Decolonising Work – A case for Zama-Zama`s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCsgMq9Z_jY

Depending on where one draws the statistics from and how one reads those statistics, there are between 5 and 20 million people of working age (15–64 years)  who are unemployed in South Africa.  Just over 40% of people of working age are employed, leaving the vast majority of South Africans dependent on self-employment, state subsidies, hussle and crime to survive.

Not only is this a recipe for disaster but it gets worse. According to the BusinessTech website, since 1994, South Africa`s working-age population has increased by 11 million. In the next 50 years, it will grow by another 9 million, peaking in 2065 at about 43.8 million. The next 20 years alone will see an average net increase in the working-age population of about 280,000 people per year.  As a share of the working-age population, United Nations (2013) projects that the peak of unemployment will occur in 2045, when it will reach 68.3%.

It thus not a great surprise that the question of work, and gainful employment has become an ever deepening fault line running through our collective hopes for a prosperous future.

For two decades we have been told by government and the economic witchdoctors of the global markets that our hope rests in the ability of the economy to attract foreign investment in order to grow the economy and by extension to generate and grow jobs, but only within the formal legacy of our colonial past. Heaven forbid that we should become innovative and act in the interest of the people, rather than preferring trickle-down economics which ensures investments are driven towards maintaining the very corporate economic structures inherited from the heyday of Grand Apartheid.

Yet our economy has never really hit the great levels of growth we are told are needed to generate the extra jobs so desperately needed by our growing youthful society. One of the most grievous results of the “New South Africa” has been the way our country`s leaders have maintained the systems and structures of Colonial Apartheid, which keep black people from engaging in economic activity that would undercut the minerals and industrial complex that has been the backbone of the exploitative extraction of South Africa`s wealth .

Just as government initially tried to wish away and criminalise the minibus taxi industry, when it exploded onto the economic scene during  the late 1980`s, today we see a similar effort to ignore and criminalise another informal industry, without regard to the imperative to decolonise the structures of the South African economy. Instead there exists an unquestioning acceptance that our task as a country is to reinforce, protect and extend the colonial structures of economic colonialism at any cost, even if that means criminalising hardworking people living in poverty.

The blowback from the decades of failed promises and desperate poverty have been increasingly felt across the land as communities, students and workers vent their frustrations and anger at a system that seems to continually promise but which seldom delivers.

As the crises deepens, and as the reality sets in that local and foreign Capital will not release the R1.5 trillion cash hoard they have been holding, in order to invest and create jobs, and that government spending with all its wasted and fruitless expenditure can only go so far, the need to move towards alternative approaches and towards stepping out of the narrow confines of the colonial economic legacy bequeathed to us, becomes not a luxury, but a necessity.

As a start it would be useful for us to resist terming the problem as unemployment. This term is loaded and brings with it a whole range of meanings which when used in day to day conversation, is often not intended to carry the baggage that it comes with. Unemployment reduces South Africans of working age to drones who have no agency and who literally need to be employed to be of any value or consequence. Instead we should be talking of a “work” crisis.

Work, labouring, is not the negative alienation and even hostile object that our historical colonial system of capitalist exploitation has turned it into. Nor is the prerogative of Big Men to dole out work to the lowly natives. Instead, labour and work should be seen as an act of dignity which allows for the expression of the human essence and is an important conduit through which the engagement with self, nature and community can be realised.

With so many people not engaged in productive acts of labouring, is it any wonder then that our young people are slowly losing their sense of self, nature and community.

So the imperative for a country that is fast losing its moral compass, and in which the alienation from the activity of labouring leads directly to the alienation from self and society, should be creating opportunities to work, not necessarily to be employed. This process is not the same as entrepreneurship, which in the South African context often only means participating in some kind of trading activity. Instead we need to speak about a much more fundamental reconnection with the self-actualisation which comes with labouring and which in turn leads to a renewal and regeneration of society.

This means that we should be making land available for people to farm and labour wherever this is possible. We should be providing the structures and support, both logistically and financially for those who wish to labour to do so.

Yet, faced with this intractable problem, our government and our public discourse remains firmly entrenched in our colonial past, preferring instead to employ its limited resources towards actively preventing people from labouring on the land. It even goes so far as to criminalise those who wish to affirm their humanity through the act of labouring.

It is so with the mining affected communities such as those in Mokopane who have been systematically removed off their fertile lands in favour of large mining corporations, and with many other communities who have little or no opportunities, than to engage in artisanal mining and which informally provides a vital form of support and income to a growing number of people in the country.

With well over six thousand abandoned mines in South Africa, which were left fallow by large corporate miners, often only because they were unable to profitably extract a profit for their foreign shareholders, given that they carry huge overheads, and which have never been rehabilitated, we have seen a growing trend of young people accessing these mines which still hold mineral deposits.

Instead of celebrating the enterprise of young people who would rather labour in protection of their dignity than sit idly by waiting for handouts, government seems more preoccupied with criminalising decent hardworking folk in protection of large corporate miners who are nonetheless not going to be increasing their employment quotas anytime soon.   

It is incomprehensible that a country which contains one of the richest mineral deposits in the world is not able to put people to work in pursuance of dignity for the individual and community, and increased wealth of the nation. To add insult to injury, our government`s plan for the sector does not include major work creation projects, but goes one step further to criminalise those who labour for their dignity.

Taking only the six thousand odd abandoned mines as a target, our government could, with some creative out of the box thinking come up with a plan to allow people to access work opportunities, in which they fund themselves, and clean up the environmental nightmare left behind by our supposed large scale mining benefactors. 

Regulation of the artisanal mining industry will not only ensure safe health, safety and security standards for the miners, but also ensure that environmental safety is brought under the regulation of the sector. The sector has a flourishing informal market and regulating its activities will add to the fiscus as much as it adds to the human dignity of its participants.

This will require however, that we abandon the colonial structural models handed down to us by big corporate miners and instead place our faith in the hard working honest people of South Africa. The decolonisation project should not be seen as one which only affects and exists on the campuses of our institutions of higher learning. Indeed, there is not a sector that needs a discussion on decolonisation more urgently than the one which provided the blue print for Grand Apartheid, and which silently continues to condemn thousands of people to poverty and criminality.