The ruling party is promising 3.5-million “work opportunities” in its election manifesto – primarily government funded jobs consisting of temporary, sometimes part-time employment. CDE analysis reveals that this election promise consists of the paltry equivalent of 300 000 low-wage jobs over 5 years. The stunning inadequacy of this promise in a country where millions are unemployed indicates an astonishing lack of ambition.

South Africa has an expanding list of existential crises. The deepest and most fundamental of them, the one that drives most of our pathologies, is unemployment. There is no country in the world in which a smaller proportion of people are engaged in income-generating work than South Africa. 

The number of people employed in SA has grown by 2.3-million since 2008 while the number of working age South Africans has grown by 9.5-million. Speaking broadly, the economy has created less than one new job for every four entrants to the labour market in the past 15 years. 

In contemplating the sheer horror of this performance, we should not forget that the SA of 2008 wasn’t a jobs-rich paradise: even then, only 45% of all working age adults had jobs compared to a global norm of more like 60%. The figure now is closer to 40%, implying that we are about 8 million jobs shy of the global norm. 

And the 8-million jobs needed increases by about 400 000 every year as the size of the working age population expands.

It's worth holding these numbers in your head when you consider what the ruling party is promising voters in its election manifesto: 3.5-million “work opportunities”, 2.5-million of which are in EPWP-style projects and the remainder provided to young people in townships and rural areas to help them start or sustain micro businesses.

In government-speak, “work opportunities” is what is provided by the expanded public works programme (including the President’s employment stimulus), and consists of temporary, sometimes part-time employment that often pays less than the national minimum wage. 

Formally speaking these are jobs. But they are temporary jobs. How temporary? Well, the best available evidence suggests that it takes about 2.8 “work opportunities” to create the equivalent of one year of fulltime employment. 

What the ANC is promising in its manifesto, then, is that its policies will create the equivalent of fewer than 1.3-million years of work over the next five years. That is the equivalent of the contribution that would be made by 250 000 full-time jobs over five years, or 300 000 jobs if we allow that some are part-time.

In the context of the need – which would be more like 10-million jobs if we were to get to a 60% employment rate by 2030 – the stunning inadequacy of this promise is, frankly, insulting. Especially if you consider that most of these “work opportunities” are simply a continuation of existing programmes, so they are not net new jobs.

Consider: last year over 700 000 young people wrote matric. The ANC is committing to create jobs for considerably less than half of them. And there will be no such jobs for anyone who matriculates between now and 2028. 

It is important to note that these are primarily government funded jobs, which have long been the focus of government’s approach to job creation.  The manifesto does talk about tackling economic roadblocks in the country (for which government is largely responsible), but there is no sense of urgency, no conviction that a faster growing, more job intensive economy is the only way to ever deal with our jobs catastrophe. It all comes across as business as usual. 

The ANC’s jobs promise is totally inadequate, revealing an astonishing lack of ambition. 

Worse, if one reads what the President has said about jobs and the economy in recent months, it becomes evident that neither the President nor his party has any real vision or plan. It’s almost as if they have given up.  

It’s not that the President has no ideas. It’s that he has so many ideas that it’s impossible to figure out what he thinks drives job creation. 

One day he’s talking about public transport; the next he’s talking about education. He has lists of initiatives to support entrepreneurs, to build publicly owned commercial property, to strengthen BEE rules, to push for more spending on infrastructure, to facilitate ‘smart cities’ or free trade zones in Africa, to localise manufacturing, to take advantage of the fourth industrial revolution, and to turn mining into a sunrise industry. 

If the President attended a meeting of the South African Society of Fly Fishermen, his next speech would include proposals to offer grants to young people so they might learn how to make flies. 

It’s not that every one of these ideas is bad. Some may even be good. The problem is that nothing coheres, there is no sense of how jobs are created in a functional economy:  no theory of change nor economic reform that would shape government priorities. It’s a smorgasbord of possibilities designed to create the appearance of action. 

These ideas add up to nothing. That, ultimately, is how a promise to create a paltry number of predominantly government funded, semi-jobs becomes the centrepiece of the ANC’s election manifesto. 

Perhaps part of the reason his promises are so meagre is because the economy is so wrecked by maladministration, corruption and incompetence that it must be hard for the ANC to see how things could ever get better under their administration. 

Is there a better option? Yes. 

Given the depth of the polycrisis, there is no set of policy proposals that would generate the millions of jobs we need overnight. But, based on historical relationships, we’d estimate that average economic growth of 4% would create 400 000 net new jobs a year – real jobs, not “work opportunities” funded by an increasingly bankrupt state. 

Achieving this depends on South Africa’s having a government that wants to serve the national interest, appoints competent leaders and is hard working, honest and committed to economic growth rather than to empowering its friends and cronies. A government with a sense of crisis and urgency and a new approach, designed to unlock the full potential of the private sector, attract investment, and make it easier to hire unskilled work seekers who make up the vast majority of the unemployed. 

Many of the policy goals such a government would implement would be similar to much of what the ANC claims it is committed to: fixing the energy system, reforming the logistics sector, investing in public infrastructure, improving education. The difference between claiming to be pursuing these things and actually delivering them is the difference between words and deeds.  

The President’s offer to the electorate must be called out for what it is. The centrepiece of the ruling party’s promise to the electorate, priority number one in its manifesto is a paltry equivalent of 300 000 low-wage jobs over 5 years.  

Written by Ann Bernstein, executive director of CDE. This article was first published in the Sunday Times.