The following speech was delivered by the DA Federal Leader John Steenhuisen during the party’s main Youth Day celebrations in Alexandra, Gauteng.
My fellow South Africans
Today, forty-six years ago, hundreds of young South Africans in Soweto paid the ultimate price at the hands of the apartheid police when they stood up for freedom. The official death toll was given as 174, although many estimates are far higher than that.
But the killings didn’t end in Soweto. As news of the uprising spread to other communities, so too did the brutal police response. And it was here in Alexandra that one of the bloodiest scenes of that 1976 uprising took place.
On 18 June, two days after the death of Hector Pieterson and scores of others in Soweto, 34 young South Africans lost their lives here in Alex as police fired live ammunition at them. The first to be shot and killed was 23 year-old Japie Vilankulu, whose grave lies here beside us.
Outraged by what had taken place in Soweto two days earlier, Japie said goodbye to his family and went to help mobilise protestors in solidarity with the fallen Soweto youth. That was the last time they saw him alive.
He was shot seven times and died carrying a rubbish bin lid he tried to use as a shield.
Today we remember Japie and Hector and hundreds of other young South Africans who gave their lives in the struggle against injustice and oppression.
It started as a protest for mother tongue education, and against Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools, but what they were really fighting for was something much larger. They recognised a massive injustice in society, and they knew that it would be up to them to resist this injustice and demand change.
They knew that waiting for others to do something could mean waiting too long. Their deaths over those days in June, forty-six years ago, still reverberate through our history. Their sacrifice paid for freedoms our country will never ever give up again.
We owe it to them to cherish these freedoms, and to ensure that they mean something for us, and for generations to come. Youth Day is a reminder that our country’s freedom came at a very high cost, and we cannot take it for granted.
It is also a reminder that freedom has to be won over and over again, in successive generations. If you see injustice, or if you think your freedom and your future is being threatened, then you cannot wait for others to do something about it.
You, South Africa’s youth, have the most to lose and the most to gain. You must do something about it.
I don’t need to tell you that the freedom fought for back in 1976, and finally won in 1994, has not translated into economic freedom. And particularly not for young South Africans.
Never before has the future looked more bleak for young South Africans. Never before has the prospect of finding meaningful work, or leaving school with a useful education, been worse. That is not the freedom all those young South Africans sacrificed their lives for a generation ago.
If we want that sacrifice to mean something, we have to ask why things turned out like this.
Why do millions and millions of South Africans – most of them young – find themselves locked out of opportunity and the economy while our global peers don’t suffer this same fate.
Why can our economy not grow and create work?
Why can our schools not keep up with those in other countries?
Why do we have among the worst education outcomes in the world, and the worst youth unemployment crisis in the world?
Why have we failed young people in this country, despite all the promise and potential we held?
We have to ask these questions, even if the answers make us uncomfortable. Even if the answers implicate the very party that led the struggle against apartheid back then.
The irony is that Youth Day will be celebrated across the country today, and that many of these celebratory events will have been organised and hosted by the very same party that destroyed the future for millions of young South Africans.
In cities, towns and villages, dozens of ANC politicians will stand before crowds today and speak about the importance of investing in the youth and of opening opportunities for them, but the truth is they have no right to do so. Because they have directly caused – through their destructive policies, their outdated ideology and their greed – every last bit of misery that our young people experience today.
The moment young South Africans realise what all these ANC programmes and policies – disguised as “redress” and “transformation” – have actually done, they will turn their back on them for good. And that is the day our country will take a massive step forward.
There is a good reason the ANC clings to its policy of BEE, and this has nothing to do with justice or redress. BEE has done nothing to uplift poor South Africans – it has only made them even poorer by killing business and investment, and thereby killing jobs.
But BEE has been very good for a tiny selection of hand-picked ANC cadres, who have become unimaginably rich thanks to this scheme. Which is why they will never give it up.
And so they convince you that it is a form of redress for apartheid wrongs so that you will carry on supporting it and supporting them with your vote. But the moment you realise that this is a lie, and that it is robbing you of a future, the game will be up for them.
Similarly, the ANC will never give up their policy of cadre deployment, because it allows them to control and loot our country’s resources, as we’ve seen at Eskom, PRASA, Transnet, and every other state-run entity or ANC-run municipality.
