S. Africa Besieged By Unemployment

With 23 Percent Jobless, Recession Worsens Problem Rooted in History

KGOTSONG, South Africa -- The economic crisis is causing South Africa, like many countries, to hemorrhage jobs. But its far deeper unemployment problem is represented not by pink slips but by the many people in this dusty rural township who do not work and never have.

One recent weekday, Fikile Present, 25, was doing little more than hanging out inside the shack he shares with his mother, because he had no job to go to. Neither did the neighbor sweeping her dirt yard, the guy biking through town, the women waiting for work on the corner and the ragged crew sifting through garbage at the dump.

Places like Kgotsong exist all over South Africa, where it often seems joblessness, now at more than 23 percent, is a way of life. The nation that is Africa's economic engine has long had one of the world's highest rates of unemployment, an intractable legacy of apartheid that economists deem the root of South Africa's stubborn poverty and inequality. It is also a prime illustration of the failure of democratic governments to extend economic freedom to a black majority that won liberation 15 years ago but remains South Africa's most out-of-work group.

"I dreamed about myself being a technician or working in an engineering office," said Present, adding that he regularly seeks work. "That is all in the past. Now what I'm looking for is a job. Any job."

There is little consensus on a solution. But experts agree that joblessness is costly to South Africa, which helps support nearly one-quarter of the population with the developing world's biggest welfare program. Some warn that chronic unemployment is a tinderbox for instability of the sort that flared last year, when poor South Africans unleashed a wave of violence against foreigners they accused of taking their jobs.

"Worst of all, unemployment is a terrible waste of human potential," said Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Center for Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg. "Almost every unemployed person could and should be doing productive work that would improve their lives and develop the country."

President Jacob Zuma, a populist elected a few months ago on promises of spreading wealth, has pledged to create half a million jobs this year and 3.5 million more by 2014. But the promised jobs are temporary public works positions that might not lead to true employment gains. And with South Africa now in recession after years of steady growth, economists say the government will have a hard enough time saving jobs, much less creating them.

The Shadow of Apartheid

In Kgotsong, an arid grid of shacks and low-slung houses in South Africa's corn belt, the promises inspire scant hope. According to the most recent data, more than 41 percent of people here are unemployed. Present said most people he knows survive on state grants. He is among them: With no skills to market, he is largely supported by his mother's monthly $120 old-age grant.

Present is just one job-seeker in a pool that is massive by almost any standard. Across impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, the unemployment rate is about 8 percent, according to a recent International Labor Organization report, though a majority of the employed have informal jobs and make less than $2 a day. In middle-income countries more comparable with South Africa, such as Chile and Malaysia, the rate is typically less than half of South Africa's.

But economists warn that it is unwise to compare South Africa's labor market with others because its problem is rooted in a history unlike any other nation's.

Under apartheid, a white supremacist government isolated blacks in crowded townships and desolate rural areas with weak transportation links to urban areas and schools designed to keep them under-educated. Blacks' opportunities to start businesses were limited, stunting the entrepreneurial knowledge that fuels informal economies in many other developing nations.

"Employment is about one thing leading to another. And that's a historical process," said Miriam Altman, executive director of the Center of Poverty, Employment and Growth at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. "Here in South Africa, they specifically excluded the majority of the population -- from employment and from living in the right places."