Slow Thoughts from Dale du Preez

There are a number of thoughts about South Africa that I’ve had over the last few weeks. Being at home and having a decent amount of time on my hands gave me the opportunity to re-encounter and sharpen a number of thoughts that I’ve been mulling for some time now. This post won’t quite get into a number of those thoughts, but it will start in on one or two of them.

For starters, I’ve started thinking about employment in South Africa in a fairly abstract sense. I don’t mean personal employment, but rather the employment opportunities available to millions of South Africans. These opportunities are really scarce – the last time I checked, estimates of our unemployment rates were somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. It doesn’t take a genius to see why theft, robbery, fraud, et al are so prevalent in South Africa – people don’t have means of acquiring wealth legally. That’s not the main problem, however. Before I left high school in 2002, I could already tell what that was, but I don’t know how much has been done to address the situation. The problem is quite simple: far too many South Africans receive terrible educations. The effects of Apartheid are brutally evident in our education system, where a large number of schools have continued to offer a similarly poor level of education in spite of Apartheid’s demise. As a result, we not only have millions of people who received poor educations under Apartheid, we are not producing the intellectual capital needed to increase levels of employment. It’s a vicious cycle, because we need better teachers, who themselves need to have been educated. We also need people capable of doing more than manual labour or simple clerking duties. And then we have AIDS…

And that is enough for now. I don’t have the energy to broach AIDS and its ramifications quite yet. But I will soon. (So stay tuned.)