WeeklySA_AdminBUFFOONERY: Decades of being wrapped in privilege and political power have left Gwede Mantashe blind to the grinding hunger, daily frustration and desperate struggles that define South Africa’s unemployed — a nation where fathers and mothers cannot feed their families, young graduates are crushed by rejection after rejection, and aspiring entrepreneurs are starved of opportunity…
By Themba Khumalo
Gwede Mantashe did not misspeak. He revealed himself. In that moment on SABC television, the veil slipped, and the country glimpsed a mind shaped more by decades of political comfort than by the lives of the people he purports to serve.
His words, “People expect the government to go and give them jobs. They don’t look for jobs. And that must change” — were not a misstatement or an offhand comment. They were a declaration: the state’s failure is invisible, and the burden of its collapse is the citizen’s fault.
Like millions of South Africans, I am burning with rage. Not polite indignation, not editorial sighs — true, combustible anger, the kind that rises from your chest and curls around your throat when those entrusted with power lecture the powerless about their “lack of effort”.
When Mantashe spoke about queues and adverts from his throne of decades-long privilege, he was not offering advice. He was passing judgement on a nation that has been systematically denied opportunity.
This was not a slip. It was a window flung open — into how unemployment is interpreted when those who govern no longer fear consequence. Through it, we glimpsed a view that absolves the state and indicts the citizen. Policy disappears. Structure dissolves. Only blame remains.
Unemployment in South Africa is not idleness. It is punishment.
It is waking up each day, heart racing, only to be met with silence. It is applying for work you are qualified for and being rejected for lacking experience you were never given the chance to earn. It is choosing between transport and food, dignity and survival, knowing failure is not an option but a daily companion. It is explaining, again, to a father who cannot feed his family, to a mother whose children go without, to a graduate whose CV has disappeared into the void a thousand times. This is not laziness. This is attrition. This is the slow erosion of hope.
The official unemployment rate is far north of 30% — more than a third of the country stuck in waiting rooms that lead nowhere. Add the discouraged — the invisible, the resigned, those crushed into silence — and the nation bleeds despair. This did not happen because people stopped trying. It happened because growth was stifled, opportunity hoarded, and policy abandoned.
Jobs do not appear by magic. They are born from growth — from businesses allowed to scale, from ideas nurtured beyond survival, from policies that understand momentum and do not betray it. Yet for decades, the state has looked the other way, and the only growth visible is in government office floors, padded salaries, and ceremonial speeches.
There are many South Africans who are not waiting for handouts. They are creating work — coding in bedrooms, selling food from pavements, running spaza shops, styling hair in rented rooms, freelancing without safety nets. They are turning survival into ambition. But ideas die young here, strangled by unstable power, bureaucratic red tape, and a state that applauds vision in rhetoric but starves it in practice.
There is no serious pathway from hustler to employer. No urgency to turn ambition into absorption. No recognition that without growth, unemployment is inevitable — not accidental.
And yet, from his insulated perch, Mantashe tells people to submit CVs: “People must begin to appreciate that you do queue up for a job, you get employed. Adverts are not going to employ you. You will have to look for the advert and apply in real terms. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to be employed.”
He further dares to declare that millions of unemployed South Africans are ‘sitting in the sun’ — a sunlit fiction of his own making that spits in the face of hunger, queues, and despair: “South Africa has developed a theory of delivery, which means you sit back, you sit in the sun and expect the state to deliver, and people are not involved.”
Sit back? In the sun? This is the hallucination of a man who has never known the bitter bite of dawn, who has never stood in a queue that snakes around city blocks, who has never counted coins for transport while knowing there will be nothing left to feed his children. It is not insight — it is contempt, a dismissive slap cloaked in the pretence of wisdom. A lazy, cowardly caricature invented to absolve a state that has perfected the art of doing little or nothing.
There are only the unemployed, the underpaid, the desperate — the men and women bleeding from the effort to survive, exhausted by the constant, invisible grind of keeping life together while those in power sit in glass towers, spinning fictions about laziness. They blame the victims. They lecture the desperate. They theorise about “delivery” while delivering nothing but indignity, frustration, and despair.
And yet here they stand, immune to shame, patting themselves on the back for crafting narratives that make poverty and suffering seem like a choice, as if the very act of surviving against an indifferent state is somehow a failure. It is obscene. It is arrogant. It is moral bankruptcy spoken in sentences so careless it burns.
This is no idle theory. This is a declaration of contempt. And South Africans, weary but unbowed, will not sit quietly under it.
Afterall, he speaks from a world where work is permanent, relevance renewable, income guaranteed. From that throne, it is easy to confuse security for virtue, and to mistake struggle for character flaw.
Last weekend, President Cyril Ramaphosa called unemployment a crisis. Yet Mantashe spoke as though the real emergency is laziness. This contradiction is not rhetorical. It is exposing.
Unemployment is not just economic. It is corrosive. It grinds dignity into dust, delays adulthood, fractures families, and robs people of purpose. It creates a permanent waiting room where lives are paused indefinitely, where hope is rationed, and despair sits like a parasite.
To speak about this reality with disdain is to govern without empathy. Mantashe later claimed he was misquoted. He was not. His words are on record. They reflect a belief system in which the economy owes nothing, and the unemployed owe everything. That belief is not harmless. It shapes policy. It excuses inaction. It justifies stagnation.
Leadership is not telling people to try harder inside a system designed to limit them. Leadership is dismantling the limits. Until this government builds an economy that grows — not rhetorically, but structurally — unemployment will remain the nation’s defining wound, no matter how many CVs are submitted or imagined queues lined up.
One thing, however, is now undeniable. South Africans have been shown how some of their leaders truly interpret their suffering.
Gwede Mantashe, hear your own words echo back: “I’m now over 70. I’ve never had a government looking for a job for me. You know that the difference is that today, because there’s a progressive government, people expect the government to go and give them jobs. They don’t look for jobs. And that must change.”
“People must begin to appreciate that you do queue up for a job, you get employed. Adverts are not going to employ you. You will have to look for the advert and apply in real terms. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to be employed.”
Read them slowly, Mr Mantashe. Imagine them landing on the ears of a father who cannot feed his family, a mother whose children go without, a graduate crushed by a thousand rejections, a young entrepreneur whose idea was starved before it could bloom.
These are not abstract statements. They are moral judgements. Delivered from a throne of decades of political privilege, where queues and adverts are irrelevant, where hunger and hope are theoretical. If your conscience does not shiver as you hear them again, then the nation itself shivers — for it is being watched by leaders who have forgotten what it means to live in the world they are supposed to serve.
