South Africa\'s High Rate of Unemployment Reflects

South Africa's high rate of unemployment reflects that lack of employment opportunities for the majority black African population. This is an endemic problem for the entire region, as unemployment rates in Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana are actually higher. The problem relates specifically to black Africans, and especially in rural areas. The wealthiest province, in terms of performance in poverty indicators, is Western Cape, and this province in Coloured majority with the lowest percentage of black Africans in the country. The next-best performing province is the heavily-urbanized Gauteng. In that sense, it is easy to isolate where the most significant structural problems exist in the country. The other provinces have the worst poverty and also the majority of the country's people.

There are significant structural problems facing the black African population in particular. Education and training, two bedrocks of economic development, was poorest for blacks of all ethnic groups under apartheid. With worse educations and less training than others, the African population is the least-equipped to succeed in a competitive job market. The job market itself is challenging in South Africa. The white community created the nation's economic infrastructure, but in most parts of South Africa this economy is only big enough to support the white community. Functional economies were created by and for the Indian community in KwaZulu-Natal and the Coloureds of Western Cape. Both of these groups had a higher level of privilege under apartheid than the Africans did. Thus, the economy of South Africa was never built to be big enough to support employment and opportunity among the Africans, and they were never given the tools to build their own economies. In fact, through policies of physical and cultural isolation Africans faced substantial barriers to developing their own economies, as Africans were able to do to at least some extent in other parts of Africa. The unemployment rate in South Africa, therefore, is a reflection of substantial structural barriers to success for the majority of the citizens, and those barriers remain ten years after apartheid has ended. Older workers still lack skills, education or even standard housing. Younger blacks still have not seen their schools improve, nor have they had the opportunity to work through a renewed school system. Half a generation is simply not long enough to implement broad-based structural change of this nature.