On Friday, 27 January 2023 the National Unemployed Workers Union (Nuwu) held its digital launch, ahead of a physical launch in April. The union exists to bring together the millions of unemployed people in South Africa to train and upskill them, place them in employment, and develop enterprises to create new jobs.

Nuwu’s vision is to unlock the potential of economically marginalised South Africans through breaking limiting beliefs. And our mission statement is to change the mindsets and conversations around unemployment through unlocking collective membership potential. We bridge the gap on behalf of those without work.

Our unemployment pandemic represents the clearest sign of a private sector and a public sector that have a collective bankruptcy of the types of progressive ideas necessary to rescue the sinking economy.

Five issues are contributing to our unemployment numbers reaching historically high rates.

First, we have a structural problem within our education system where a large majority of the 23,000 public schools catering for 12 million pupils have teachers that do not have the requisite science, maths, engineering, and technology skills to prepare students for the modern economy. It is no surprise then that about 40% of our pupils drop out before Grade 12 and only 21% of the remainder pass with more than 50%.

Second, as a legacy of apartheid, many parents raised in townships work far from home in highly stressful and often demeaning jobs. They do not have the time, energy nor in some instances the technical capacity to help their children navigate a career choice suited to their skills and passion.

These parents pass on to their children some of their own woundedness, fear of failure and limiting beliefs that make it difficult for them to unlock their potential. We should not be surprised to hear that many students at our universities and vocational colleges are underperforming. South Africa has a 9% throughput rate at technical and vocational education and training colleges, and our universities have a 15% throughput rate.

Third, the private sector is still an old (mainly white) boys’ club. Whatever skills new entrants bring to the workplace, they have to also navigate the implicit bias in favour of private school-educated job entrants who speak the coded language of the old boys’ club.

Fourth, there is a process of systemwide, overt discrimination against children with a township or rural background. The system is rigged against them acquiring the requisite social networks to hear about available job and entrepreneurship opportunities, the ability to get to interviews that are often far away from where they live, the internet access to send their CVs and attain the necessary social exposure taken for granted by the interviewers. This adds up to a trust deficit that the interviewee experiences as implicit bias, low expectations and what sociologists call “stereotype threat”.

Fifth, corruption in the public sector has robbed the government of the capacity to use its investment capital to create new job opportunities. Those who have the misfortune of entering the public sector as their first or second job, learn terrible work habits that doom them to long-term unemployability within the private sector. Those with a genuine passion for civil service are locked out of opportunities because they are not favoured by the governing party.

These five factors combine to create an intractable structural unemployment problem. Neither the public nor private sectors are currently incentivised to fix this problem.

The public sector is entrenched in the cadre deployment strategy that has pushed this country to the brink of bankruptcy. The private sector continues to hang on to the old boys’ club model which has continued to cap black management below 30% of the total. Something has to give.

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At the core of the problem is the antiquated education system that has not managed to transform itself from the colonial model which was educating society to produce compliant bureaucrats, into a modern educational system aimed at producing tech-savvy industrialists.

The results have been economically catastrophic. According to the ratings agency Moody’s, of 30 emerging market economies, South Africa had the largest share of mismatched workers at more than 50% of the total, and the lowest productivity levels, according to Boston Consulting Group. The OECD forecasts that unemployment will not fall below the 30% threshold before the end of 2023.

Over the past 24 months I have been working with unemployed young people to understand what their challenges are and, therefore, what a non-government actor can do to try to resolve them.

From the point of view of unemployed black, coloured and Indian youngsters, the solution required is not that difficult to understand. They need their own social network built around creating job readiness, hard skills, productive social networks, and mindset shifts.

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Working with a few talented colleagues, we have answered this call through the creation of Nuwu.

So far, through our “train the trainer” programme, we trained 200 coaches in 2022 and are beginning the training of another 500 this year. Our flagship programme, “Unlocking Potential”, is being piloted at 10 locations around the country between now and June. We plan to ramp this up to 200 locations between June and December.

To date we have been self-funded. We are blessed to have also received in-kind donations from associated fellow NGOs, churches and businesses around the country. We are now ready to scale the model so we can reach up to 50,000 unemployed workers this year, one million next year and three million the year after.

What we have found through our training so far is that the appropriate sequence is to start with mindset change, then deal with limiting beliefs, then work with team dynamics and leadership training before moving on to hard-skills training.

This sequence recognises the state of mind of the average South African job seeker, while taking for granted that intelligence is randomly distributed in the country, and therefore demonstrates that if one builds the soft foundation for learning, hard skills can be readily acquired.

Both the government and the private sector can transform this country by supporting organisations like Nuwu and helping alumni of our programme with job placement and skills training.

New ideas like Nuwu are destined to come from outside the conventional enclaves in the economy – it is up to those who control political power and capital to help scale these new ideas in order to reverse the sinking ship that is the South African economy. DM