JABULANI SIKHAKHANE: Why the unemployed remain invisible and voiceless

One of the reasons unemployment in SA doesn’t get as much attention and urgency in terms of public policy that it deserves is that the unemployed suffer from the worst combination possible: invisibility and voicelessness. They are, to borrow British poet Stephen Spender’s words, not “starvingly visible and shoutingly audible”. 

They can’t speak for themselves. No organisation represents them. They are simply not seen and unheard. We — you and me, and policymakers — talk about these fellow citizens in statistical terms. They have no faces, no families. President Cyril Ramaphosa will comfortably present us with Tintswalo, democracy’s child, but won’t show us her unemployed twin.

As if to confirm the invisibility of the unemployed, former president Thabo Mbeki once questioned the validity of Stats SA’s unemployment data, asking why, the numbers were accurate, the unemployed weren’t seen on the streets. 

By the end of the June 2024 there were more than 11.5-million of them. At the height of the Great Depression in 1933 about 12.8-million Americans were unemployed, according to the Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, a rate of about 25% in statistical terms. 

The US Federal Reserve describes the Great Depression as “the longest and deepest downturn” in the history of the modern industrial economy. It lasted for more than a decade. 

SA is in no similar depression. Yet more than 45% of its labour force — or measured, another way, 28% of the population aged between 15 and 64 — are without jobs. That has been the case for a decade and more. 

That figure includes more than 3-million people who are classified as discouraged work-seekers simply because they hadn’t been out searching for jobs in the four weeks preceding the date of the survey by Stats SA. To be shoved into this tent of discouraged work-seekers, a person must also have given one of the following reasons: there were no jobs available in the area; unable to find work requiring his/her skills; and lost hope of finding any kind of work. 

To have this many people unemployed, and for this long, should have galvanised the nation to pull out all stops to get them into jobs. But their invisibility and voicelessness mean even politicians, whose lack of modesty of ambition (promises) is well known, have become modest in their electoral promises.

It appears this sad waste of human potential isn’t enough to galvanise all of us to do something about it, including kicking politicians hard in their backside to get them to act with urgency and purpose. 

Spender articulated the problem clearly in a new (1994) introduction to his autobiography, World Within World, first published in the 1950s.

“So our generation was driven into politics because world events presented us with situations in which it seemed impossible for us not to take sides. The first of those was the Wall Street crash of 1929, producing millions of unemployed not only in America but also in Europe.” 

He noted the difference between the 1930s and the 1990s: “Today we see the unemployed more often on television screens. They are images moving across glass screens, harvested for us from all over the world by a camera crew and some reporter who interprets them for us.

“These are three-dimensional figures transformed almost to abstractions — while we sit in our rooms perhaps eating dinners or high teas and watch them. The viewer may be shaken or depressed or distressed by these images, but they do not step out of the screen into his room, or shout from the street up to his windows. Everything today is spectacle.” 

Back in 1929 the unemployed “were starvingly visible and shoutingly audible”. This moved young writers, himself included, who had thought that as artists politics wasn’t for them. They woke up to the fact that the economic system that had “enabled them to go (say) to university (and, in my own case, had provided me with a small private income)” could not provide the unemployed with jobs. The unemployed, the young writers noticed, were also being subjected to a means test “before they could receive the dole”. 

So, taking a cue from Spender, SA’s unemployment isn’t going to get the urgency and public policy seriousness it deserves because many of us who continue to benefit from the country’s economy think politics isn’t for us. And we will continue to think so because the unemployed aren’t starvingly visible and shoutingly audible in our living rooms. 

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.