steadily strangled opportunity, shut out entrepreneurs, and driven both investors and employers away”. 

The job losses, Pretorius pointed out, “are the bill coming due for years of fake transformation and economic sabotage”. As the record shows, what Pretorius called “an urgent pro-growth policy pivot” has been the theme of IRR advocacy since at least 2007.

In her most recent — August — report in the IRR’s Blueprint for Growth series, senior colleague Anthea Jeffery says the “best way to generate millions more jobs is to trigger a rapid upsurge in economic growth”. This report says an achievable growth rate of about 7% would be capable of doubling the size of the economy every decade. 

However, plodding along with reckless indifference while — as Kane-Berman warned in 2007 — ignoring “disadvantage aris(ing) from current policies”, has meant that SA’s annual growth rate since 2008 “has averaged around 1.3%”, a paltry level at which “it will take 54 years for the economy to double its current size”. 

Simply to express grave concern in 2025 is an eloquent admission. 

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2025-09-08-michael-morris-jobs-crisis-has-been-a-long-time-coming-because-of-failed-policies/