Unemployment blues
Mmegi Editor | Thursday August 17, 2017 09:12
These figures include any person who was engaged in an activity that brought income at the time of the survey, whether temporary or permanent, paid in cash or in kind, and young people aged around 15-years-old and above.
What is interesting about the findings, however, is that the job market continues to struggle to absorb graduates and approximately 17,000 of them are unemployed. This is a huge figure in view of the fact that almost the same number is expected to graduate this year from several tertiary institutions. This brings to front the question of whether we train our children according to what the market needs, or we just throw them into lecture rooms to pass time. Recently, the Human Resource Development Council (HRDC) engaged industry players to get information on what the market needs to inform the sponsor (government) on which programmes to send students to study.
We hope that HRDC and Statistics Botswana could also engage each other to identify which programmes dominate or contribute a huge figure in unemployed graduates so as to reduce sponsorship for such programmes. Secondly, HRDC should give regular updates on the skills that are scarce in the market so as to inform policy makers, students and their teachers on which subjects to focus on in preparation for future studies at tertiary institutions.
Whilst we may think that unemployment figures indicate any form of economic growth, we ought to keep in mind the fact that the ‘lucky’ few who are employed are paid slave wages that are far below their daily expenditure on rentals, transport, clothing and meals amongst others. With better wages, the employed will be able to create jobs for the unemployed through other sectors such as agriculture, SMMEs, construction and provision of goods and services. It is therefore important to regularly review the minimum wage in line with the rising inflation.
Meanwhile, poverty eradication can be achieved only with a change in the mindset, particularly the JC and senior school certificate holders who do not have any skills or training that can make them employable. They have to ensure that they wake up in the morning to do something even if it means working as a domestic workers (maid or herdboy) or labourers. These are menial jobs that many Batswana shun, something that contributes to high unemployment figures and poverty. We should all play our role in fighting poverty and unemployment.
Today’s thought
“If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.