During the hard lockdown in mid-2020, a young African man dressed in rags and a green blanket called out to me from outside my gate in east Joburg, pleading for food. I got to know him a little: his name is Mduduzi, he’s 28 years old and was brought up by his grandparents in Umlazi, Durban.
Mduduzi suffered a medical condition a few years ago that has partially restricted the movement on one side of his body. Poor to the extent of possessing only a few clothes and a bundle of blankets, he is without even a grade 10 certificate. With no one to help him in any way whatsoever, his plight is stark and sad enough, but not unusual. Luckily, he’s avoided the nyaope addiction that has destroyed so many of his comrades.
On a freezing Youth Day it will have been little consolation to him to once again hear there’s a political party in office, an establishment, that professes to care about him and hundreds of thousands of other desperate and unemployed youth, yet its practices often suggest the opposite.
If not for Mduduzi, then for whom the sacrifices made by the schoolchildren of Soweto on June 16 1976? And if not for his benefit, then for whose the Youth Day warnings about the state of desperation of our youth and the annual renewal of vows by politicians to do more for them? Yet neglect of our youth, often grandstanding as progressiveness, has been a feature of our ANC government.
Mduduzi thought he wanted to be a security guard. But to do this he needed several thousand rand to get the certification to qualify to potentially get a job. He didn’t ask, but in any event I wouldn’t have been happy sponsoring such a dangerous idea, and he’s not the intimidating sort.
I put his resilience down to his youth, and I wonder, as the years go by for him, whether he’ll still be content with a few tins of beans and bully beef, and some chocolate biscuits.
In the meantime, he was receiving a disability grant from the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa), R1,800 a month, to compensate him for his disability. Then about a year ago, in what it called an exercise in cleaning up its books (except for the thousands who receive illicit grants, no doubt), Sassa decided he wasn’t disabled enough for its high standards and his eligibility would have to be tested from scratch. His hardship had to be compounded by pointless visits to Sassa, to doctors, endless postponements, waiting in queues for days on end. No punishment was deemed sufficient. And still no resolution.
Whereas the state health bureaucracy busied itself turning the Mduduzi molehill into a Drakensberg of complication and despair, it acted with unaccustomed efficiency in suspending his grant. In that there was no delay, no queues, no rude officials, no come-back-tomorrow. The money had gone before you could say Batho pele twice: the rest of the deal, the reinstatement of the grant now that he has undergone enough tests to qualify to go into far outer space for a year, has not happened yet.
For all his tribulations, though, Mduduzi is without any hint of bitterness. I guess this is because he is a naturally optimistic and intelligent person. And young. We’ve made an arrangement in terms of which he only comes once a week, on a Wednesday, and I pack him a bag of food, and some of my very old clothes sometimes, and some change, and he limps off quite happily. I put his resilience down to his youth, and I wonder, as the years go by for him, whether he’ll still be content with a few tins of beans and bully beef, and some chocolate biscuits. Whether, as age creeps into his bones, he’ll still be happy to curl up on cardboard on the pavement outside Shoprite in Yeoville, in rags and newspaper and old blankets, and assess his lot in life as not a bad one. That it could be worse. Or will his heart turn to stone as he asks, why?
He has freedom, but what a hydra-headed monster is this thing called freedom in SA, especially for our youth, which is typical in societies where the once-established order has been abolished and replaced by very little at all. From what exactly could this child of freedom (and of apartheid) be said to be free?
He has freedom, but what a hydra-headed monster is this thing called freedom in SA, especially for our youth, which is typical in societies where the once-established order has been abolished and replaced by very little at all. From what exactly could this child of freedom (and of apartheid) be said to be free?
One obvious way to re-engage the youth in the national project, and overwhelmingly for their benefit, is for them, boys and girls, to give at least a year of national service, with exceptions only in special cases. I’m usually shouted down when I suggest our youth subject themselves to the good of the national project, which is often a knee-jerk response given the history of national service in SA. So the notion of any sort of direction or authority, any guidance at all, is anathema, even though it also, by the way, provides a mechanism for funnelling youth more efficiently into tertiary education and training, which should be the right of all.
As things stand, we do our youth a disservice and prohibit them from making a life-changing contribution to society that would energise and inspire the rest of their lives. There are many skills young people can learn and, in doing so, help build and maintain rural infrastructure, for example, or work in whatever field according to their skills and experience. They can possibly also be led by graduates (already unfairly favoured because they have political clout) who will be paying back to society their education thanks, in part, to the taxpayer rand. Be more like the Cuba we claim to admire.
Instead of investing heavily in our youth, we offer them the empty promise of limitless freedom, licence really, without responsibility. For the educated and relatively well off this works fine enough, and it’s good grounding for their future membership of a self-seeking elite. But tens of thousands of children are left by the wayside because of the manner in which our system operates, or fails to make itself and its benefits known to all but the most savvy and connected.
We’re meant to value our youth, but we clearly don’t in the way we ask nothing of them to offer their vigour and originality to help rebuild society. We practise neglect and call it caring. Sometimes it seems we pay more attention to our cars.
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