Zukile Majova
It is common knowledge that South Africa’s youth have an alcohol and substance abuse problem but for two days in a year, they lose themselves in a sea of drunkenness.
The two days are Youth Day, 16 June, the national commemoration of the Soweto students uprising and 16 December, the unofficial start of the festive calendar.
Group trips are planned, braai sessions and parties that are often marked by drunken orgies are all too common.
Alcohol retailers advertise specials for booze popular with the youth.
And so today, 16 June, is the day when young people whose official unemployment rate has reached more than 60% bury their sorrows in alcohol.
For the moment they drink to forget the pain of their state of despair as millions have already given up looking for a job.
The Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) for the first quarter of 2022, says 63.9% of the youth aged 15-24 are unemployed.
“South Africa has over 10 million young people aged 15-24 years and, of these, only 2.5 million were in the labour force, either employed or unemployed,” said the survey.
“The largest share, namely 7.7 million or 75.1%, of this group of young people are those that are out of the labour force. The main reason for being inactive is discouragement. These are young people who have lost hope of finding a job that suits their skills or in the area they reside.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government also has no realistic hope of creating millions of jobs for the youth.
In his weekly letter to the nation this week Ramaphosa promised to recruit 50,000 young people into the National Youth Service and Social Employment Fund.
“The SEF will create 50,000 new work opportunities in the first phase before scaling up further in subsequent phases.”
The work is in areas like community safety, food kitchens, urban agriculture, early childhood development and the fight against gender-based violence.”
It was French political philosopher Frantz Fanon who said: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.”
The 1976 generation’s resolve and defiance of the apartheid government’s forceful introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in township schools went a long way to contributing to the country’s liberation in 1994.
Unemployment is perhaps the new frontier for youth revolutionaries in the current generation.
