Covid-19 is killing our economy, parents shouldn’t be killing our spirits

We can joke about a lot of things, but unemployment is definitely off the table.

The coronavirus is killing more than lives. It has already left a significant number of businesses dead and continues to be a threat to many more.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had several conversations with young people who are worried about their livelihoods. Many of them are not only dealing with internal pressure, but they have to also deal with parents who compare them with their peers/neighbour’s child.

At times, the neighbour’s child is your former high school classmate or you were in the same grade. As if it isn’t enough that thousands of us young people are seeking employment in a very struggling economy, our parents make us feel useless and incapable to do better.

They throw “shade” with words such as, “You should have studied law too. Now you would be driving a German car. You could learn a thing from so and so, he or she has a stable job and can even take care of his or her parents and siblings.”

Sadly, those are some of the hurtful and offensive sentiments from our parents that we need to stomach. And the facts are painting a very gloomy picture.

Just a few weeks ago we got news that Edcon has sent out 22,000 retrenchment notices, 600 jobs at the SABC are at risk, and ZARA is closing about 1,000 stores globally.

The unemployment rate hit a record high in the first quarter of this year with the data that we were shown on the past Tuesday. Those are results of how weak our economy was before it was even hit by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The unemployment rate of 30.1% was up from 29.1% in the final quarter of last year. There were 7.1 million people without jobs in the first quarter, up from 6.7 million in the previous quarter, Statistics South Africa reported in its quarterly labour force survey.

Statistician-General, Risenga Maluleke said: “This is the first (time) ever that we have hit the 30% mark.”

I was trying to recover for the news we got mid-April when Sun-International announced that it will be closing one of its oldest and most popular businesses, The Carousel Casino. The place where many residents of Hammanskraal and the villages I come from, Pankop, Phake, Mmametlhake and beyond used to work, is no more.

The second-quarter report doesn’t sound promising at all considering how the coronavirus has already affected us. One doesn’t even have to be an economist to make this prediction. And everyone understands that economies worldwide have taken a downward plunge.

This is a reminder to many young people that qualifications are not tickets out of poverty. Youth month ends with even more bad news as more young people remain

i) educated and unemployed,

ii) uneducated and unemployed,

iii) hopeless and desperate.

However, that is not even my biggest concern. My appeal is for parents to be easy on us and understand that it isn’t entirely our fault that we cannot get jobs. They should be encouraging us, remind us not to lose hope and stop being the reason why we end up depressed ad hopeless.

During these hard times of unemployment and a great lack of opportunities, young people need supportive and caring parents more than anything.

• Kabelo Chabalala is the founder and chairperson of the Young Men Movement (YMM), an organisation that focuses on the reconstruction of the socialisation of boys to create a new cohort of men. Email, kabelo03chabalala@gmail.com; Twitter, @KabeloJay; Facebook, Kabelo Chabalala
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  Kabelo Chabalala.

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