The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says, in its first report on South Africa, that the high level of unemployment is a major stumbling block hampering economic prosperity and has urged government and business leaders to make some meaningful contributions to job creation.

At much the same time, Minister of Public Works, Geoff Doidge, tells Business Unity South Africa that the construction and property sectors need to become more productive, more competitive and more inclusive of the previously disadvantaged groups of people.

Meanwhile, the national government has set aside about R800bn that it will spend over the next ten years on maintaining, improving and creating new infrastructure in the country. The spending plan includes major mass housing projects to get the poor and indigent people out of squatter camps and condemned buildings and into proper houses.

If you combine these three elements then, surely, there must be an easy solution for South Africa: create jobs in the labour-intensive construction and property sectors, use the money allocated by government for infrastructure development to properly train the people and in that way, include them in the wealth creation cycle.

There’s only one problem with that scenario: the people who are jobless and hopeless now do not want to work – particularly not on a construction site where labour is exacting, tiring and hard.

The OECD report highlights several other issues on the labour front: the difficulty of getting to and from work, the lack of skills, the inadequate schooling system and so forth. But I think that these objections are little more than pallid excuses: the fundamental issue remains that thousands of jobless people do not want to work unless it is in some cushy job as the boss’s understudy.

Oh, yes and unless it comes with a car, fashionable gear and an expense account.

Meanwhile, across the road in similar camps around the country are squadrons of foreign people who have ventured into South Africa in search of work and have found jobs quite quickly and easily.

Venture onto any building site around the country and you are bound to find a great many Zimbabwean and Mozambican workers plying their trades efficiently and diligently. They manage to get to work on time, work for the wages that are competitively fair and then go home to their squatter camps and rest as best they can.

So what do our lot of indigents do? Threaten to kill them and drive them from this land instead. The xenophobes accuse these foreigners of “stealing our jobs and stealing our women” and set upon them in places like Kya Sands.

Well, guess what South Africans, if you want to work and are prepared to make the sacrifices that being trained may require then you will get and keep your job. Then, with some money, you’ll probably find that women find you much more alluring than if you are sitting on a street corner doing nothing.

Back to what Doidge says: the construction and property sectors must become more competitive, more productive and more inclusive.

That can only be done if people are prepared to work – and if necessary work for wages that are just above the poverty datum line – in order to gain the skills that allow them to command better wages.

There is an old saying that goes this way: “If you have an education or a skill you can pick and choose. If you don’t then you must pick and shovel. . .”. And that’s exactly the point with so many of the layabouts that populate our squatter camps, townships and condemned buildings. They need to learn to pick and shovel and only later can they start to choose.

But if we look at the reality of the millions of unemployed the point is that they appear to want an easy way to make money. And the easiest is through crime. Whether it is drug dealing, pimping, hijacking, housebreaking or blowing up automatic teller machines.

For them crime represents a better choice than eight to ten hours swinging a pick on a building site.

And that’s precisely the point: our layabouts want life to be easy for them because they voted for the ANC, which promised them jobs, a better life and their own land.

What it didn’t promise was that they would have to work damned hard to get ahead; they would have to pay their dues with back-breaking labour before they could get some cushy office job; they’d have to apply their minds to gaining the skills they need to become employable.

And so here we sit with almost 30% of the population unemployed while we face potential labour shortages in every facet of the property and construction industry. In fact, it’s wider than that: with labour shortages in every industry in the country.

I reckon that the time has finally come for government intervention – and as any of you who read this column regularly will know, I’m deeply opposed to government intervention in any form.

You see I think that we need to get these layabouts out of the camps and into a vast, compulsory labour pool that is akin to the labour market that developed after the Great Depression. People who are working for their food, for their few rands a day and for their own skills development.

I say we need to put the layabouts to work on the R800bn infrastructure projects that will unfold. And, if they are shovelling tar for the new roads from a wheelbarrow, then so be it. For this is the first step on a path to real freedom.

Enforced labour camps have an unpleasant ring to them, don’t they? Forcing people to take a job, any job, just to get ahead and earn an honest living smacks of a kind of brutality doesn’t it?

But what choice is there? The people who can work don’t want to unless it is on their cushy terms. And they are prepared to kill and maim those that are working too.

Otherwise we will face more xenophobic violence, we will have millions of refugees fleeing our borders and when that ghastly dust has settled we’ll be left with even more of a labour problem than we currently have.

And our indigent layabouts – who are fuelling and committing their xenophobic acts – will do exactly what they’ve done for the past 16 years.

Nothing.

They’ll still hang around their squatter camps, steal when they can, drink as they choose, rape passing women and children with impunity and tell everyone else how the government has let them down.

And yet we have a solution at our fingertips: labour-intensive construction projects, intensive training programmes, a massive allocation of capital and an urgent need to create jobs.

With those things in place, all we need now is to get the idle unemployed off the streets and back to work. That’s the obvious solution until you factor in the ever-present real problem. The unemployed don’t want to work on anything but their own terms.

And there’s the real truth.

*Paddy Hartdegen writes a regular column for Property24.com. The content of his columns constitutes his personal opinion and doesn’t pretend to be facts or advice. Contact him at paddy@neomail.co.za.

Readers' Comments Have a comment about this article? Email us now.

Would suggest to government that they make use of all the criminals in jail to do the hard labour. Then maybe the message will go out that crime does not pay and they would be better off legally employed than to resorting to crime. The government should spend more money on education especially in self esteem and motivation and encouraging more interest in ‘blue collar’ work but even if they do it would be like the AIDS crisis – ignore it until it reaches pandemic proportions. A case of too little, too late. – Patricia

You are a brave man, Paddy. No one can argue with you but the mindset of those who are not prepared to work will not change until those in power admit that they cannot fulfill their promise. I just can't see that happening.

What I find annoying is the constant lie that employers use foreigners because they can pay them less when in fact the opposite is true. If someone can be relied upon they get paid more. There is a reluctance to paying too high a wage to locals when the chance of Union demands exists. Where in the world do you find employers being forced to give increases to workers that are below par because the Union says so? – Anonymous

Dead Right!!! This is the first time someone has it correct. - Errol Hey