Instead they will convince you that the governing party needs to have all these things under its control because that’s how they can implement their plan. But it’s a lie, and it is robbing you of your future.
The moment you realise that none of these things are what they say on the box, you will see the massive injustice and you will have no choice but to stand up and take action at the ballot box. Because you will not tolerate that from a government.
That is when our country will finally cast off the anchor that is dragging us down and drowning the hopes and dreams of almost every young citizen of this country.
The worst part is that many young people here have already given up on dreaming. The reality of life for millions who are either still in school, or who have left school in recent years, is so grim that they no longer think in terms of big future plans.
In large parts of the country, young people simply stop looking for work soon after they started because they just can’t see any hope or possibilities. The people at Stats SA who compile our statistics on employment even have a whole category for these people. They call them Discouraged Jobseekers.
You might have noticed, when they talk about jobs and unemployment, there are two different numbers that get thrown around – one sounds bad, but the other one sounds disastrous.
This second one – called Broad Unemployment, or Expanded Unemployment – is the one that government doesn’t like using because it is so terrifyingly high. They call the other, lower one the “official” unemployment rate and they prefer to use that because it doesn’t sound quite so bad.
But that “official” rate excludes all the people who no longer actively look for jobs – the Discouraged Jobseekers. If people have lost all hope of finding work and no longer go out looking for a job, government doesn’t even want to include them in the statistics.
But that is just pretending you don’t see the whole problem. The Expanded Unemployment rate is the full extent of our crisis, and right now this sits at 46% of our country’s adult population. That’s one of the highest unemployment rates in the entire world, and a massive chunk of that is young people under the age of 24.
If you want to see how badly government is failing the youth, you need to look not only at how many young people are unemployed, but also at how many of them have already given up hoping for a better outcome. Those are the people who no longer allow themselves to dream.
But in all these terrible statistics there is a ray of hope too. Because if you look closely, you will see that one of the nine provinces shows a different pattern.
One province has a significantly smaller proportion of discouraged jobseekers – in other words, in one of the nine provinces, most people still have hope of finding a job. And that same province has a far lower expanded unemployment rate than all the others.
That province is the Western Cape. And the reason it has a significantly lower unemployment rate – and the reason why unemployed people there continue looking for work – is because it does things a little different there.
You see, DA governments don’t believe in judging policies and programmes by their fancy and noble names. They only judge such interventions by their actual outcome.
If a programme or a policy makes it easier to attract investment, to do business and to employ people, it is considered good. But if it gets in the way of doing business and creating work, it is considered bad, no matter what it is called.
When a government’s biggest focus is to grow the economy and create jobs for young people, there is no time or space for crony enrichment schemes or looting scams disguised as redress. Expanding opportunities is a full time job, and all that matters.
But you’ll also find the Western Cape leads the way in preparing young people for the world of work.
It is the only province with a School Evaluator system, to assess whether quality teaching is taking place. It leads the way when it comes to Collaboration schools – where schools in disadvantaged communities are partnered with non-profit organisations – and it leads the way in broadband connectivity in schools.
The Western Cape also has, by some distance, the lowest school drop-out rate. Which means that more children stay in school until their matric exams, giving them a better chance at building a future.
When you look at the unemployment data combined with these education outcomes, it is clear that DA governments are invested in the youth of this country. And that is what we need to replicate across South Africa if we want to reverse this downward trajectory our country is on.
Forget about the Youth Day platitudes and spin you will no doubt hear from the ANC today. Forget about all the schemes and scams they try to sell as redress, transformation and justice. Only look at the outcome.
If you want to make our freedom work – and if you want to honour the memories of people like Japie Vilankulu, Hector Pieterson and everyone else who paid such a high price – you have to start judging every intervention by its result only.
And if you then realise that you’ve been taken for a ride by people promising you the world but only looking after themselves, you need to stand up and take action. You cannot wait for someone else to do that for you.
But thanks to the sacrifices made forty-six years ago, your action needn’t be violent or dangerous. You don’t have to protest or destroy to get your message across. Today you have a far more powerful weapon in your hands, and that is your vote.
It is not too late to secure a future worth fighting for. But this generation of young South Africans will have to stand up and vote for it themselves.