June 16 marks the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising against apartheid rule. Percy Ngonyama writes that South Africa’s youth have faced an onslaught from market-friendly economic policies. Rather than a day of celebration, the anniversary should be used as a platform to re-launch and intensify young people's struggles for a genuine "Better life for all".

In the days leading up to the 30th anniversary of the June 16 Soweto uprising, young people have been urged by the government and the SA Youth Commission to take part in planned nationwide commemorations. The 2006 "apathetic" youth have been heavily criticised for their disregard of important national events.

While it is typical to assume that the Soweto uprising was triggered solely by the use of Afrikaans - widely seen by most black people as the language of the oppressors - as a medium of instruction, the youth of '76 took to the streets also to protest against inhumane living conditions in the townships and the racist policies of apartheid's 'bantu education', which subjected poor young black people to an inferior education system characterised by an inadequate supply of educational resources in black schools.

Thirty years on, and twelve years since the advent of the much talked about April 27 1994 'miracle', for many young people very little has changed, and as a result, there will be nothing to celebrate on June 16 2006.

The appalling socio-economic conditions in the townships have worsened. Youth unemployment has reached crisis level. For many young people who are HIV positive and poor, which is usually the case, there is no hope.

Because of government's strict fiscal discipline, and President Thabo Mbeki and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang's dissident views on HIV/Aids, life saving anti retroviral drugs are only available to a fraction of infected persons at public medical institutions. We are yet to see a genuine 'roll-out' programme being implemented. And the disease continues its reign of terror, amongst the youth, unabated. Every day, more young people die from HIV/Aids compared to those who died on June 16, 1976.

The majority of black schools are still without basic necessities, such as electricity and water, let alone computer and science labs. Most public schools have had to drastically increase their admission fees to cope in the era of budget cuts. The shortage of resources at most public schools is so endemic that even the education minister has lost trust in her own system. Both her daughter and son have been enrolled at prestigious private schools.

While the brutal apartheid government was responsible for the plight of young people in 1976, the current government's ill-advised neo-liberal, market friendly, capitalist economic policies are to blame for the plight of the children of the 1976 youth.

Despite these serious predicaments facing our young people, the government has prioritised multi-billion dollar mega projects, such as the elitist Gautrain, the corrupt arms deal, the 2010 Soccer World Cup and the ecologically destructive Coega development project.

Faced with a serious unemployment catastrophe, the government has introduced the Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP). This much-touted programme hopes to create 1 million jobs between 2004 and 2009. Thirty percent of these employment opportunities will be allocated to young people. However, the EPWP is marked by very serious shortcomings. The jobs are very temporary and pay next to slave wages. Furthermore, with only R25 billion allocated to the programme, the government needs to think again if it hopes to effectively address unemployment.

And given SA's huge apartheid induced services backlog, government would be well advised to embark on a massive recruitment drive of young people to build hospitals, clinics, schools, houses, roads, crèches, centres for abused and battered women, and other such urgently required infrastructure. Such a move could create a lot of decent employment opportunities for the youth.

Placing the crucial task of service delivery, as stipulated in the EPWP, in the hands of the private sector, will, as the past twelve years have brutally demonstrated, prove futile. Another initiative, The Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (Jipsa), which, like the EPWP, also forms part of government's Accelerated And Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (asgiSA), in true capitalist style, puts the blame for the high rate of youth unemployment on the victims, the "unskilled" youth.

The reality, however, is that a large number of unemployed youth have post grade 12 qualifications. Some are even in possession of tertiary qualifications. Over a hundred thousand graduates are unemployed or underemployed. Clearly, the "skills" being "prioritised" by Jipsa are not people centred, but skills required by capital to increase profits and to achieve the ambitious 6% annual growth rate by 2014.

So called 'youth empowerment' programmes have not benefited the majority of young people, but a few who are aligned correctly politically. The appointment of ANC aligned young people to senior positions in government and the private sector has not improved the lives of the majority of young people. But, one can be certain that the newly 'empowered' young people have become filthy rich, thus joining the ranks of the black petty bourgeoisie who appear regularly on covers of fashion and financial publications, and are described as 'shinning examples' of 'success' that should be followed by all young people.

Eight million of the economically active population are unemployed - meaning they have no form of income. Seventy percent of these are young people. Given this sad situation, one need not be shocked by increasing incidents of criminal activities involving young people.

The government hopes to deal with the symptoms and not the causes. During his 2006 state of the nation address Thabo Mbeki announced a plan to increase resource allocation within the justice system to ensure, in his words, that "crime does not pay."

What are the causes of rampant poverty? This is a question government bureaucrats always prefer to avoid, for the answer lies in market-friendly policies that promote cuts in social expenditure and cuts in corporate tax. The post apartheid government has reduced corporate tax by 16%. One percent amounts to R2 billion. These funds are desperately needed to improve the lives of the country's young people and to create decent and sustainable employment opportunities.

Young people do not part-take in national events, not because of "apathy" as widely purported by politicians and mainstream youth formations, but because of disillusionment and very justified anger at SA's new rulers, who have abandoned the progressive principles of the 1956 Freedom Charter and slogans declaring "Socialism is the future, Build it now", and have become deaf to people's desperate pleas.

The only voice they ever listen to now is that of financially well-endowed capitalists and financial markets calling on them to implement more 'trade liberalisation'. As a result, they are endlessly running amok like headless chickens, formulating, courtesy of handsomely remunerated experts, one failed neo-liberal policy after another, at the expense of the poor masses.

HIV/Aids, unemployment, poverty and other problems affecting young people need to be put on top of government's agenda. For this to be realised, young people need to follow the recent example of the French youth who have united and successfully prevented the implementation of pro-business labour laws giving 'carte blanche' to bosses, after two years, to fire young people under the age of 26 without providing reasons. Our experience, past and present, also tells us that mass protest, and mass based campaigns, is the only 'language' governments and the capitalists understand.

Evidently, mainstream youth formations, such as the government bankrolled Youth Commission which continues to sing poetic praises for the state's ineffective and exclusive youth empowerment programmes, and the ANC Youth League – which has prioritised the 'Zuma for president' campaign and beauty contests, such as the annual Miss South Africa beauty pageant, over pressing youth issues, and counts amongst its 'comrades' the likes of the late Brett Kebble - are not the answer.

The '76 young generation did not lay down their lives for the current criminal neo-liberal 'paradise'. It is therefore a sign of indifference to the plight of many young people to commemorate the 30th anniversary of June 16 with yet another 'kwaito bash' at the Durban ABSA Stadium.

The anniversary should be used as a platform to re-launch and intensify young people's struggles for a genuine "Better life for all". A step in this direction is the 'Right to Work Campaign' [R2W] - a campaign that seeks to make unemployment 'public enemy number one' - which is being launched in Cape Town from June 13-16, at a conference to be addressed by various prominent national and international social-movement activists and trade unionists.

* Percy Ngonyama is a social-movement activist based in Durban ([email protected])

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org