Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s has outlined the government’s strategy for the next few years in his medium term budget policy statement, referred to by some people as a ‘mini’ budget.
One of the goals in the medium term budget policy statement is to create five million jobs and, furthermore, reduce unemployment to 15% or less. Most of the job creation programmes will focus on the younger people in our communities who, at this stage, have almost no hope of being employed.
Well that’s a laudable goal but how on Earth will it be achieved in a country where every young person apparently needs to be trained first and only employed later?
Then I look around the country at the thousands of slums – or informal settlements as some politically-correct people insist on calling them – and I marvel at the ingenuity of the shack-builders who’ve made themselves a home using nothing but scrap metal, old bolts, bits of wood and rusty nails.
And I ask myself: “Who taught them to do that?”
And the simple answer is: “Nobody. They did it themselves.”
Thousands of people are ingenious enough to build shacks that they can live in – sometimes for years and years – without any training at all and yet we insist that the unemployed must first be trained.
I wonder what those untrained masses in squatter camps could do it they were just shown how?
But let’s consider government’s goal to create five million jobs and combine that goal with the creation of houses.
Right now the estimated housing backlog is at least 2,4-million homes and Human Settlements Minister, Tokyo Sexwale has said that it will take an enormous effort on the part of every South African to overcome the backlog.
He’s called for innovative thinking from the captains of industry; he’s urged people to devise new and better methods of building; he’s asked for solutions to the housing problem at all levels.
So why don’t we set up a simple programme – modelled on compulsory military service implemented throughout the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties – to put the out-of-work youths into building the millions of houses that we need for our communities today?
The training programmes needed are hardly that challenging or time consuming are they? What are the rudiments that these youngsters would need to understand?
Digging trenches measured with pieces of string in a straight line for the foundations. Laying bricks – using the same pieces of string – in a straight line and leaving a hole for the windows and doors. Putting in a lintel to hold up the brickwork above the doors and windows. Adding prefabricated beams to support the roof structure and then fitting windows and hanging doors.
It can’t be that hard. And many youngsters understand the principles so well because they’ve already built a shack for themselves, helped a friend do so, or even grown up in one that was made from nothing.
So the building concepts aren’t that foreign.
I know that many of you will say that it’s much more complicated than that because there are things like drainage, plumbing, electrical reticulation and so forth and, of course, you’re right. It is more complicated than that.
But there are thousands of bright young people out there. And the thousands of properly qualified plumbers, electricians and engineers who can teach bright youngsters how to perform the more complicated tasks that require specialised knowledge and ability.
I know, for instance, that there are trainee plumbers who, after just six months, are working on construction sites doing basic connection work to provide a working household water system under the guidance of their supervisors.
I have seen trainee electricians pulling wires through conduits ready for a qualified person to connect to a distribution board. I’ve seen the labourers digging trenches for the connection points to the main sewage system.
So I fail to see why things in South Africa are so complicated. We need millions of houses. We have millions of out-of-work people. Why not put the two together and resolve both problems.
What’s so difficult about it?
Even history shows us that housing and job creation go together. When there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning from the Second World War the first task the governments set about was to build houses using labour provided by returning soldiers.
Not just here in South Africa, but in Britain, America, Germany – all of Europe for that matter – Russia and Japan. In fact in virtually every country throughout the world there were major housing projects underway fuelled by the cheap labour of returning soldiers who needed to be employed and who, as it turned out, learned a trade in the process.
Surely this is the solution that South Africa should be looking at given the extent of the housing shortage and the vast levels of unemployment here?
The government has spoken about community projects, community values, building new communities and even Ubuntu. But so little of this has manifested in real change. Instead, we’ve seen service delivery protests, riots over the lack of housing and even squatters in the Gabon informal settlement refusing to move into houses rebuilt by the Ekurhuleni council because they were so bad.
The untrained squatters preferred the houses they’d built than the ones the council erected for them using trained labour. The mind boggles.
If the government really wants to create jobs and is sincere about wanting to house the people then I cannot understand why no-one has combined the two and said: “Well, here’s a solution to the problem.”
We need to find ways to make a project such as this work, rather than find reasons to make it fail because I’m certain it can work, given the commitment of the communities, the money from the government and the necessary supervision from the many thousands of trained mentors available to us.
And, in so doing, we’ll probably create a whole new wave of entrepreneurial youngsters who’ll be able to put their new skills to new uses too.
*Hartdegen writes a regular column for Property24.com. The content of his columns constitutes his personal opinion and doesn’t pretend to be facts or advice. Contact him at paddy@neomail.co.za.
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