Ben Levitas says businesses must be freed from onerous racial requirements

Yet again Ace Magashule is lying and deceiving the country. As long as he continues with his maverick policies and deception, as Secretary General of the ANC, we must hold the ANC to account for their failures, particularly for causing the jobs crisis which is now a “National emergency” if not a disaster.

As if to justify probably the highest unemployment rate in the world, for a country not at war, he glibly claims that it is an international problem, with people all over the world losing jobs. While people may well be displaced by technology as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” kicks in all over the world new jobs are also being created and being filled.

We should pray to have the unemployment problems of other countries -3,7% in the USA, 3,8% in the UK, 3,1% in Germany, 5,2% in Australia-almost record lows for all these countries. Well these are all developed countries, you may argue, so let’s look at countries we like to associate ourselves with in BRICS-Russia 4,5% and Brazil 12,5% still well below the 14% which is targeted by the ANC. Even though I would question the data, because it is in a deep economic crisis, Venezuela reports an unemployment rate of 7,3%.

In total numbers, the USA with a population 5 times ours, has fewer unemployed at 6 million people, than we do at nearly 7 million. Likewise the UK with a larger population than ours, has only 1,5 million people unemployed.

Ace and the ANC are lying and deliberately pulling the wool over our eyes using red-herring tactics.

While I differ completely in the remedy I would propose, I must agree completely Zwelinzima Vavi of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) General-Secretary when he says that the increase in unemployment comes as no surprise and will continue to grow as long as the current policies are kept in place by the governing ANC.

“Our government has been absolutely resolute that it is going to continue to pursue the economic policies that have dismally failed the poor and working people in this country, and one of the signs of somebody who has gone mad is somebody who keeps on repeating the same thing and hoping for a different result. We chose a set of economic policies that simply worsened our situation. Last year, the president announced what could only be a laughable intervention, not even a quarter of what this economy demands. We need a real intervention in this economy,”

At the Working Class Summit held last year, Saftu focussed on building a united, independent, democratic and militant working class movement that would wield more power and influence against employers, to protect jobs and maintain living standards. Now Vavi is proposing something like a R500 billion plan to stimulate the economy in order to create jobs. Unfortunately, the unions are stuck in the Marxian class struggle paradigm, where the working class is by its very nature perceived to be exploited and therefore antagonistic to their employers.

The harsh truth is that unions don’t create jobs, even though they try to protect jobs. Employers and entrepreneurs create jobs and as long as they are perceived to be the enemy, the hostile unemployment environment will persist.

In our environment where unions are fighting to protect jobs in the bloated public sector and in Eskom, which is employing about 30,000 excess workers, unions are a regressive force because they protect unproductive workers at a huge cost to the fiscus, which merely adds costs to the already ever growing budget deficit.

And, no matter how many “Jobs summits “our President Ramaphosa arranges and how much money Vavi proposes to spend on creating jobs, it will all be futile, as long as our racist relics from the Apartheid era linger in the form of BBEEE contrivances.

Despite Magashule proclaiming that ´the single most important” challenge facing the country is to “build a non-racial, non-sexist” economy, the harsh truth is that more women are unemployed than men, that women earn lower salaries than men and that the racist mould is as entrenched as ever. The youth too are almost completely excluded from the economy with more that 1 out of two youths that will never enjoy the prospect of a job in the formal sector. What we need is more of the imaginative thinking in Poland that has just excluded all youth from paying any tax.

If there is but one transformative action that is essential to create jobs, it is to remove racism completely from the workplace and eliminate all vestiges of BBEEE. With this sweeping change family businesses, which are the basic unit and foundation of most job creation all over the world, will sprout up again and with it most of the corruption inherent in the tender-entrepreneurs structure will be eliminated as well.

Unfortunately, the ANC Is so stuck in its racist groove that there is little to no chance of that, and it will continue to show “signs of somebody who has gone mad (because it) is somebody who keeps on repeating the same thing and hoping for a different result.”

Ben Levitas