Youth Day, June 16: Comparing 1976 to 2025
Police watch as pupils demonstrate in Soweto during the 1976 uprising.
Image: IOL archives
By Adv Mahlodi S. Muofhe
Let me detour for a moment from the collective amnesia of many South Africans who believe stoically that the Soweto Secondary and High School students on that fateful 16 Wednesday June 1976 day when we took to the streets of Soweto in the cold morning to march in protest, we were marching to demand jobs or job opportunities from the white apartheid economy which thrived in its business endeavours because the protectionist apartheid labour laws enabled it to do so.
Far from it. We were in our teens when we took the revolutionary steps to march in protest against the then Bantu Education system which was hellbent on domesticating us, as black students. The apartheid government in all its forms of diabolical anti-transformative education polices had already succeeded in deploying our parents to "kitchen girls and garden boys" at their places of work by feeding them the rotten education syllabus.
The apartheid government contemporaneously commenced with their policy which implored that all black students in schools in South Africa from Form One to Form Three (JC) then, would have to study their content subjects implying that mathematics, physical science, geography, biology and history would have had to be taught in Afrikaans, the language we detested as that of our apartheid oppressors language which we neither understood nor comprehended.
We who were, at the time in 1976 in Form Four and Form Five, were exempted from learning these content subjects in Afrikaans. The (apartheid government's) sole purpose of imposing Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools wasn't to educate us for the future so that upon completion of our tertiary or vocational educational studies, we could also be creators of jobs and job opportunities, it was meant to condemn to the world of perpetual job seekers as we would have dropped out from school without having grossed Form Five (Matric).
During that period in 1976, we barely had dreams about entering the job market. We had genuine ambitions to complete our primary to high school education system so that we could either go to various universities or technical colleges to acquire more professional knowledge in preparation for us to fully participate in building our democratic South African economy post the attainment of our new democratic South Africa which we knew would dawn in our lifetime since in underground structures of our then banned liberation movements like the ANC and PAC, some of us were already moles thereof.
That our economy is misfiring and not performing optimally is as a consequence of inter alia our neglect back then as South African of some of the 1976 cohort of students who fell through the cracks post June 16, and found themselves drowned by the apartheid economy which remunerated them poorly such that when they became family persons, others couldn't afford to educate their children all the way to universities and technical colleges as a result, their children became hasslers and that process replicated itself so much that out of 20 countries globally with the highest unemployment rate of youth, we (South Africa) came at number four with 49.14% (statista.com).
We didn't preach the importance of going to school then vigorously. We are continuing in the same trajectory today in the name of the youth of Soweto June 16, 1976 where we want the youth of today to think that they must go out there and look for jobs and job opportunities which are not there. We fought for quality education in 1976.
Critical essential education to match the needs of our economy is what we should embark on vigorously. Our youth that is those who succeed to summit university qualifications and technical qualifications, often study qualifications which are not fit for purpose the outcome of which keeps on increasing the pool of the high number of unemployed youth in South Africa.
It now not an anomaly to see students who have just qualified as medical doctors, lawyers and accountants queuing at various robots in the City of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town carrying placards indicating that they have completed their degrees and yet they cannot find employment.
This is a crisis which requires that South Africans must put their heads together with the leadership of our institutions of higher learning and try to cure the problem of mismatch of our education system with what our economy needs.
* Adv Mahlodi S. Muofhe, admitted advocate of the High Court of South Africa.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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